That quest, as Boorman spells out during Point Blank’s masterful first few moments, involves reclaiming $93,000 that was stolen from him during a heist. Long before Mel Gibson turned the character into an endearing, wise-cracking anti-hero in the pathetic remake Payback, Marvin’s Walker was the cinema’s ultimate unsentimental badass-chillingly determined, unfettered by pesky human emotions like love, sympathy, or remorse, and unwilling to halt the bloodshed until he had fulfilled his quest. 38 pistol at the ready, Marvin’s character seems almost inhuman his one word moniker, Walker, and lack of dialogue for the film’s first 20 minutes merely confirms the impression that he’s less a man than an unbridled, indestructible elemental force. As he stomps stoically and silently amid Los Angeles’s glistening high-rises with an enormous. With daunting broad shoulders, hard, searing eyes, and a face that looked like it had been carved out of iron, Marvin was an imposing goliath, and as he rises from the dead during the title credits of Boorman’s tour de force, one becomes immediately aware of the actor’s enormous physicality. One of Lee Marvin’s initial claims to fame was disfiguring Gloria Grahame’s face with a pot of scalding coffee in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat, but even for cinema’s quintessential thug, there was something more terrifyingly callous about his performance in John Boorman’s seminal 1967 neo-noir Point Blank.
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