Novelist Richard Stark (aka Donald E. Westlake) was one of the great writers of blunt, single-minded hard-boiled crime fiction, so when John Boorman decided to adapt his most famous creation – the infamous “mean bastard” criminal, Parker (here called "Walker") – he followed suit and made one of the all-time great blunt-force neo-noirs. A huge part of that was his choice of lead actor Lee Marvin (THE GOD), whose tough mug and physically intimidating screen presence is still the closest anyone ever got to accurately realizing this brutal noir antihero on the screen, but Boorman also excelled at the borderline psychedelic stylistic flourishes and strange, hypnotic atmosphere in which he realizes the Parker character’s sense of momentum when you read his exploits. Where angrily climbing the capitalist ladder of his crime network to get his cruel, cold-blooded revenge is made to feel like an unstoppable force moving through a collection of dreamy flashbacks, fractured editing choices, bizarre light shows, and looming LA architecture; turning pulp paperback genre cliches into something deliriously subjective and expressionistic. Marvin's diegetic footsteps as he marches his way across town towards breaking into his suicidal ex-wives apartment become a montage metronome; the lights projected on his face after the jazzy strip club fight; the LA river turned into this lonely, vast, corpse-riddled western landscape vista; the use of mirrors/reflections throughout but especially that shattered mirror frame; those fluid rolling transitions during the love-making with Dickinson; those brief avant-garde déjà vu flashbacks during his quest to scare/brutalize increasingly higher middle-managers of this "organization"; the shadowy, labyrinthian use of Alcatraz in the finale, of course. Just unbelievable. Full discussion on episode 137 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.
