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The first fifteen minutes proceed without dialogue or music to illustrate the protagonist's process, the bullet from his rifle is merely the finishing touch in a meticulous composition of rigged stove, drugged tea and combustible bookshelf. The elite hitman (Charles Bronson), something of an aesthete, "untidy" is the ultimate insult. "Murder is only killing without a license, and everybody kills." The latest job has Keenan Wynn yelling on a deserted beach to point up the connection to Boorman's Point Blank, the victim's son (Jan-Michael Vincent) follows the funeral with a hippie jamboree at the mansion in a nod to Hodges' Get Carter. Weathered pro and amoral apprentice, a nihilistic pas de deux. "I've always been interested in primitive rituals, like tucking the dead away." Monte Hellman's early involvement in the project miraculously rubbed off on Michael Winner, whose customary heaviness is tempered by moody taciturnity. Bosch canvases on the wall and Beethoven fugues on the Victrola, "this is what it looks like inside your head, huh?" A matter of balance, lost down at the aquarium, regained up in the skies. Parallel rituals regarding the escort with movie posters (Jill Ireland) and the girlfriend with slashed wrists (Linda Ridgeway), symmetries and mirrors. Reheated Melvillisms, plus a note from Fuller's The Crimson Kimono in the martial-arts match witnessed by the duo, the pupil brutally cheats his sensei and earns a bloody comeuppance. "Some new tricks that are sort of an insult to the old style." The cliffside chase during the Naples assignment is capped with a gag from Huston's Beat the Devil, one side cancels out the other in a punchline lifted verbatim by Frankenheimer in 52 Pick-Up. With Frank de Kova, Takayuki Kubota, and Patrick O'Moore.
--- Fernando F. Croce |