For obvious reasons, Los Angeles is a popular setting for movies. It’s usually depicted as a sunny paradise, lined with palm trees and populated by beautiful people in bikinis and swim trunks. Even L.A. nightmares like David Lynch’s masterpiece Mulholland Drive find beauty in its bright sunlight and blooming flowers. Not so much Point Blank.
Directed by an Englishman — then-newcomer John Boorman — and starring Hollywood’s premiere tough guy Lee Marvin, Point Blank envisions L.A. as a striking, but stark landscape of concrete and mirrors whose cold, sharp modernist lines match the citizens’ sense of violent alienation. Boorman had what critic Mark Harris calls “an alien’s keen eye” for the city, rendering it in drab shades of dirty grayish white and sickly orange and green.
