Trailer
Plot summary
Mal Reese owes a large sum to the organized crime bosses he works for, so he brings his friend Walker in on a robbery: the two ambush a courier on Alcatraz Island. When the take proves smaller than Reese hoped, he shoots Walker and abandons him, going off with the money and with Lynne, Walker's wife. Walker survives his wounds. A man named Yost offers help, and Walker sets out to find Reese and claim the half of the money he is owed, $93,000. Reese has already handed the whole take to a syndicate called The Organization to clear a debt. Walker reaches Los Angeles, but Reese has disappeared. He presses a car dealer, Stegman, for information, wrecking a new car until Stegman says that Reese is with Chris, Walker's sister-in-law.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Point Blank (1967)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Lee Marvin asked the executives whether he had script approval and approval of principal cast, was told yes to both, then said "I defer all those approvals to John" and walked out, which left Boorman final cut on his very first film in Hollywood.
- After Boorman showed the finished cut to MGM executives, they were very perplexed and mumbling about reshoots. Supervising film editor Margaret Booth told him as the executives filed out, "You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!"
- This was the first film shot at Alcatraz Island, the infamous San Francisco prison that had closed in 1963, only three years before the production. Two weeks in the abandoned prison facility required the services of 125 crew members.
- On March 29, 1968, Point Blank was screened at Cinelândia movie theaters in Brazil to protest the murder of an 18-year-old high school student, shot at point-blank range by the military police of Rio de Janeiro, in what became one of the first major public protests against the Brazilian military government.
- MGM's head of production Robert Weitman wanted the female lead played by Stella Stevens, but Boorman and Marvin insisted on Angie Dickinson; Winkler claims he was then not surprised to see Stevens cast in a subsequent MGM film, Sol Madrid.
- During the shoot, Angie Dickinson and Sharon Acker modeled contemporary fashions for a Life Magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison, and Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon used to shoot at Marvin early in the film.
