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Lang is the pricinpal model for the ruthless consideration of "a revenge kick," and there's Beatrice Kay looking like Sylvia Sidney rode hard and put away wet. (Her character collects dolls because she can't have children, the surrogate son is a truculent dummy.) A gangland slaying on New Year's Eve makes shadows on a wall not forgotten by the dead man's son, from reformatory to prison to the top of the heap. The culprits are now powerful criminals with respectable fronts and thus "better guarded than the President of the United States," the hoodlum (Cliff Robertson) infiltrates their syndicate while working with the district attorney (Larry Gates). "Well, I'm a sentimental slob when it comes to loving a parent." Samuel Fuller's Red Harvest, clenched from beginning to end. Business and war are the metaphors for the pungent territory, the scarred safecracker in a white suit navigates it deftly, greased by hate. The "top butcher" (Robert Emhardt) lounges by an Olympic swimming pool and chides his underlings over dwindling numbers for drugs and prostitution, the killer (Richard Rust) is a personable fellow until he puts on his shades and goes to work. (A few brilliant frames state the liquidation of a would-be snitch—lit matchstick, butterball drenched and trembling, sedan bursting into flame.) The bruised angel in the midst is a blonde moll (Dolores Dorn) with domestic dreams, never more ethereal than when battered and sloshed while tonguing an ice stick in close-up. "Isn't there a story about a guy all alone in a desert for years and years and then he meets an ocean?" Fuller tabloid strokes abound, the dope brick in the gun shop ("Clean Sports Make for a Clean America") and the grainy alley zoom for kino-fist. Boorman receives all of it gladly in Point Blank. Cinematography by Hal Mohr. With Paul Dubov, Gerald Milton, Allan Gruener, David Kent, Sally Mills, Neyle Morrow, and Henry Norell. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |