A flashback lasting only a few seconds reminds us of an earlier scene in which Vernon begged Marvin's help in carrying out a heist and shouted at him, "Walker! Trust me!" The editing is so precise that in this - and in a dozen other scenes - a few seconds more or less would drain them of their impact. Marvin is holding a gun to his ex-pal's, Vernon's, face and the poor guy faints until Marvin slaps him awake, and then he begs Marvin to trust him. They are instrumental in letting us know what Marvin is thinking. The editing gives us a couple of brief flashbacks, but not just to evoke a mood. Not only that but it's WINDY on the fourteenth floor roof and the wind is whipping the sheet up into billows around Marvin, like some demonic object with its own malevolent life force, before he is finally able to unwrap himself and fling it away. ![]() But here, Marvin is still holding the sheet. A cat might have survived such a fall but a full-grown man would have splashed.) In an ordinary movie, we'd get a cut from the body hitting the street to Marvin staring down at it over the railing. Vernon begins to tumble over the edge, Marvin grabs for him but winds up holding only the sheet while Vernon plunges some dozen floors to the street below. Lee Marvin throws John Vernon out on the roof of his penthouse, wrapped only in a bed sheet. I'll give an example of what I mean here, too. Wardrobe, too, has fitted these performers out in ordinary suits and ties, and the women are always rather chic looking. The apartments these people live in look like ordinary arid gray middle-class bourgeois digs. The production designer gives us sterile urban vistas, featuring bland cement boxes and the Los Angeles River, without which no noir would be complete. So, although it is a genre film, it is nevertheless unique. ![]() There is betrayal, a false woman, suicide, multiple double crosses, revenge, an urban setting, and an ambiguous ending. It's a neo-noir film if there ever was one. At that, he strides wordlessly to the couch, plops down, turns on the TV and begins surfing the channels. At first he guards himself with his arms but then lowers them and stands silently and without any expression as she beats him, slaps him, and pounds his chest, finally slumping to the floor exhausted. ![]() Walker (Marvin) and his companion (Angie Dickenson) have an argument and she begins whacking him across the head with her purse. People break up the interactive script they've initiated and do something completely unpredictable. When I worked in a psychiatric hospital I noticed that one or two of the patients had a peculiar tendency to stand up, start walking purposefully across the ward, stop and look around, then begin walking just as purposefully in another direction, then sit down again.
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