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The rubout at the school for the blind throws off the order of things as seen by the assassin, an investigation is in order. "A man stood still while we burned him, and I'd like to know why." The contemplative hitman (Lee Marvin) and his sidekick, a health-nut hipster (Clu Gulager), abrupt professionals in suits and shades. Their target (John Cassavetes) was once a race driver involved with "the wrecker" (Angie Dickinson), convinced of his own tragic side long before he staggers out of a trackside fireball. "Do I make you nervous?" "So far, yes." A fast and lowdown paraphrasing of Hemingway, also a treatise on vision and time, Don Siegel scraping off the prestige of Siodmak's version for the tingling seaminess underneath. One cool million floats through, it might solve the killer's riddle and provide him with a bit of old-age security. The moll belongs to the veteran racketeer (Ronald Reagan, waxy and shellacked), who needs a wheelman for a backroad caper. "I approve of larceny, murder is against my principles." Not noir shadows but television harshness, zooms, rear projections and staccato cutting, the currency of modernist brutality. The human body is terrorized, perforated, barbecued in a sauna and dangled out of a window, "living is dangerous." In the duplicitous landscape, the most honest burst of emotion comes via the doomed hero's mechanic (Claude Akins), who takes a tearful swig from his hooch flask upon news of his demise. The foreshortened gun barrel that blots out half the screen becomes a bloodied trigger finger on the suburban lawn, just another boy playing cops and robbers. "I had to get my eyes boiled before I could see." Through Point Blank it passes to arrive at Pulp Fiction. With Norman Fell, Virginia Christine, Nancy Wilson, and Seymour Cassel.
--- Fernando F. Croce |