Saw Point Blank (1967). I loved it! It was a late noir, full of grim violence and brittle, crystalline women. It opens on the protagonist, Walker, waking up in a jail cell. The film jumps back and forth as he recalls that he got there by being double-crossed in the middle of a heist. His wife and his friend turned on him. We get flashbacks of his friend and him rolling around on the floor of a class reunion together. Then, when Walker finally comes to, the film jumps forward to find Walker on a boat, talking to some bald man, being asked to help the bald man help him, to take down The Organization. From there Walker kills a lot of people.
The film is just marvelously abstract and strange. The identity of the bald man, for example, is never fully explained. Is he a government agent? A rival gangster? Death? Satan? An angel? Similarly, there's the intriguing opening, with the main character possibly dying in a jail cell. Is this his afterlife? Or is he now trapped in the prison of pointless revenge? The thematic implications are never fully teased out but are doubly fascinating for what they subliminally suggest.
The film is Lynch-ianly chilly and full of arresting images and otherworldly performances. It is Hitchcock-ishly posed and choreographed. It's mostly grim and violent, but stylishly so and in a nice, intriguing way. It's clever and classy, tipping its hand a few times and letting you know that this is all pointless. At one point one of the gangsters shouts at Walker "You're a very bad man, Walker, a very destructive man! Why do you run around doing things like this?" It's just such a deliciously absurd line and so wonderfully undercuts the seriousness of the action. "A very bad man" indeed!
I didn't think I'd enjoy this film but I really really did.
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