10 Gangster Movies That Mess With Your Brain

7. Point Blank (1967)

An adaptation of thriller The Hunter by Richard Stark (Donald E. Westlake, writing under a pseudonym), John Boorman€™'s strange, unbalanced revenge potboiler has long been regarded as one of the finest films of the sixties. The material was adapted once again in the West by Brian Helgeland in a much more straightforward film, Payback with Mel Gibson.

In Point Blank, Lee Marvin'€™s Walker is an armed robber betrayed and left for dead on the island of Alcatraz when his partner and his wife conspire against him, who returns for the money he was swindled out of. An American thriller with an artistic European sensibility, Point Blank is a harsh, fiercely idiosyncratic film at odds with its subject matter.

Walker is a practically superhuman protagonist, seemingly carved from granite, preferring to let his actions do the talking.

Really though, Point Blank is about memory and trauma, pain and loss: while the vengeance-fuelled plot shuttles forwards with increasingly brutal urgency, the sins of the past unravel behind Walker in disorienting fashion.

Given the almost dreamlike style of the film, the question has been asked for years: is Walker dead, killed by his betrayers on Alcatraz? Are these flashes of memory his life flashing before his eyes in his last moments as he fantasises revenge?