John Boorman turns 71 this year, fresh off his latest picture, The Tailor From Panama, adapted from a John Le Carre novel. It's his 14th film and, not surprisingly, the first of its kind in his career. Just when you thought this genre specialist had run out of genres, he's gravitated to the Ôspy movie' after trying on most of the other classifiable forms that movies take: crime (Point Blank), WWII (Hell in the Pacific), science fiction (Zardoz), adventure (Deliverance), historical (Excalibur), revolution (Beyond Rangoon), and horror (Exorcist II:The Heretic). I may be one of the few who'll defend The Heretic as a near-masterpiece, with its cautionary respect for the occult and its hallucinatory set pieces, but Boorman's willingness to take artistic risks, buoyed by an enthusiastic and, at times, outlandish intellectual curiosity, has kept his fans on his side – and his career afloat – against all commercial odds.

He's hardly what you'd call an independent filmmaker, yet he is too much of a maverick to fall under the sway of a studio. No one picture can categorize him.

But Point Blank, is, I suspect, poised

for rediscovery by a new generation of

moviemakers searching for ever more idiosyncratic storytelling methods.

In his 1986 book on Boorman's career, Michel Ciment brought up the criticisms leveled against Point Blank for being Ôtoo European' in its use of flashbacks and

its less-than-linear structure. Boorman responded by saying,"Critics are fond of displaying their erudition. If they're hostile to a film, they maintain that this or that was stolen from Antonioni; if they like it, they point out the wonderful allusion or homage to Rene Clair, etc. The cinema is a living language and once a technical process has been used successfully it becomes part of the medium's vocabulary. The public has merely to be able to understand and interpret it. Audiences were quite prepared to accept the flashbacks in Point Blank."

What audiences saw when Point Blank was released in 1967 was a riveting, fable-like tale of one man's relentless quest for retribution; an ellipsis in which space and silence said as much about a character as image and sound. Walker (Lee Marvin) is shot and left for dead in a cell on the abandoned island of Alcatraz, double-crossed by his wife, Lynne (Sharon Acker), and his partner, Reese (John Vernon). Walker regains consciousness, somehow gets off the Rock (in a feat better imagined than explained), and spends the rest of the film in search of one thing: the $93,000 due him from the robbery that went awry moments before Reese gunned him down.

In the hands of any number of competent American directors, the film-which was based on the novel The Hunter, by Richard Stark (aka Donald Westlake) – would have no doubt been a straightforward crime thriller; a by-the-numbers revenge tale. But Boorman, having made a mark in British television during the"Swinging London" era, with its ebullient precociousness, looked at America with a keen, off-kilter eye; with a sense that he could exploit the country's cold-as-concrete architecture, its hierarchical divisions of greed and responsibility, to create a parable with all of the genre codes intact, but with the means to crack those codes elusive. There are crooks, bosses, sex, doublecrosses, gunplay, shootouts and fistfights; crashed cars and tough talk; bad guys and good guys. All the genre conventions are there, but the connections between them are skewed. The story plays less like a hard-boiled crime drama and more like a fugue. Deeply layered and dreamlike, it confounds us with a story that keeps doubling back, that repeats some scenes, and stages others that feel like we've seen them before. Boorman himself said he wanted to create the impression that Walker was trapped in a revolving door. It's a game that even kids tire of, and by film's end, Walker, exhausted by the Byzantine landscape of traps and dead-ends, sits down and says ÔI want my money' like a child who wants to go home.

Boorman, with the solid support of Lee Marvin, (who agreed to work with the director without having seen his previous work) created what is now regarded as one of the best films of the '60s. A masterpiece of any genre, Point Blank's non-linear narrative presents a must-see textbook for any moviemaker inclined to time-trip us with storytelling gimmicks. The druggy set-pieces of Darrin Aronofsky's Requiem For

A Dream; the overlapping chapters in Doug Limon's Go; the jigsaw of Mike Figgis's Loss of Sexual Innocence; the fractured chronology of Allison Maclean's Jesus' Son; even the

alt-linear bravado of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction owe a debt to Point Blank. Christopher Nolan's Memento, which is told in reverse order, is influenced by Point Blank without even being aware of it.

They are speaking the same language as Boorman, which was expressed to him by Resnais and Godard, and by directors from as far back as D.W. Griffith.

But what is sometimes missing from

the narrative antics of these younger moviemakers is the psychological through-line that Boorman was careful to maintain. Walker begins and ends the movie in the shadows of a cell on Alcatraz, having witnessed the same robbery twice, and having traversed the labyrinth of the plot while still coming up empty-handed and confused. There is the suggestion that the entire movie is a dying man's dream. Indeed, the early shot of Walker pushing off from the rocks of Alcatraz into the turbulent waters of the bay, and then – in the very next edit – showing up on a tourist cruise, dry and dressed, isn't explained. How did he escape from the island from which no prisoner ever escaped?

Marvin's characterization of Walker provides few clues beyond his primitive quest. A man this machine-like, this driven, perhaps could survive a bullet and then swim to freedom. Sheer force of will could keep him afloat. But Walker is not a man to talk about the past, so the exact"how" of his return is left unclear.

Boorman's concerns, and his brilliantly constructed tangle of motive, design, and action, are less expository then they are expressive. He was an Englishman confronting the banal landscapes of urban America – in this case, Los Angeles, the sunny antithesis to the his drizzly homeland. The script was written to be filmed in San Francisco, but Boorman insisted on shooting in L.A.. In the car lots, skyscrapers, apartments, and concrete canals he found his own asphalt jungle, owned and operated by an unidentified mafia, an impenetrable vault where crime is conducted like a legitimate business. Walker is a man in the wilderness, and the first of many Boorman heroes to find himself bewildered by a changing world. From the doomed canoeists in Deliverance to Merlin in Excalibur to the engineer searching for his son in The Emerald Forest to the doctor in Beyond Rangoon, his protagonists often find themselves trying to apply the rules they do understand to a universe they don't. This is why many of his films have the aura of fantasy about them, an uneasy (and sometimes unsuccessful) confluence of the blunt and the metaphysical.

With Point Blank, as with any puzzle, you get the sense that if any piece were removed, the whole would be incomplete. This is what sets it apart from the gimmickry of its imitators. There is a density to the film, and I must admit that after watching it a dozen or so times, I'm still not sure I get all of it. The film is hard-headed, reluctant to reveal its motivations. But this stubborness is refreshing. Point Blank is not some self-indulgent tease, but a study of power, manipulation, and helplessness, grounded by an integrity of purpose that is too often missing from the frantic genre rip-offs of today.

Tarantino pays homage to Lee Marvin (and by association, Boorman) in Reservoir Dogs when Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) pays Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) the ultimate compliment:"I bet you're a big Lee Marvin fan, aren't you?" Dogs is still, for my money, anyway, Tarantino's best film, since it is one of the last crime thrillers to adhere to the criminal's code of professional conduct: you do a job well, no one gets hurt, you get paid. That professionalism goes to hell when someone rats out the crew, and Blonde starts shooting innocent bystanders. In Point Blank, the code breaks down immediately: Reese shoots a mob delivery man, Walker is double-crossed, his wife cheats on him, the money is missing, and the only man who can pay him back is no man at all, but a mob, a mob run like an organization, an organization that looks like a corporation.

The final twist in Point Blank leaves Walker dazed and impotent. He retreats into the shadows of an Alcatraz cell, a man whose prosaic code of honor is outmoded in a world of corporate backstabbing. Boorman's ultimate stroke of genius is to give us a character defined by all the recognizable tropes of the masculine screen hero and then throw him into an environment so abstract it emasculates him.

Boorman uses the same design in his other masterpiece, Deliverance, which leaves four weekend warriors raped, murdered, broken, and humiliated in an alien wilderness. In many of his films, Boorman meticulously crafts a vivid but recognizable landscape, then penetrates deep beneath it, rendering those first surface impressions meaningless. In too many of today's films, we only get the surface. Allegory is all but dead.

Watch Point Blank for the allegory, but also for the action. MM