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How a Brit managed to so precisely execute such an authentic and impactful film arising from a distinctly American crime milieu, is practically incomprehensible. Director John Boorman has, however, delivered with the precision of his film's title that and more in 1967's 'Point Blank', a neo-noir masterpiece fortified by style and driven by purpose. (More here including Tuesday March 21's showtime information throughout the U.S.): http://thecinemacafe.com/the-cinema-treasure-hunter/2017/3/1/now-listen-to-me#Point-Blank
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Posted: |
Mar 21, 2017 - 6:20 AM
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By: |
Jim Phelps
(Member)
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Just as American expatriates had to step outside of a close-minded post-WWI America in order to better write about that land they loved, oftentimes it's the foreigner "outsider" perspective that often nails its subject best, as Boorman does with the masterful Point Blank.
Arthur, one of the best things I ever read about this film was a post on the now-defunct IMDb message boards. I gave it the title, but cannot take credit for having written this fine analysis of the film:
POINT BLANK: the 'Lost' 1967
"POINT BLANK is one of the best cinematic representations of that stark, sunbleached, urban mood which dominated the mid-to-late-1960s but rarely gets referred to--- people talk about "protest" and "tumult" but almost never about this (just as people rarely refer to the autumnal-wintry melancholy of the 1970s when that was the mood that virtually defined that era, which THE ICE STORM, flawed as it was, later attempted to capture).
But regarding POINT BLANK:
The atonal score; the "echo-y" resonance of the thing; the claw-your-neck, angsty atmoshpere; the diffused lighting; that window-screen camera trick; the jazz bar; the aloof neon lights at night; even that car lot.... it's all just sooooo very, very 1966 and beyond...
It's just like the name of the film: in-your-face ("POINT") yet oddly hollow ("BLANK").
Anyway, for any younger person looking to see what the cities tended to feel like at that time, POINT BLANK is one of the better movie examples of the period you can point to.
...Also, the DVD has two brief extras (both entitled "The Rock") which focus on Alcatraz Pison and also convey the same lost, disillusioned flavor of time which was so captivating yet confounding.
Walter Cronkite once observed that the '60s was "a slum of a decade". And one has to understand what that means. Yes, the sunstreaked-field/Woodstock image existed, but to miss the juxtaposition of that with the grimy, dank, hollow quality of the '60s is to miss the decade entirely.
The truth is always more complicated -- and infinitely more interesting -- than the pre-chewed view of history, even recent cultural history, that we tend to get.
When one mixes POINT BLANK with those urban montage scenes in MIDNIGHT COWBOY and, say, Antonio's BLOW UP, with a dash of the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, you're getting a more accurate sense of the mood of the late-'60s (albeit cinematically) and how they actually kinda felt and why they haunted that generation so much and so long then you will from the media's simplistic spin on the era today.
Or from those dreadful, revisionistic '80s films which tried to exploit it and reshape it to fit a Reagan era sensibility which bore no resemblance to it.
There is always tumult and cultural change, and there's always tragedy. But what made the 1960s seem so dramatic, so resonant, was how it felt. Which is always a tough thing to describe or to capture.
The 11 years between JFK's instantly-legendary, bottomlessly macabre assassination (such that we refuse to deal with it even today other than thru platitudes) in 1963, and Nixon's resignation in 1974 under the Watergate scandal -- and all the lies told in between about that eternal, turgid mire that was Vietnam -- created and reflected a startling shift in the culture which was unusual in its speed and severity and starkness. And, yes, that story is so much more compelling than flower-power images of bellbottomed jeans and Volkswagons and posters of Che Guevara.
If only we had a better way to capture the zeitgeist of a period, or a decade, so that it could be sniffed like a cologne and the air of the time breathed in. So people could appreciate what it actually felt like to be alive in that particular period.
All the modern hippie references just make it seem boring. And silly.
How could a decade which went from the doomed, sacred, frozen-in-time eeriness of The Twilight Zone and Mayberry and The Bates Motel of the early-'60s and then jarringly metamorphosed into the post-apocalyptic tension of POINT BLANK and and the psychedelic intravenous journeys of FANTASTIC VOYAGE and THE YELLOW SUBMARINE and the forlorn, arid wastelands of PLANET OF THE APES and 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY from the late-'60s, and then subsided into the deeply melancholy, bittersweet disillusion caught vividly by that ice-skating/snow-angels scene in LOVE STORY (just that one scene, as the whole movie is pretty rank) of the early-'70s possibly be boring??
I use those free-association/stream-of-consciousness movie references because they're so much more memorable (and oddly precise) than "Entertainment Tonight" or recent years' pop culture efforts at '60s nostalgia can seem to communicate.
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As someone who wasn't even born until 1971, I find this analysis fascinating. I knew that the 1960s had to be more than the pre-packaged countercultural time capsule that the media and pop historians tried to make it out to be. The 1960s that POINT BLANK chronicles is infinitely more interesting than the stale hippie stories our parents told us.
A thought-provoking follow up on the longer post posted previously:
"It's worth pointing out that among the various causes for the above-mentioned "stark, sunbleached[ ] urban mood which dominated the mid[ ]to[ ]late[ ]1960s" in the United States, there were at least three quite clear-cut major ones, namely the widespread tearing down of buildings in the centers of cities in order to build parking lots, the moving of large numbers of businesses and residents from the centers of cities to the suburbs, and the use of vast unadorned expanses of concrete in new urban architecture and landscaping. The first two phenomena were in turn the fruit of market-distorting transportation policies and associated land-use policies that had been put in place by the federal, state, and local governments starting in the early twentieth century as part of a huge "progressive" social-engineering effort to artificially overstimulate road transportation, punish and diminish the railroad industry, and try to build a new form of suburb-oriented rather than city-oriented society. The resulting urban semi-desolation was a signature excess of the sixties that persisted into the seventies and only began to be significantly reversed in the eighties. I vividly remember that stark, sunbleached urban mood from my childhood experiences of Boston and a few other cities. On the whole it was a bad and destructive period for the urban environment, although I have to admit that at the same time it did have a certain attractiveness for people who, like me, are perpetual connoisseurs of strange new varieties of melancholy."
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Posted: |
Mar 21, 2017 - 9:14 AM
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By: |
RoryR
(Member)
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I can certainly attest to the "sunbleached, urban mood" part of that very well-written, insightful commentary on POINT BLANK. Even though I was only a kid in the late sixties, the years of 1966,67,68 and 69 are the favorites of my childhood, and when I think back on them, recall the pictures that most linger, it's always of a sunny, warm day in if not an urban setting, at least a suburban one. I lived on Long Island then, so it had its fair share of overcast, cold weather, but it was the summers that I recall with great fondness. And of course, it was during the summers that I got dropped off or taken to the most movies.
I never saw anything like POINT BLANK when I was between the ages of seven and ten, but I saw plenty else from that time.
Walter Cronkite once observed that the '60s was "a slum of a decade".
Not for me. The "slum of a decade" was the seventies. The sixties was a golden era, despite the murders of the Kennedys and the depressing reality of Vietnam. It was in the seventies, for me starting right at 1970 when my parents split up and eventually divorced, that most everything went south -- including me because my mother decided to move to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Talk about sunbleached.
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Arthur are you open to a suggestion? Just make one thread and edit it and each time add the new movie showing on TCM. I think the administrators of this board would appreciate it instead of making individual threads for each movie.
Chris
I appreciate the suggestion. It's just that I really dig the responses *to each individual film* that many have decided to make because they see the title and only want to respond to that specific one. Look, if what I'm doing is annoying you or the admins, breaking the rules etc. please just let me know and I will adjust my posts accordingly. I don't want to rock the boat here. It's just that on a TCM post alone, one would have to keep going to the end to see if there are any films they are specifically interested in posting on, responding to, or are alerted to watching. In other words, it's really the films themselves I'm interested in hearing about (getting feedback on), more so than promoting TCM or driving people to my reviews, (which happens very infrequently anyway, as I easily monitor that). Here is an excellent example where Jim Phelps has posted this fascinating article on Point Blank that I and others probably would have missed if I only had one TCM post. If the individual posts garner little interest they are quickly buried here. They can skip past them just like any other post of no interest as I've seen happen. The ones that do stay on page 1, are sort of survival of the fittest. As far as my site goes, there are NO ads or revenues generated there whatsoever. I'm just an old guy who's passionate about movies, loves to share, and am very appreciative of this particular long-standing opportunity to do so.
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Posted: |
Mar 22, 2017 - 5:18 AM
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By: |
mgh
(Member)
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Arthur are you open to a suggestion? Just make one thread and edit it and each time add the new movie showing on TCM. I think the administrators of this board would appreciate it instead of making individual threads for each movie.
Chris
I appreciate the suggestion. It's just that I really dig the responses *to each individual film* that many have decided to make because they see the title and only want to respond to that specific one. Look, if what I'm doing is annoying you or the admins, breaking the rules etc. please just let me know and I will adjust my posts accordingly. I don't want to rock the boat here. It's just that on a TCM post alone, one would have to keep going to the end to see if there are any films they are specifically interested in posting on, responding to, or are alerted to watching. In other words, it's really the films themselves I'm interested in hearing about (getting feedback on), more so than promoting TCM or driving people to my reviews, (which happens very infrequently anyway, as I easily monitor that). Here is an excellent example where Jim Phelps has posted this fascinating article on Point Blank that I and others probably would have missed if I only had one TCM post. If the individual posts garner little interest they are quickly buried here. They can skip past them just like any other post of no interest as I've seen happen. The ones that do stay on page 1, are sort of survival of the fittest. As far as my site goes, there are NO ads or revenues generated there whatsoever. I'm just an old guy who's passionate about movies, loves to share, and am very appreciative of this particular long-standing opportunity to do so.
I like the way you do it; keep going.
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