"Somewhere between a dream and a nightmare"—that is how director John Boorman described Point Blank, his second feature film and the first he made in Hollywood. Like a lot of young European directors at the time, he was lured to the U.S. by a studio system that was floundering amid massive cultural upheaval, financial despair, and shifting audiences, which meant that he was given a significant amount of control over every aspect of the film, from the locations (which he selected himself after determining the film needed to be shot in Los Angeles, not San Francisco as originally written in the script), to the casting, to color schemes. The result was a film that looked and felt like no other crime thriller of its era—a jazz-like riff on story beats and characters familiar from countless other genre movies, but made frequently surreal through visual style and narrative dismemberment.

The central character in Point Blank is a man named Walker, who is played by Lee Marvin at the height of his cinematic stardom. Walker (whose full name is never mentioned and is clearly a mystery even to those closest to him) is on a mission of vengeance after having been betrayed during a nighttime heist at Alcatraz by his friend and partner, Mal Reese (John Vernon), and his wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker). The film's fragmented opening sequence shows the betrayal and how Male and Lynne left Walker for dead, after which he seeks not just revenge, but also his half of the money from the heist that he is still owed. The problem is that Mal is involved with a shadowy organized crime outfit known only as "The Organization," which means that, to get to him, Walker has to work his way through a series of polished crime dons (two of whom are played by Lloyd Carter and Carroll O'Connor). Along the way he is aided by Chris (Angie Dickinson), Lynne's sister after whom Mal has lusted for years, and a mysterious man named Yost (Kennan Wynn), whose relationship to Walker remains vague, but who is clearly invested in the success of his revenge tour.

The plot, engaging as it is, is largely perfunctory; the screenplay is based on the 1962 novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake writing as Richard Stark, the first of 23 books featuring the Walker character (who is known in the book series as Parker). There are double-crosses and triple-crosses, and the nonlinear structure forces you to put pieces together, especially at the beginning. What gives the film its intensity is Boorman's abstract, minimalist style and Marvin's steely-cool performance as Walker, who is both a seemingly inhuman revenge machine and a deeply wounded soul (apparently Marvin didn't like the original script, but he felt drawn to the character).

Marvin had recently graduated from an early career playing heavies and villains in Westerns and film noir to more nuanced antihero protagonists like the assassin Charlie Strom in The Killers (1964) and Major John Resiman in The Dirty Dozen (1966). He had also demonstrated substantial range, having just won an Oscar for his dual role opposite Jane Fonda in the comedic western Cat Ballou (1965). Marvin's screen presence in Point Blank is dynamic; he makes Walker into an enigma that you can't help but want to solve. Even though his apparent motivation is as basic as it gets—money, vengeance—he imbues it with a deeper sense of necessity that feels almost mythic, which is perhaps why some have read the film as a dream that unfolds in Walker's mind as he lies dying in the Alcatraz cell after being betrayed and shot.

However you read the narrative, Point Blank is a visual marvel. Many critics at the time were off-put by the film's cold brutality (it was one of the first films to carry the MPAA's newly created, pre-ratings-system "M" designation—recommended for mature audiences); nevertheless, they were duly impressed with the images Boorman and cinematographer Philip H. Lathrop constructed. Even Bosley Crowther, who so hated the violence of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), conceded that it was "spectacularly stylized and vividly photographed." Boorman had never worked in color before, but you wouldn't know it from the way he manipulates color throughout the film, subtly shifting from a nearly monochromatic look in the early scenes to increasingly garish hues by the third act (we can see this in Walker's clothing, which change from a metallic blue suit that matches his hair and eyes at the beginning to a brown suit with orange shirt and tie by the end).

Boorman, who would go on to direct several more major Hollywood films over the next decade (both good and bad), including Hell in the Pacific (1968), Deliverance (1972) and Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), makes expert use of the 'Scope frame to capture the immensity of the Los Angeles environs, which often makes expansive spaces (a seemingly endless airport walkway, the concrete culvert of the Los Angeles River near Lincoln Heights) feel claustrophobic. The modernist and early brutalist architecture on display, much of which is built of concrete, conveys in no uncertain terms the film's view of the brutality of human nature and the circle of violence that too often consumes us.

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