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Director John Boorman brought the gangster drama into new realms of modernist abstraction with this stylized revenge thriller, which transforms hard-edged pulp into a kaleidoscopic psychological puzzle. Lee Marvin is iconically cool as the enigmatic Walker, who, after he’s betrayed and left for dead by his best friend during a robbery, embarks on a brutal quest for vengeance, aided by a jaded ex-moll (a sensational Angie Dickinson) who has her own complex motives for helping him. Capturing Los Angeles locales with a surreal pop-art eye, Boorman locates the existential dread lurking beneath the city’s sunlit surface.

DIRECTOR-APPROVED 4K UHD + BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES
New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director John Boorman, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
Audio commentary featuring Boorman and filmmaker Steven Soderbergh
Interview with Boorman conducted by author Geoff Dyer
New interview with critic Mark Harris
New reflections on the film by filmmaker Jim Jarmusch
New program on the midcentury Los Angeles architecture featured in the film, with historian Alison Martino
The Rock (1967), a short documentary on Alcatraz and the making of the film
Interview with Marvin from a 1970 episode of The Dick Cavett Show
Trailer
English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
PLUS: An essay by Dyer

New cover by Jay Shaw

This is an unexpectedly stacked release! Other than the commentary and The Rock, everything is new to disc. Pity the Los Angeles piece did not end up a second commentary track, though.

Agreed. I also hope Jarmusch’s extra is a bit longer. Recently when he gave his Letterboxd Top 4 he named this as one of his favorites. I’d love to hear his thoughts, how it influenced him, and discuss his likeliness to Lee Marvin.

Jon Mulvaney on the color reference in an email to me:

Thanks for writing to me. I checked in with our restoration team regarding your POINT BLANK question and they elaborated that they looked at a 35mm archival print and a Technicolor IB print. We then remastered from the OCN, with 35 mm separation masters used for some sections.

I finally read the novel this is based on, Richard Stark [Donald E. Westlake]'s The Hunter. It was also the basis of the Mel Gibson movie Payback, which exists in two versions, neither wholly satisfying. The Gibson movie is the more faithful of the two, especially in the director's cut. It reproduces whole scenes and even lines of dialogue, usually the best scenes in the film (thanks mainly William Devane and James Coburn). It adds plenty, tho': a romance subplot, a subplot with two corrupt cops, a subplot with a triad gang led by Lucy Liu's dominatrix, and in the theatrical cut, lots of material with Kris Kristofferson's baddie Bronson, who's only a voice on the phone in the director's cut and novel. Point Blank adds a love interest, too, plus a whole subplot about Walker being used by Fairfax under an assumed name to take out rivals in the organization. In the novel and Payback, Fairfax is merely an upper management type called in from vacation in Florida after Carter is killed. There's also no escape from Alcatraz in the novel.

You'll notice I've said a lot about the movies adding things, which'll be counterintuitive given how movies are usually pressed to subtract things when adapting novels. But Stark's novel is true to his name: there's little in it. The emphasis is on attitude and atmosphere, an attempt to epitomize the hardboiled style to a state so pure it risks parody. The plot itself is spare: Parker wants revenge, tracks down Mal Resnik through his associates, and kills him; Parker decides he also wants his money, tracks it down through several Outfit managers, gets it, leaves. There isn't much action: the biggest action scene is the heist where Parker is betrayed, which is more elaborate than in either movie. After that, just a suspense scene at a train station towards the end and a very brief fight in a hotel to cap off the main plot. Both movies have to add action scenes. In the book, Parker mainly just intimidates a series of people by being gruff and laconic.

The only thing not straightforward is the structure. The novel doubles back on itself twice: the first third is from Parker's POV as he looks for Resnik, with a flashback to what he experienced of the betrayal. This section ends with Resnik seeing Parker climb in a window and walk towards him. The next section restarts from the time of Parker's arrival in town at the start of the novel, but from Resnik's POV, explaining his position in the Outfit and his reasons for the double cross (we get a lengthy flashback showing the heist and aftermath), ending with Resnik being choked to death. The last section switches to Parker's POV and doubles back again, showing how he tracks down Resnik, kills him, and then carries on from there to his conflict with the Outfit. A twisty kind of novelistic structure that's harder to describe than read.

Payback plays things linearly, but Point Blank famously dips back and forth in time. Not like the novel, but in odd, abstracting ways unrelated to storytelling. Point Blank also takes the novel's spartan brutality and transforms it into something otherworldly. The Parker of the novel is a straightforward brute--he has some principles, and no taste for killing, but he's a gruff asshole with a talent for violence who treats humans as objects, especially when he's fixed on something. He has no love interest: he lets his wife kill herself, he kills an innocent woman through inattention, and all but assures the death of another woman, a friend who genuinely helps him. He even has his own plans to betray Resnik after the heist just because he doesn't like him (tho' Resnik isn't aware of the plan until after his own backstab), which really undercuts any sympathy you might have for Parker. Both movies wisely cut that part. There are no heroes or even likeable characters in The Hunter. Parker is the main character just by virtue of the fact we start with his POV and he's slightly less awful than Resnik. Subsequent novels will make Parker a bit more admirable by giving him a personal code of conduct and a sense of professionalism. Payback softens him, giving him a dog and Maria Bello. Point Blank abstracts Parker's brutality and violence into something otherworldly, an avenging spirit or force of nature. Parker, or rather Walker, isn't more likeable in Point Blank--indeed he's even less human--but gets to exemplify an idea of balance, be it justice or revenge or what have you. But his role is ambivalent, because he's also the tool of an awful man consolidating power. That Walker is a force of nature bearing down on evil men is an idea the movie declines to endorse, letting us wonder if anything that's happened has been worthwhile or useful. An interesting place to take a straightforward bit of hardboiled crime.

Reading The Hunter mainly reinforced what a weird action movie Point Blank is. It takes a novel that's straightforward and brutal and turns it into this fraught, ambivalent, otherworldly thing when there was no reason to. Why anyone would look at this book and think to make Point Blank the way they did, I don't know. It's a miracle they were even allowed to. But it makes for a considerably more interesting film than, say, Bullit or Dirty Harry or any number of action films from the time period.

Beaver review is up, and the Criterion looks to have gotten the teal treatment, unfortunately.

It only looks bad in a few caps, I have hope

What a great-looking film regardless, holy mackerel.

tbh at least on my computer monitor, the older caps look a bit too magenta and red to me, especially in the sky where it feels completely out of place. In most of those caps, the new color looks better and it would never occur to me they were incorrect. Otherwise, there may be a few I'm not sure about, but I think they're still an improvement over the previous caps.

Definitely an overall improvement, and I can see the excessive magenta/red shift in the DVD, but that car lot shot feels like it's been pushed way too far in the other direction - really all the daytime exteriors feel that way to me, while the interiors feel pretty much balanced.

Interesting that the car shot looks much better and less teal in the UHD cap than the BD cap...

Criterion tells us that the restoration was supervised and approved by John Boorman. So Boorman must have agreed to the color grading, right?
If we did not know that this was Criterion, would we have attributed the colors to Ritrovata?
That would suggest that the preference for teal-leaning colors is a broader phenomenon than the idiosyncrasy of one individual organization.

From the UHD thread: Criterion states in the booklet:

“A 35 mm archival print provided by Warner Bros. was used as a color reference.”

BR.com user teddyballgame also found a comment from the DP about the look of the film:

"It had an entirely different look," he says. "He made a color chart for every scene. They were never garish. In one scene the colors were desaturated. There was no color anywhere. It was like black-and-white film. There was a very warm sequence and another which made strong use of green."

Other BR posters saw the film on 35mm and they mentioned that the prints resemble the Criterion grade more than all the past home video masters.

Repeating what I said in the general UHD thread, the color balance looks better to me now, and the increased distinctness of greys supports the compositions, which are full of striking lines and edges. Those edges are drowned out by the saturated colors on the Warner disc.. The new version is more coherent aesthetically, which suggests it might be closer to the original intent. Same thing happened (inarguably, imo) with the recent UHD of Brazil.

The 4K is far better, looks more of the period, and the DVD is definitely more magenta-y. I haven't seen the old Blu-ray but I assume it's the same master the DVD used.

The chapter menu listing is also pretty fun:

The Rock
The walk
The aftermath
The car
The club
The broad
The penthouse
The Organization
The date
The boss
The drop
The color bars

That's a clever touch, I love it

Another cute touch is that all of the supplements for interviews only use the surname of the participants in the title.

Jazz pianist Ethan Iverson discusses Johnny Mandel's scores for Harper and Point Blank

Has anyone received their copy? Pre-ordered from Unobstructed View (which had no problem shipping my Eyes Wide Shut UHD pronto), but haven't gotten word and it now seems backordered.

You should contact them. I just picked mine up from Bay Street Video on release day, but I believe Unobstructed View are their supplier for Criterions.