I’ve been reading the Richard Stark novels and wanted to put a face to Parker, and no one is better than Lee Marvin at the sort of hard-boiled nutjob that Westlake, I mean Richard Stark, writes about. So I rented Point Blank by John Boorman. It’s a fairly avante-garde movie, somewhere between 50’s cool and 60’s groovy, a bit tiki actually. It’s the standard revenge plot that was redone in Mel Gibson’s Payback, but this seems infinitely better. Not as straight an adaptation of The Hunter as Payback was, but Boorman knows how to set up the shot. Have to say too, Angie Dickinson is a sight to behold.

“The office women looked at him and shivered. They knew he was a bastard, they his big hands were born to slap with, they knew his face would never break into a smile when he looked at a woman. They knew what he was, they thanked God for their husbands, and still they shivered. Because they knew how he would fall on a woman in the night. Like a tree" - The Hunter