Lee Marvin: Point Blank of His Career

The "superstar" phenomenon of the last forty years has not been restricted to the film world, but can be found in sports, politics, religion, and writing, when mere fame has not been enough to distinguish one star from another.  With the studio system dead by the end of the Sixties, being a movie star could not guarantee an actor the best or most lucrative roles.  Formerly, the stars had large studios – Paramount, MGM, RKO, Columbia, Universal, Fox, and Warner Brothers – to support them with a steady stream of solid film vehicles to display their stardom. 

Starting in the late fifties, stars had to fend for themselves.  In a world increasingly managed by public relations people, a star was anyone with a starring role; the “Superstar” had to be created as a sort of star of stars.  Paul Newman, John Wayne, Barbra Streisand, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, Dustin Hoffman, Clint Eastwood, Julie Andrews.  This sample of superstars had either ascended from stardom to superstardom or who were catapulted immediately into superstardom in the mid-sixties. 

Another to add to the list was Lee Marvin, almost without warning, because he had been around so long.  Nearly too familiar to audiences.  Yet, from 1965 to 1973, if he did not dominate the box office, Marvin commanded attention on and off screen, starring in many major films and receiving one of Hollywood's highest honors.

Cat Ballou (1965) played facilely with the traditional western and inspired later comedy-westerns including Texas Across the River, Waterhole #3, and Support Your Local Sheriff.  Marvin played the dual role of Kid Shelleen and his villainous half-brother, Tim Strawn (aka Silvernose).  Shelleen was a once famous gunslinger turned drunk.  Hired by Catherine Ballou (Jane Fonda) to protect her father, and later to avenge the father's death, he was whipped into shape for a confrontation with Strawn.  He stopped drinking and, in a scene reminiscent of a bullfighter's dressing, was outfitted for the shootout.  The most commented upon shot, however, featured Shelleen, drunk again, asleep on a horse, both leaning against a wall. 

Marvin won the Berlin Film Festival Best Actor award, Britain's Best Foreign Actor award, and to top it off, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Best Actor Academy Award.  Amazingly, he beat out Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, Rod Steiger, and Ship of Fools co-star Oskar Werner.  Although, having won the other awards should have alerted the public that his performance was not going unnoticed.

Winning the Best Actor Oscar gave Marvin greater freedom to choose scripts, demand higher salaries, and, ultimately, take his career into his own hands.  This meant both choosing the right roles for his talents and taking risks.  Richard Brooks wanted the now "hot" actor to lead Woody Strode, Burt Lancaster, and Robert Ryan in The Professionals (1966), which dealt with a group of men rescuing a millionaire's wife from a Mexican revolutionary (Jack Palance). 

As in The Killers (1964) and, next, The Dirty Dozen, Marvin played the moral superior to his boss(es).  In the midst of the rescue in The Professionals, he and his cohorts discover that Ralph Bellamy’s wife (Claudia Cardinale) is really in love with the revolutionary, and Marvin resolved, finally, to turn the tables on the husband.  Marvin pulled off the role neatly, as his biographer put it: “without showing much muscle, relying on cerebral power via voice intonations, a threatening smile, and those dominating eyes.”

The Dirty Dozen (1967) was Marvin's biggest hit and most enduring favorite among fans.  Robert Aldrich, who had first worked with Marvin in Attack! (1956), directed this story of U.S. Army stockade miscreants given a second lease on life and freedom if they volunteered to drop behind German lines before D-Day and wipe out a chateau full of German officers.  Marvin was a rebel officer assigned against his will to train and lead the crew that the army group psychiatrist  (Ralph Meeker) warned him were  "just about the most twisted, anti-social bunch of psychopathic deformities I have ever run into." 

Marvin, again, was called upon to lead a powerful cast: John Cassavetes, Jim Brown, Donald Sutherland, Charles Bronson, Telly Savalas, and Clint Walker among them.  Likewise, Marvin disdained the brass, which included the formidable presences of Ernest Borgnine, Robert Ryan, George Kennedy, and Robert Webber.

The film exhibited the rebel/leader qualities in Marvin's character to the fullest and these qualities attracted moviegoers to him.  The rebel must accept the mission for the greater common good.  But not everyone liked the Reisman character or the mission he accomplished.  Wrote one reviewer, "Reisman sounds intelligent, but he's the fascist policeman as hero".  In the same review, a more sweeping claim was made:  "The hideous moral of the war in Vietnam and The Dirty Dozen is that you kill Enemy, and have a lively time at it, because that is what you are ordered to do; you never worry much about why you're fighting or what's at stake". 

The New Yorker reviewer remarked at the absence of "the moral gap between the enemy robots and our citizen-soldiers" and that in the new kind of war film "the enemy is depicted as quite neutral morally and our own soldiers turn out to be unspeakably brutal".  But it was this very brutality which thrilled audiences, like it or not, and what we remember from the film is Cassavetes' Franco getting his face stomped; Donald Sutherland's marvelous imitation of a general reviewing Robert Ryan's troops; and certainly, the most dangerous of the bunch, the sexually deviant, bigoted, Bible-quoting Telly Savalas as Maggott, who turns on his fellow prisoners when they finally penetrate the chateau.

When Philadelphia-born but British-based director Richard Lester achieved success with the Beatles in 1964's A Hard Day's Night, Hollywood took notice of the mod scene.  British director John Boorman guided another popular singing group, the Dave Clark Five, through 1965's Having a Wild Weekend, then was given an opportunity to work in the States on a major film with the immensely popular Marvin.

He met Marvin in London (during the shooting of The Dirty Dozen) and agreed to film Point Blank (1967), a tough crime drama.  Marvin played Walker, a man relentlessly looking for $94,000 owed him from a heist.  He based his character primarily on his own movie image and created variations of his own screen personality.  Boorman even claimed that Point Blank was, in part, a documentary on Lee Marvin.  One critic observed, "Without Lee Marvin the film would probably never have been made, or, having been made, achieved its popular success; for to a large extent the aggressive, forward-thrusting, impassive Marvin contains the meaning of the film.”

In 1999, John Boorman filmed a fifty-minute documentary on Lee Marvin for the American Movie Classics cable channel.  His tribute to Marvin poignantly reiterated how this and the next film Hell in the Pacific respectively personified the essence of Marvin the actor and Marvin the man.  Point Blank was a risky venture from Marvin's standpoint.  Boorman had yet to prove himself, but Marvin fought for the director's independence.

What came of this venture was a latter day noir classic with tremendous resonance, tension, and obsession.  However, misunderstandings arose from the film's violence.  One reviewer claimed that Marvin threw John Vernon off the roof of a penthouse – actually Vernon got tangled in some sheets and fell off.  Indeed, Marvin is responsible for several deaths, but, personally, he kills no one.  Part of the film's greatness resides in its ability to create this mis-perception, as well as to establish an allusive meaning to the narrative.  By exploring the source of these wrong impressions, we might begin to understand Point Blank's message that American society is on a course of self-destruction, as well as appreciate Marvin's acting accomplishment. 

Marvin's personal past stimulated his participation in Hell in the Pacific, with Japanese superstar Toshiro Mifune.  Few major films depend on two people alone.  And if it is to be attempted, even with superstars, one must rely heavily on plot, character identification, and dialogue.  Marvin best eulogized the heroic effort to make Hell in the Pacific, saying that it was a tough movie to make. There were many problems with local atmospheric conditions.  Filming on location in Palau, the production had to coordinate five different languages.   

In addition, Marvin and Mifune speak their own respective languages in the film without subtitles for the audience.  The film nearly realizes Boorman's desire of making a silent film, a personal achievement ignoring the risk that few post-World War II moviegoers would want to attend a silent movie!

Yet, Hell in the Pacific, at the very least, contains the second half of a statement about Lee Marvin that is begun in Point Blank.  Point Blank successively combines in one film  Lee Marvin's film personae of the previous fifteen years; Hell in the Pacific condenses the formative experiences of Marvin’s life as a warrior and survivor.