Point Blank

Music by Johnny Mandel

 

 

 

 

 

 

The police adventure Point Blank (1966) was one of the films that drew attention to the cinematic aesthetic of British director John Boorman.

In the search for style, the film assumes tha fantastic in a plot led by a character (Lee Marvin) that supposedly is "back from the dead" to collect the money taken from him. The novel The Hunt by Donald Westlake was the same that inspired The Payback years later. And styling is what also oriented Johnny Mandel´s soundtrack with his jazz from "another dimension" marked by dispersive winds and "pointillist" piano. The uncertainty and the mystery of tracks such as Opening or The Bathroom border on the ghostly, something quite unusual in the genre and in jazz soundtracks. Mandel employed procedures of serial composition and scale of 12 notes. More traditional (but also stylized) are the soul Mighty Good Times with "shouted" performance of Stu Gardner Trio (for the night club sequence). The ballads This Way to Heaven and I'll Slip Out of Something, are more traditionally jazzy and causes a curious opposition to the whole work. Next to Quincy Jones soundtracks of the same period, Point Blank with its sound and emotional dispersion, was one of the most daring and innovative works of the jazz music on film. Somehow it is equivalent in innovation, to what Mandel himself had done in I Want To Live eight years before. The edition of Film Score Monthly label also includes the music for The Outfit by Jerry Fielding.