Susan Holloway Movies

In this "B" grade film noir wannabe, the U.S. government releases David Fox (Richard Lynch) from prison on the condition that he help them trap a tax-shelter specialist working for the mob. Armed with $1,000,000 in hot money, Fox is chased all over Miami and back as he vacillates between fulfilling his obligation and finding the man who killed his brother. On the way, he unintentionally picks up Karen (Priscilla Barnes) via the unlikely method of stealing her landscaping truck, and she soon joins him as the adventure continues to the final showdown, back in Miami. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi

Based on Donald E. Westlake's novel The Hunter, John Boorman's gangster film hauntingly merges a generic revenge story with a European art cinema sensibility. In Alcatraz to divvy up the spoils from a robbery, thief Walker (Lee Marvin) is instead shot point blank by his double-crossing friend Mal Reese (John Vernon) and left to die while Reese takes off with Walker's wife Lynne (Sharon Acker) and his $93,000. Resurrected, the stone-faced Walker returns to Los Angeles a couple of years later to seek revenge on Mal with the help of the enigmatic Yost (Keenan Wynn) and Lynne's sister Chris (Angie Dickinson). Wanting little but his cash, Walker implacably penetrates Mal's lair and the hierarchy of the shady "Organization," registering no emotion about the string of murders left in his wake, as his thoughts repeatedly return to the past that brought him there. In his first American feature, Boorman transforms a stripped-down revenge plot into a surreal meditation on the gangster's spiritual demise, using flashbacks and startling shifts in setting to interweave Walker's fractured memories with his extraordinarily photographed odyssey through L.A. Marvin's chillingly stoic presence further hints at the ambiguities in Chris's observation that Walker "died at Alcatraz, all right." Brutal in the violence that it shows and suggests, Point Blank opened in the U.S. in the same period as Bonnie and Clyde, becoming one more testament to the genre-bending and ground-breaking possibilities of the nascent Hollywood New Wave. Although Point Blank was mostly overlooked in 1967, Boorman's visual adventurousness, and Marvin's amoral and apathetic antihero, have since made Point Blank seem one of the key films of the mid-late '60s, a precursor to revisionist experimentations from Martin Scorsese to Quentin Tarantino. It was remade as the 1999 Mel Gibson vehicle Payback. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi

Narrative takes a back seat to music in this loose remake of Girl Crazy, as Harve Presnell plays a footloose young millionaire who meets perky Connie Francis and hatches a scheme to save her father's failing Nevada ranch by turning it into a resort for people waiting out their quickie Las Vegas divorces. This was an early musical vehicle for then-Broadway star Presnell, who would gain notoriety with film fans years later as a character actor in Fargo, Patch Adams, and Saving Private Ryan. Besides, how often do you get to see a musical that features Louis Armstrong, Liberace, Herman's Hermits, and Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs? ~ Mark Deming, Rovi