Point Blank is a 1967 American crime film directed by John Boorman, starring Lee Marvin, co-starring Angie Dickinson, Keenan Wynn and Carroll O'Connor, and adapted from the 1963 crime noir pulp novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark.

In 2016, Point Blank was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress, and selected for preservation in its National Film Registry.

[4] Walker works with his friend Mal Reese to rob a major crime operation, ambushing the courier on deserted Alcatraz Island.

Walker goes to Los Angeles, where he bursts in on Lynne and riddles her bed with bullets, only to find Reese has long since disappeared.

Willing to help in any way, Chris agrees to a sexual tryst with Reese inside his heavily guarded penthouse apartment, where she will unbolt a door for Walker.

With a gun to Reese's head, Walker persuades him to give up the names of his Organization superiors – Carter, Brewster, and Fairfax – so he can make somebody pay back his $93,000.

The sniper leaves; Walker tears open the package of money but finds only slips of blank paper.

Winkler and Judd Bernard became enthusiastic about the Point Blank script and felt it would be ideal for Lee Marvin.

They struggled to get the script to Marvin, so they sent it to John Boorman, an emerging director Winkler knew from his management days.

When they agreed to work on the film, Marvin discarded the script and called a meeting with the head of the studio, the producers, his agent, and Boorman.

MGM's head of production Robert Weitman wanted the female lead played by Stella Stevens but Boorman and Marvin insisted on Angie Dickinson.

So Boorman changed the lines in the script so that Acker would essentially ask and answer Marvin's questions and the result is in the finished film.

[7] This was the first film shot at Alcatraz Island, the infamous prison in San Francisco that had closed in 1963, only three years before the production.

[11] During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life Magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison.

[1] In her 1967 New Yorker review of Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael wrote: "A brutal new melodrama is called Point Blank, and it is.

[14] Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and said, "as suspense thrillers go, Point Blank is pretty good.

"[16] In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther described the movie as a "spectacularly stylized and vividly photographed film that hints at some of the complex organization and hideous humanity of the modern-day underworld" and that director Boorman had "done an amazing job of getting the look and smell of Los Angeles into the texture of his picture...But, holy smokes, what a candid and calculatedly sadistic film it is!....This is not a pretty picture for the youngsters--or, indeed, for anyone with indelicate taste.

"[17] Slant reviewer Nick Schager notes in a 2003 review: "What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman's virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism.

The website's critics consensus reads, "Shot with hard-hitting inventiveness and performed with pitiless cool by Lee Marvin, Point Blank is a revenge thriller that exemplifies the genre's strengths with extreme prejudice.

Boorman believes the film is about Lee Marvin's brutalizing experiences in World War II, which dehumanized him and left him desperately searching for his humanity.

[7] Critic David Thomson has written that the character of Walker is actually dead throughout the entire movie and the events of the film are a dream of the accumulating stages of revenge.

[23][24] Point Blank combines elements of film noir with stylistic touches of the European nouvelle vague.

The film features a fractured timeline (similar to the novel's non-linear structure), disconcerting narrative rhythms (long, slow passages contrasted with sudden outbursts of violence), and a carefully calculated use of film space (stylized compositions of concrete riverbeds, sweeping bridges, empty prison cells).

[7] Boorman said that as the film progressed, scenes would be filmed monochromatically around one color (the chilly blues and grays of Acker's apartment, Dickinson's butter yellow bathrobe, the startling red wall in Vernon's penthouse) to give the proceedings a "sort of unreality".

[28] Thomson adds, "[...] this is not just a cool, violent pursuit film, it is a wistful dream and one of the great reflections on how movies are fantasies that we are reaching out for all the time—it's singin' in the rain again, the white lie that erases night.

"[29] Director Steven Soderbergh has said that he used stylistic touches from Point Blank many times in his filmmaking career.