Marvin had worked with many of the actors previously, and got along well with both the cast and director. Aldrich however, was not always in the best of moods during the shoot since he was not allowed to use his regular crew. “Well, the English government wouldn’t allow American crews to work in England,” stated Joe Biroc, Aldrich’s veteran cinematographer who was replaced by England’s Edward Scaife. “Aldrich hated it. They were very, very slow. Bob didn’t work that way. He was used to doing a lot of shots in a day when they only did two or three. He was glad to get out of there.”
It being England, the weather did not always cooperate for Aldrich either, and Marvin could be found at the nearest pub on more than one rained-out occasion. His partner in crime this time was former Chicago detective Bob Phillips, who had a small role in the film as Corporal Morgan. The two ex-Marines frequented many of the local watering holes, and Phillips recalled one particular night in which disaster was barely averted. They had been drinking and winning at darts all night, angering the locals, but earning the affection of the bartender, a sixty-year-old, six-foot tall, brunette beehive-wig wearing Lee Marvin fan whom Phillips had dubbed “Black Helen.”
When a patron started removing the darts from the board while Marvin was still playing, one landed in the man’s coat between his shoulder blades. A voice then immediately rang out, “The Yank stabbed me mate!” The owner of the voice was taller than Marvin and huskier than Phillips, and proceeded to advance on the duo. “Lee swings with a John Wayne roundhouse right. Lee missed him by three feet. Not that the guy ducked or anything. Lee sailed over right behind him. I went in and I hit that son-of-a-bitch right, and he went down and out. Lee stands up, and he looks down at the guy. ‘Anybody else? Who’s next?’ Honest to god, in his best passionate style. Well, here comes about five or six of them. Boy, out of nowhere, with her beehive, is ‘Black Helen.’ Nobody’s going to punch out Lee. She saved our ass. I grabbed Lee and I said, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ He said, ‘What about our drinks?’ He’s worried about the drinks!” Thanks to Helen, they were able to beat a hasty retreat, and make it back to their hotel unscathed.
Marvin and Phillips appeared on the set each day ready to work despite such adventures the night before. Phillips also bonded with Marvin through their mutual war experiences and their schoolboy antics. “Bob Aldrich used to always say ‘Zabba, zabba, zabba,’ about a scene,” recalled Phillips. “Then he’d shoot it and say, ‘That’s a thing of beauty. Print it. Next shot.’ We’d imitate him when he wasn’t on the set. Lee and I would talk, ‘Zabba, zabba.’ One of those kids playing one of the Dozen would walk up, and we’d say, ‘We’re running lines.’ We’d always catch somebody with that.”
They also took to playfully calling Charles Bronson “Charlie Sunshine,” due to his often dour disposition. Years later, Marvin recalled about his frequent costar, “He wants to intimidate you, but there’s a little gleam way back behind the eyes, if you can see it. We were sitting in London once in a very posh club, wearing black suits, talking to a girl. Charlie says, ‘Yeah, sweetheart, it’s tough lying on your side in a coal mine.’ I said, ‘Jesus, Charlie. You ain’t been in a coal mine in thirty years. You drive around in a Rolls Royce…’”
Lisa Ryan, daughter of actor Robert Ryan, remembers her father would often laugh to himself and mutter, “What a character,” whenever Marvin’s name was mentioned. She discovered what he meant when visiting the London set one morning: “I was just standing around, and then Lee Marvin just sort of walked over to me and was sort of leaning over me. He seemed drunk, and I knew who he was. I was just sort of like, ‘Ooo, Lee Marvin!’ He was like, ‘Oh, what are you doing here?’ I mainly remember that he was kind of listing toward me. I wasn’t upset or anything. I thought it was really cool that I was standing there, talking to Lee Marvin. The next thing I remember is my dad came marching over and said, ‘Lee! That’s my daughter!’ I remember, he literally jumped backwards. I mean it really was like he got zapped with a cattle prod or something. He just jumped backwards and kind of stumbled away. That was the end of it. I don’t recall anything unpleasant. I think it was funny. I think maybe my dad thought it was funny, too.”
Costar Clint Walker remembers the experience of working with Marvin as a pleasant one, stating: “Lee’s a pro. Sometimes there’s a problem that’ll pop up that you simply don’t anticipate. Maybe the gate on the compound fence swings the wrong way, so you got to change a scene a little bit, or something. Other than that, like I say, Lee always knew his lines. I think there were a few times he may have suggested something to Bob Aldrich. I think for the most part, Bob went along with it. Don’t forget, Lee had a military background. He was right at home with what he was doing… I think everybody had a great deal of respect for Lee. Usually what he did or said made sense. I can’t even remember any problems or friction or any real difference of opinion… I think everybody got along quite well.”
Walker’s major scene in the film had Marvin’s character taunting him to lose his temper and stab Reisman with a knife. Walker recalls: “I had cut my finger the night before fixing a chicken for my supper. I had to go to the hospital. I think it took about five stitches in my right thumb.” As Aldrich explained to Walker how the scene would work, “He grabbed my thumb instead of my hand. He started leading me around by it and Lee starts tapping Bob on the shoulder and saying, ‘Um, Bob…’ Bob kept on going and he said, [louder] ‘Bob!’ He said it a third time, and Bob stopped and said, ‘What do you want, Lee?’ Lee says, ‘Let go of Clint’s thumb.’ Bob looked and said, ‘Why?’ Lee said, ‘Because he cut it last night and he had five stitches taken in it.’ Bob said, ‘Oh!,’ let go, and then started laughing. That was the beginning of the scene. So as you can see, Lee certainly had a consideration for his fellow man.”
Production finally drew to an end, but not before Marvin was approached on set by an enthusiastic young British filmmaker by the name of John Boorman, interested in making a film with his favorite American actor. Boorman discussed his idea for the film Point Blank with Marvin and found a receptive audience. They maintained contact with each other after Marvin returned home to southern California and worked out the details.
Marvin, in the meantime, hosted and narrated a TV documentary that utilized rare color footage of the Marines in WWII, titled “Our Time in Hell.” After it aired, Democratic California Representative James C. Cameron paid tribute to Marvin as part of the Congressional record, “As a patriotic American who is donating his entire fee for this narration to the Marine Corps Civic Action Fund, which is currently being used to rehabilitate civilian victims of Vietcong attacks.”
By 1967, Lee Marvin was soaring high in the rarified air of film stardom. Since he never had done things in the usual way in his career, being in the driver’s seat proved no different. According to Boorman, Marvin dispensed with the usual protocol and set up a meeting himself with him, that also included several producers, the head of MGM, and Meyer Mishkin to work out the details of Point Blank. The way Boorman recalled the meeting was that, “Marvin asked: ‘I have script approval?’ They agreed. ‘I have cast approval?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Approval of technicians?’ ‘Yes.’ For the first time in his career, he had assumed the heady powers of superstar. Rising to leave, he lobbed the grenade in their midst. ‘I defer all these approvals to John.’” Marvin’s characteristic gesture allowed Boorman to state, “Making my first picture in Hollywood, I was fortunate enough to have the gift of freedom. And he backed me all the way with a belief and loyalty that was inspiring.”
Based on the 1962 novel The Hunter by Donald E. Westlake (writing under the pen name Richard Stark), Point Blank is a modern noir thriller in which Marvin’s character, Walker, is double-crossed by his wife and best friend, and then left for dead before the opening credits. What follows is a highly stylized tale of Walker’s systematic attempts to get back the money that is owed him as he battles his way through the hierarchy of the Los Angeles crime syndicate. The only help he gets
is from his ex-wife’s sister, played by Angie Dickinson, and Keenan Wynn as a mysterious stranger known only as Yost.
Dickinson noted a distinct contrast from her previous outings with Marvin. “The Killers had a different situation already,” she stated. “It was not a friendly atmosphere because of all of our grief [over JFK] so you can’t really judge anything accurately… It [Point Blank] was concentrated. They were constantly working on the script, he and Boorman. I don’t want to say it was strained, but it was constantly challenging. So, between Boorman’s great ideas and of course the genius of Lee Marvin, I wasn’t privy to what they were struggling about.”
The challenge was to create a unique vision of noir, a sort of art-house action film. According to Boorman, Marvin rose to the challenge: “He was endlessly inventive, constantly devising ways to externalize what we wanted to express. He taught me how actors must relate to other actors, objects, settings, compositions, movements. He has a dynamic relationship with the camera, a knowledge of its capacity to penetrate scenes and find their truth.”
The axiom of art imitating life was certainly borne out during the filming of Point Blank. Several of the scenes in the film seemed drawn from Marvin’s personal experiences such as Walker’s wife’s suicide, which mirrored Michele Triola’s attempt to take her own life. The film’s opening scene, when John Vernon’s character of Mal desperately entreats the drunken Walker to help him out of a financial jam, also parallels a similar real-life experience for Marvin. At the Malibu bar known as The Raft, bartender Ralph O’Hara struck up a friendship with the actor and witnessed the event himself. “Lee was having one of these anxiety attacks from being in the Marines, and he got to drinking and… he got juiced. This guy, [a friend from San Francisco] puts him there in the bar. Lee was laying there on the ground, and this guy was saying, ‘You got to loan me the money!’ So, Lee give[s] him a check for $9,000 and he [the guy] never paid him back.”
O’Hara observed something else during the making of the film in the chemistry between Marvin and Dickinson. “He felt the world of her. He really liked her, and I’m sure she did the same. On Point Blank, when we were down at The Raft, she couldn’t take her eyes off him. There’s something about people that you could see, that no matter how you’re trying to hit on that woman yourself, or someone else’s, they’re not even listening to what you have to say…”
Asked about this, Dickinson acknowledged, “Well, I’m very flattered by that. On Point Blank we did have an eye thing… Oh, it was wonderful! But as I say, Lee never made any kind of move of any kind; emotional, physical, or anything towards me that would make me think he was ever interested in me… I would say if you asked me, ‘Do you think Lee digs you?’ I would probably have said at the time, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ If he did, I wasn’t aware… My guess would be that from him, a look would be comparable to a pass from somebody else. Again, so hard to read Lee.” Had he been less shy in her presence, who can say where it may have gone.
Another bizarre moment when events in the film and his own life seemed to intersect, and which further resonated for the character he was portraying, occurred when Carroll O’Connor came to shoot his scene. Unbeknownst to Marvin, O’Connor and his wife Nancy had become good friends with Lee’s estranged wife. “So, Carroll said to Lee during the film, that he was looking for a house to buy,” recalled Betty. “Lee said, ‘I think my house is for sale. You should see it. It’s a wonderful house.’ Carroll said, ‘I know your house very well.’ Lee said, ‘You do?’ And he said, ‘Betty and I are good friends.’ He said, ‘You are?’ Carroll said, ‘Absolutely.’ That seemed to be the end of their communication.” Just as Walker’s life had seemingly gone on without him, so too had Lee Marvin’s.
A few years before his death, Marvin ruminated on these parallels between art and reality: “I saw Point Blank at a film festival a year or so ago and I was absolutely shocked. I’d forgotten. It was a rough film. The prototype. You’ve seen it a thousand times since in other forms. That was a troubled time for me, too, in my own personal relationship, so I used an awful lot of that while making the picture, even the suicide of my wife.”
As he had succeeded in doing with 1965’s dual release of Ship Of Fools and Cat Ballou, film audiences of 1967 also got a double shot of Lee Marvin with the releases of The Dirty Dozen and Point Blank coming just two months apart. The box-office returns for The Dirty Dozen surpassed even the most generous estimates. It became the highest grossing film of the year, the sixth highest in MGM’s history, and made Marvin the number one male film star in America. The violent WWII-era action film remains one of the most popular of its kind, spawning a cottage industry of both sequels and thinly veiled rip-offs. Even though the demographic of film audiences of the day was considerably younger than Marvin, the film struck a chord with the youth market in its depiction of social outcasts. Marvin’s character, Reisman, brashly conflicting with the authoritative establishment, reflected the younger generation’s growing disenchantment with the U.S. military.
It is worth noting that John Wayne understandably had turned down the film when he was offered Marvin’s role. Neither Wayne, nor his loyal fans could possibly imagine seeing The Duke do some of the things Reisman and his men perpetrate by the climax of the film. Wayne could be violent, but not to the extent as Lee Marvin, who sought to give his fans their “vicaries” by incinerating countless Nazis locked in a bomb shelter. Aldrich reportedly fought the studio to keep the scene in the film, which may have cost the director a possible Oscar nomination. But, regardless, the film did finally receive four nominations, including one for John Cassavetes as Best Supporting Actor.
The movie Bonnie & Clyde, released later the same year, proved to be even more violent, and resulted in the early retirement of New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther, who had refused to write a retraction of his review condemning the graphic gangster film. Producer and star Warren Beatty loved the free publicity, which would not have been possible without The Dirty Dozen having paved the way first. Crowther usually liked Marvin’s films, often comparing him to Bogart, but, though he condemned Dozen’s ultra-violence, his critique had little effect on its box office appeal. When Bonnie & Clyde followed the next month, the stage was set for Crowther’s ire to peak, which precipitated the end of his career with The Times.
The release of Point Blank took another path to success. Largely overlooked at first, it has since become one of the most influential cult films ever made. This is due in part to the enigmatic, surreal style that was just slightly ahead of its time, as well as Marvin’s haunting portrayal of the emotionally hollow, psychopathic Walker whose single-mindedness of purpose and almost robotic, killing-machine persona, set against the alienating landscape of modern Los Angeles, has inspired many revenge-themed films ever since. The movie itself has also been remade several times, most recently with Mel Gibson in 1999’s Payback. That film’s ad line was “Get ready to cheer for the bad guy!” Lee Marvin fans had clearly learned to do that a long time before.
A remake was surely something the actor had in mind when he called Betty into the bedroom during one of their several reconciliations. After countless drunken mishaps, car accidents (Marvin’s license had been revoked for a good part of the year), infidelities, and screaming matches, Betty recalled, “We sit down in the master bedroom. He’s there and I’m here. I said, ‘What is it, Lee?’ He said, ‘Well Betty, this is nothing personal, but I don’t want to be married anymore.’ Is that a great line? Nothing personal. I said, ‘I wish you would have told me this four children ago.’”
CHAPTER 11
“I Ain’t Spittin’ on My Whole Life”
AMERICAN FILMS of the late 60s and early 70s emphasized themes of sexuality, violence and realism more intensely than ever before. Young filmmakers and stars of this new Hollywood were clearly rebelling against the way films had been made previously, and it became a struggle for some postwar male stars to find projects worthy of their talent. The middle-aged Lee Marv
in was luckier than many of his contemporaries, making some of his best films during this period. At the time they were cast aside by “The New Hollywood” and youth-oriented audience, but in recent years technology has allowed these films to be rediscovered by a whole new generation of filmgoers.
Following his divorce from Betty in January of 1967, the actor’s attempt to simplify his personal life with bachelorhood was complicated by the presence of Michele Triola. He often vacillated between entreaties to his ex-wife, truces with Triola, and occasionally taking advantage of his newfound celebrity in ways his previous status as a feature player never could. While filming The Dirty Dozen in 1966, for example, he invited both his soon-to-be-ex-wife and his live-in girlfriend to London, but spent most of his time hanging out with his costars.
Actor and costar Bob Phillips recalled another aspect of Marvin’s use of his celebrity power: “A female reporter from New York came to the London set to interview Marvin. She was over six feet tall, and asked embarrassing questions about his marriage. Marvin told me, ‘Watch me get her.’ Later that night, I come to meet Marvin in his limo. When I opened the door, the reporter was on her knees blowing Marvin who just had an ‘I-told-you-so’ smile on his face.”
Lee Marvin: Point Blank Page 19