Point Blank (John Boorman, 1967); 11.22.63 (Hulu, 2016); Parkland (Peter Landesman, 2013)

SPOILERS

Point Blank is the quintessential JFK-assassination-hangover film. During a robbery on Alcatraz of a crime/business syndicate known as The Organization, Walker (Lee Marvin) is ambushed and left for dead by his heist partner Reese (John Vernon). Upon regaining consciousness, he spends the rest of the film trying to recover $93,000, his half of the heist, with a doggedness worthy of Jim Garrison (he utters "$93,000" so often that it takes on the contours of a conspiracy theorist's mantra - "magic bullet" or "grassy knoll"). That requires him to navigate The Organization's hall of mirrors and Boorman, along with Phillip H. Lathrop's dazed cinematography, dumbfounds with his portrait of an unknowable, rhizomatic ecosystem - penthouses across from penthouses, rooms within rooms within rooms, mirrors that are doors, heel clicks and soul screams (courtesy of Stu Gardner) and intercom announcements that disorient with their ability to transgress space, characters who intone robotic business speak, and, of course, snipers in disparate locales. Walker himself is a cipher. He has no known first name. But that's okay - in a mildly feminist twist, his paramour Chris (Angie Dickinson) has no known last name. And as a measure of his extreme indifference to anything unrelated to his $93,000, he thanks the gay men (Ron Walters and George Strattan) he holds hostage as a ruse to divert the attention of the phalanx of suits guarding Reese.

Walker runs through several important functionaries in this Organization with no success. If he could just find the top man who "runs things," then he can retrieve his money. But no discernible hierarchy exists; once Walker thinks he's found the highest executive, there's always someone higher and more mysterious. Nowhere is this baffling reality more redolent than in the scene in which Walker confronts Brewster (Carroll O'Connor). Nope, he's not the top man either and he's almost petulant about all the trouble Walker has caused: "You threaten a financial structure like this for $93,000?" As an officer in The Organization, he explains corporations to Walker. They deal in millions but never in cash; Brewster himself has only $11 in his pocket. But both remain as obstinate as toddlers. Even though he feels it's pointless, Brewster takes him to see Fairfax (Keenan Wynn) who shoots Brewster dead and assures Walker that Brewster "was the last one." Finally, Walker has found the top man. But wait - isn't this Yost, the man he partnered with in the beginning of the film to find Reese and his $93,000? Then who he is really? Walker doesn't know and recedes into the shadows like a sniper. Yost/Fairfax drops off the money and leaves. But Walker doesn't retrieve it; he doesn't even emerge from the shadows. The film ends with a long shot of Alcatraz and Boorman strands us with one of cinema's most searing portrayals of the indifference of capital and all its byzantine organizations. 

Based on a typically bloated Stephen King novel, 11.22.63 has an intriguing premise. Jake Epping (James Franco) must travel back to 1960 and gear up to prevent the assassination of JFK. But King's 849-page novel means that it must be translated into a eight-episode miniseries with far too many time-wasting diversions and preposterous coincidences. Fascinating when it sticks to the assassination plot. But someone get this man an editor!

Parkland falls somewhere in between. Based on Vincent Bugliosi's Four Days in November: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy, it runs a tight 93 minutes even though Bugliosi's book is over 1,600 pages long! With an attractive cast including Zac Efron as Dr. Charles James "Jim" Carrico, Jeremy Strong as Lee Harvey Oswald (perfect training for Kendall Roy in Succession), and Jimmie Dale Gilmore as Reverend Saunders, Parkland comes off as a little more than a Wiki page. But as a minute-to-minute recreation of 11/22/63, its merciful briskness lends it a great deal more utility than the average Oscar prestige pic.

Point Blank: A+

11.22.63: B-minus

Parkland: B+

Those Tumescent 1970s

As with serial television, so with feature-length film - the longer a show/movie goes on, the better chance it has of shitting the bed. This is one reason why I gravitate towards the classical (pre-1960) era of Hollywood before running times (and budgets) grew tumescent. For instance, the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956) is so taut you could bounce a quarter off it. But Philip Kaufman's 1978 remake tacks on 35 minutes during which his version, well, shits the bed. The interior scenes evince an assured hand transforming the first half into a prismatic wonderland. But Kaufman loses control once the film moves outdoors for more workaday imagery. The climactic destruction of the pod lab is visually drab compared to the hypnotic moments in the mud spa. And while Denny Zeitlin's score works in burbling electronic mode, it's preposterously inappropriate when it adopts Star Wars clomp. Why the initial swirling of spores on a distant planet needed Valkyrie volume levels remains a mystery.

As a key tentpole of the New Hollywood, The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973) was tumescent to begin with, a roided-up exploitation film drunk on The Method. So it's not as if Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977) had a model of economy to work with. But at twenty minutes shorter than the first entry, it feels forty minutes longer. It pains me to admit this. As yet another example of my "perverse" readings, I'd always felt it trounced its predecessor. But a recent rewatch had me wishing I bailed at the forty-five-minute mark. Much of it still amazes. The psychiatric institute where Regan (Linda Blair) continues to heal is a dazzling honeycomb of windows and reflections and peripheral activity. Her NYC apartment sports a shatter of mirrors and opens out onto the most dangerous patio in Manhattan complete with incomplete railings and an Op Art birdhouse. And even zanier than the locust-eye views of Africa are the hypnosis sessions bathed in pulsating white light and low electronic moans. Too bad Boorman had to fashion a story out of all this scintillation. With a production plagued with rewrites and a frequently MIA director, the film loses its narrative footing and begs to be put out of its misery by the halfway point. Still, I'd rather have this playing in the art-porn theatre of my dreams than the first one. Easier to treat it like a piece of architecture rather than an absorbing drama. 

Standing apart from all these films is The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980) even though it supposedly forms part of Blatty's "Faith Trilogy" novels of The Exorcist and Legion. Good luck getting horror dorks on board with this sui generis wonder. Dave Kehr likens it to "wacky personal" films like William Cameron Menzies’s Invaders From Mars or James B. Harris’s Some Call It Loving. There's definitely a lot of the latter in The Ninth Configuration's setting (a creepy castle), style (dreamy freeze frames, cognitive shifts), and, especially, score (De Vol with a hangover). The worst I can say for it is that the insane asylum conceit affords Blatty a convenient excuse to parade around the wackiness. But it morphs into an unexpectedly moving portrait of PTSD as a motley crew of Vietnam vets try to make sense (and nonsense) of their lives. Unexpected because you've been treated to tryouts for an all-animal production of Hamlet, an astronaut encountering Jesus on the moon, one of the wildest bar fights in cinema history, and dozens of purple one-liners available for obsessive quoting. 

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956): A

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Philip Kaufman, 1978): B+

The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973): B+

Exorcist II: The Heretic (John Boorman, 1977): B

The Ninth Configuration (William Peter Blatty, 1980): A