Cinema: Cash Customer

Point Blank is one of those forgettable movies in which only the settings change—the violence remains the same. The first setting is deserted Alcatraz, where Lee Marvin lies in a cell, badly wounded and flashbacking like mad. Lee, his wife (Sharon Acker) and a friend have just hijacked a helicopter load of cash that some criminal syndicate had tried to deliver, for obscure reasons, to the abandoned prison. Friend and wife, however, have cut Lee out of the deal by pumping him full of lead —but not enough lead, apparently, to interfere with his swimming to the mainland.

The rest of the movie is a sado-masochistic version of an old-fashioned quest—not for a golden fleece or a Holy Grail, but for Lee's stolen share of the stolen loot. His techniques are sometimes interesting—as when he uses a white 1967 Chrysler convertible to subdue a bad-guy passenger by crashing, crunching and slamming the car into a junkyard heap. His invasion of the syndicate's impregnable penthouse (carpeted in wall-to-wall red fox fur) begins with a steamy sex wrestle and ends in a superbly vertiginous shot of a naked mobster arcing 20-odd stories into a crowded street.

The finale may be some kind of landmark in cinema typecasting, perhaps not unrelated to Frank Sinatra's new chairmanship of the American-Italian Anti-Defamation League. As Lee and his soulmate sister-in-law (Angie Dickinson) battle their way up through the syndicate hierarchy in pursuit of his $93,000, it turns out that the evil big shots seem neither to have been born in Sicily nor to be afflicted with five o'clock shadow, but bear such names as Brewster, Carter and Fairfax. The biggest mobster of them all (Carroll O'Connor) is downright refined. Arriving at his hideout, he grumbles that the shrubbery needs watering and the swimming pool is too cold, then expresses horror at Marvin's demand for the missing dough. "We don't handle actual cash," he gasps. "I've only got about $11 on me."