4/24/2023 0 Comments Point blank cast![]() I kept thinking that the actor who played crooked car dealer (and really, ladies and germs, is there any other kind.?) Big John Stegman - Michael Strong - looked familiar and yep, I have seen him before: he played the renegade scientist Dr. For that matter, it was weird seeing a clean-shaven, not entirely bald Sid Haig. Sikking's ( Hill Street Blues Doogie Howser, M.D.) nameless sniper plays a bigger role than O'Conner's Brewster. The fact that the actor has never forgiven Friedkin for slapping him should speak volumes.) While gays don't come off particularly well here, they're not brutalized, or made the butt of jokes to the extent that they were in other movies of the time, or in the next ten or fifteen years.Ĭarroll O'Connor might as well have not been in the movie, for all the impact he made James B. I've read of William Friedkin slapping the actor who played one of the priests in The Exorcist to get him to display what Friedkin felt was the level of fright and uncertainty that the scene required, but these tricks seem like dirty pool to me. (Boorman said that Marvin hit Vernon - as in, he really hit him - prior to the filming of their confrontation scene in Mal Reese's penthouse Boorman said that Vernon burst into tears, but went into the scene with a vigor that Marvin felt that he was lacking prior to slugging him. Pretty funny that a movie with Angie Dickinson (supposed quote from Ange on Jack Kennedy's prowess as a rake: "the best twenty seconds of my life " ouch.) is so jammed full of homoeroticism pretty impressive that Lee Marvin seemed to have gone along with it. Maybe they meant that Point Blank was his first on-screen American movie credit? ![]() Third, Point Blank listed John Vernon - the voice of so many characters from the 1960s Grantray cartoons of Marvel Superheroes (Vernon played Tony Stark/Iron Man, the Sub-Mariner, and Major Glenn Talbot on The Incredible Hulk), as well as Dean Wormer on Animal House - as though it was his first on-screen movie credit, even though the Internet Movie Database lists him as appearing on-screen in five other (presumably Canadian) movies between his off-screen role as the voice of Big Brother in the 1956 movie version of 1984 (which was suppressed prior to Michael Radford's 1984 remake.) and Point Blank. What might have been had the producer or studio who bought the rights to Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm series decided to play them straight and cast Lee Marvin as Helm, instead of going for cheap (and infrequent) laughs and casting Dean Martin. ( The Big Red One and Emperor of the North, sure, but Prime Cut sounds even more - intriguing.) Second, the only thing keeping me from kicking myself from having missed out on watching any Lee Marvin movies until now (I watched The Professionals last month - 1966, directed by Richard Brooks, starring Marvin, Burt Lancaster, Robert Ryan, Woody Strode, Jack Palance, Claudia Cardinale, and Ralph Bellamy) is the fact that there are so many more to look forward to. I haven't seen every movie that John Boorman's directed, but I've seen quite a few (six, excluding Point Blank), and for the life of me I can't recall any of these other movies exhibiting the sheer virtuosity in cinematography, editing, and stage setting that Point Blank did - no, not even the much-beloved-by-me Excalibur. PB's lean and short (read: under two hours), but it's exhilarating - and exhausting - to watch. Get Carter is a better movie than Point Blank but Point Blank is damn sure chockablock with more flash and sizzle than Get Carter. (Soderbergh, for his part, cheerfully admitted on the commentary track to having swiped shamelessly from it.) And as for location shots, I saw what most likely tipped off William Friedkin when he made To Live and Die in L.A. But I can see where Mike Hodges, the director of Get Carter, and Sam Peckinpah, the director of the original Getaway (1972, starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw), totally went to school on Point Blank. (Interestingly enough, Boorman told writer-director Steven Soderbergh on the commentary track of the DVD of Point Blank that the script for Payback was a lot like the one that he and Lee Marvin threw out the window - apparently literally - when they met to discuss it.)įirst of all, I still like the original (1971) Get Carter better. Uvula_fr_b4Finally watched Point Blank, the 1967 John Boorman-directed thriller based on the novel The Hunter by Donald Westlake under the nom de plume of Richard Stark it was remade in 1999 as a Mel Gibson vehicle called Payback.
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