The Killers (Don Siegel, 1964)

Cast: Lee Marvin, John Cassavetes, Angie Dickinson, Ronald Reagan, Clu Gulager, Claude Akins, Norman Fell. Screenplay: Gene L. Coon, based on a story by Ernest Hemingway. Cinematography: Richard L. Rawlings. Art direction: Frank Arrigo, George B. Chan. Film editing: Richard Belding. Music: John Williams.

The Chase (Arthur Penn, 1966)

Cast: Marlon Brando, Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, E.G. Marshall, Angie Dickinson, Janice Rule, Miriam Hopkins, Martha Hyer, Richard Bradford, Robert Duvall, James Fox, Diana Hyland, Henry Hull, Jocelyn Brando. Screenplay: Lillian Hellman, based on a novel by Horton Foote. Cinematography: Joseph LaShelle. Production design: Richard Day. Film editing: Gene Milford. Music: John Barry.

Bad movies are often fun to watch anyway, and most of the people involved with The Chase, including director Arthur Penn, screenwriter Lillian Hellman, and star Marlon Brando, agreed that it was a bad movie. Brando let his opinion show, giving a sluggish performance that validates the old criticism that he mumbled his lines. Hellman had her script taken away and rewritten, and Penn struggled to deal with an ill-conceived project. The chief interest the film generates today is seeing actors like Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Robert Duvall on the brink of major stardom. There's a good deal of miscasting, including E.G. Mashall as the boss of a small town that seems to be in Texas or Louisiana. Marshall lacks the ruthless aura that the character needs. Angie Dickinson is wasted as the loving and dutiful wife of the town sheriff played by Brando. And Redford feels out of place in the role of Bubber Reeves, the town bad boy who escapes from prison (it's never quite clear what he did to be sent there) and stirs a manhunt, a lynch mob, and a conflagration in a junkyard. The town itself is a hotbed where everyone sleeps with everyone else's spouse and goes orgiastic on the Saturday night when the news of Bubber's escape breaks. It's a silly and lurid movie, but a little too long to be entertainingly bad.

Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967)

Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin in Point Blank

Walker: Lee Marvin
Chris: Angie Dickinson
Mal Reese: John Vernon
Lynne: Sharon Acker
Yost: Keenan Wynn
Brewster: Carroll O'Connor
Frederick Carter: Lloyd Bochner
Stegman: Michael Strong
Hit Man: James Sikking

Director: John Boorman
Screenplay: Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, Rafe Newhouse
Based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake (as Richard Stark)
Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop
Art direction: Albert Brenner, George W. Davis
Music: Johnny Mandel
Film editing: Henry Berman

Stoner noir. With its non-linear storytelling and audaciously post-realist tricks of style, Point Blank clearly shows the influence of the great French and Italian filmmakers of the 1960s, but even though its director was a Brit whose only previous non-documentary film was Having a Wild Weekend (1965), an attempt to do for the Dave Clark Five what A Hard Day's Night (Richard Lester, 1963) did for the Beatles, it's unquestionably an American movie. Its loner antihero, Walker, is straight out of American Westerns, and the two cities it shifts between, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are the American final frontier. That any studio, let alone MGM, would allow John Boorman and Lee Marvin to make Point Blank what it is -- an eccentric spin on a familiar genre -- shows how the Hollywood studio system had imploded. It's a film full of outrageous moments: Walker bursting into Lynne's apartment and emptying his revolver into an unoccupied bed. Walker fastening his seat belt -- in the days before shoulder belts and mandated buckling up -- and embarking on a one-car demolition derby with Stegman in the passenger seat. Walker dumping a naked Reese from a penthouse balcony. Chris pummeling an immovable Walker with her purse and her fists before collapsing in exhaustion. It has showoffy tricks: The pock pock pock pock of Walker's heels as he strides down an airport corridor, a sound that's carried over even after he's left the hallway. The often psychedelic color effects, like Chris's day-glo wardrobe or the closeup of the multicolored perfumes in the bottles that have shattered in the bathtub after Walker swept them from the shelves. Its plot stretches credibility to the breaking point: How did Walker survive being shot at, yes, point blank range and then get away from Alcatraz? This alone has served as the focus of countless attempts at interpretation: Is Walker a ghost? Or is what happens after he's shot the revenge fantasy of a dying man? In short, Point Blank is a glorious mess, made into an enduring work of fascination and puzzlement by wonderful performances, particularly by Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson. Is it a great film or just an enduring cult movie? I tend to the latter view, but it's bloody fun in either case.

Watched on Turner Classic Movies

Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, 1959)

I could never countenance plagiarism, but as they say, if you're going to steal, steal from the best. Even if you're Howard Hawks stealing from Howard Hawks, which happens almost shamelessly in Rio Bravo. No one who loves Hawks's Red River (1948) as much as I do could fail to miss how much of Rio Bravo is, let us say, borrowed from that film. There's the byplay between Sheriff John T. Chance (John Wayne) and Stumpy (Walter Brennan), which echoes that of Dunson (Wayne) and Groot (Brennan) in Red River. Ricky Nelson's young gun Colorado Ryan is a reworking of Montgomery Clift's Matthew Garth. And Angie Dickinson's Feathers could almost be a parody of Joanne Dru's motormouth Tess Millay. But the Hawksian borrowings don't stop with Red River. When Feathers kisses Chance for the first time and then goes in for a second kiss in which he participates more enthusiastically, she comments, "It's better when two people do it," which is a direct steal from a similar scene in To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944) when "Slim" (Lauren Bacall) tells "Steve" (Humphrey Bogart), "It's even better when you help." The two movies share not only a director but also a screenwriter, Jules Furthman, who is joined in Rio Bravo by Leigh Brackett, who earlier worked together on another Bogart-Bacall-Hawks movie, The Big Sleep (1946). Even the composer of the score for Rio Bravo, Dimitri Tiomkin, gets into the borrowing game, taking a theme from his score for Red River and handing it over to lyricist Paul Francis Webster for the song, "My Rifle, My Pony, and Me," sung by Dean Martin's Dude and Nelson's Colorado. Rio Bravo isn't as great a movie as Red River by a long shot, and it probably signals some creative exhaustion on Hawks's part that he not only borrowed so heavily from his earlier work but also felt it necessary to remake Rio Bravo in two thinly disguised versions also starring Wayne, as El Dorado (1966) and Rio Lobo (1970). But is there a more entertaining self-plagiarism, and a surer demonstration of what made Hawks one of the great filmmakers?