Point Blank – review

From a background in documentary and TV realism, John Boorman brought grit to swinging London with his 1965 feature debut Catch Us If You Can. He then brought the hard-edged European avant-garde of Resnais and Antonioni to Hollywood with his groundbreaking 1967 thriller Point Blank, now revived in widescreen (the only way to see it) in cinemas and for an NFT Boorman retrospective. One of the four supreme masterworks in a major oeuvre, it begins and ends on a deserted Alcatraz, bookending the bloody swath Lee Marvin's gangster cuts across Los Angeles that may be a dying man's dream. A landmark in the history of the crime movie, Point Blank's expressive feeling for landscape and architecture anticipates Michael Mann's Heat. The other good news is that Boorman is about to embark on a sequel to Hope and Glory.