ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (21)

By: Gordon Dahlquist
September 14, 2025

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite sympathetic villains. Series edited by Heather Quinlan.

WALKER

The archetypal moment for Walker — the career-criminal protagonist of John Boorman’s Point Blank, played by Lee Marvin — comes 10 minutes into the film. In a perfectly framed foreshortened shot, Walker strides down the LAX Terminal 6 arrival corridor. Walker has somehow survived being doubled-crossed and left for dead by his wife and best friend and is now coming for revenge. His implacable march down the corridor and his relentlessly echoing footsteps only end when Walker bursts into his ex-wife’s apartment, gun drawn. He seizes her as a shield, pushes her to the floor, then charges into the bedroom and fires six shots into the empty bed.

For the rest of the film Walker stalks both vengeance and the return of the $93K taken from him in the double-cross, clawing his way through the ranks of the organized crime syndicate in which his former friend, Mal Reese, has bought himself a stake. Nothing is allowed to stand in Walker’s way — certainly not feelings, nor collateral damage. One mafia salary-man after another protests — about not having cash, how they’re a corporation now, about the vulgarity of Walker’s violence — before going down, still uncomprehending, under Walker’s heel. In the end Walker realizes that the man feeding him inside info is another syndicate boss, using him to take out his rivals. Walker — again, to the man’s complete mystification — fades into the darkness, leaving the tainted money on the ground.

None of this touches on the swooning abstraction that informs Boorman’s framing of Walker — so archetypal and elemental that the film could almost be retitled Nemesis Hunts Vanity. Neither does it account for the incredible — and always so fleeting — nuance that Marvin shows within this unfeeling and implacable man. We see flashbacks of a softer Walker — when he met his wife (a genuinely strange and unsettling scene on the waterfront of their slow, silent flirting, watched by a band of leering-just-shy-of-rapey stevedores), vulnerably drunk when Mal pitches the ill-fated heist at a Navy Reunion, and his near Zen-like struggle to survive after being shot. We don’t so much mourn these glimpses of a more human Walker as we understand how this part of his self is now closed off, discarded — and he’s far more dangerous, an uncaged predator, for the change.

We support him. despite his cruelty and violence, because we know he was betrayed, and because — with the exception of his wife Lynne, eventually suicidal with guilt – the objects of his wrath are self-satisfied, glad-handing ghouls. Genre storytelling suggests that when Walker teams up with Lynne’s sister Chris (played by Angie Dickenson in a tough, understated performance), the human contact will produce some kind of thaw. Certainly Chris expects it — she’s human, after all. She helps Walker at great sacrifice and peril — and he allows her to do it, knowing both the damage to her and the limits of their connection. Near the end of the film, her life completely upended, she asks Walker if he even knows her last name. Walker sits with the question a moment, then asks, “Do you know my first name?” When Chris has no answer, Walker lets that hang for a moment, too, then leaves her to get ready for the next mobster.

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ENDORA YOUR ENTHUSIASM (21)

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