..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
Point Blank
Directed by John Boorman
The colors look fantastic on John Boorman's 1967 revenge thriller, Point Blank, a Warner Home Video release (67414, $20). The hues are vivid and fleshtones are rich, all crisply delivered to convey an extra sense of immediacy in the drama and the action. Boorman drew enthusiastically, if unevenly, from the French New Wave film style, so the movie already has a kinetic, charged up atmosphere, and the beautiful, solid colors completely lock your attention to the screen. Lee Marvin is the wronged crook, double-crossed by his partner and left for dead (in the empty Alcatraz penitentiary). He recovers and, with a laconic determination, works his way through a crime organization to get the money that is owed him. One scene will be full of jump cuts, Dutch angles and other deliberately disorienting innovations, and then the next will be staged, competently, with a classical Hollywood drabness, as if Boorman were excited about his key scenes, and played it safe with the others to protect his position. Nevertheless, the film grabs you with its narrative, with its cast (Angie Dickenson, an almost unrecognizable Keenan Wynn, and Carroll O'Connor before he got typecast) and with its pizzazz, and the DVD locks the grip tight.
The picture is letterboxed, with an aspect ratio of about 2.35:1 and an accommodation for enhanced 16:9 playback. The mono sound is clear. The 92-minute program has an alternate French track, optional English, French and Spanish subtitles, a trailer and two 1967 production documentaries running a total of 16 minutes. Boorman and fan Steven Soderbergh supply an outstanding commentary track, discussing the possibilities that the entire story may be the death dream of Marvin's character, exploring the subversive use of color in the movie, talking about the nature and meaning of revenge, and sharing terrific anecdotes about the cast. "Lee felt [John Vernon] wasn't strong enough. Lee felt that I'd cast someone who wasn't strong enough to contend with him, and we rehearsed one day and Lee hit him, and hit him in the stomach, and he started crying. And he said, 'I'm not a fighter, I'm an actor.' And when we came to do the scene, Vernon was so hyped up that he found that energy, the power that Lee thought he was missing."
The tech talk they get into is also highly rewarding. "Fundamentally, this wide-angle lens does give you that 'open' feeling. Also, because it's a wide lens, you get a bit more depth of field than you would on the longer lenses. But it can also help, in some ways, that when you go into close up, you can use a stop which gives you enough to see in the background, to see what's going on, without being distracting from the close up. What I like most about it is you can give the space between the actors. I always try to have the space between the actors reflect their relationship, so that if they're close, I have them close. If their relationship is difficult or stressful, then I bring them apart.
"One of the things you get in color is jump cuts. If you go from one cut to another and there's red in one shot and you cut to blue in the next shot, the color is disconcerting, and different colors take different lengths of time to decay on the retina, so often this color will carry across to the next cut, and it is very disturbing."
August 3, 2005
DVD Roundup: This Week's DVD Releases
The Review VaultDouglas Pratt's DVD-Laser Disc Newsletter is published monthly.
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