Point Blank/The Hunter

The Same Story, Told Three Ways

Point Blank is a favorite crime film of mine, but I didn’t know anything about the book, The Hunter, or the graphic novel of the same name until recently. I was catsitting for my neighbors, and read the book over the course of a week. While looking for more in the series at my library, I noticed they had the graphic novel, so I checked that out and read it. I enjoyed all three versions, which is unusual for adaptations for me. So I wanted to run down all three versions. But first, the basics.

cat tax!

Richard Stark, the author of the book, was a pseudonym of Donald Westlake. Westlake used a lot of fake names in his career. Stark wrote the “Parker” books—the protagonist of The Hunter. He had another name, Alan Marshall, under which he wrote soft-core porn books (there used to be mass market porn novels, written for men, that were sold next to the dirty magazines at newsstands). It was common for prolific writers at the time to have a name for each genre: a horror name, a science fiction name, a Western name, etc. And sometimes the publishers didn’t want to glut the market with a particular writer’s books, so that writer became two writers. I’m not sure exactly of Westlake’s intention, but he saved the Stark name for the meaner, bleaker writing of the Parker novels.

The Hunter is the first of over 20 Parker novels. It’s sparse and functional, but not like an IKEA bedroom; it’s more like a stock car that’s built to move with no unnecessary weight. Each chapter roars past, and the next one does the same. I can’t think of a paragraph or a line of dialogue to cut.

But it’s also brutal. People get beaten for information, they accidentally die, they get purposefully murdered, and they commit suicide. It’s an amoral buffet of crime and mayhem. Maybe you like that, but if you don’t, don’t go near it. In print, in Parker’s head, I love the way the language flows. But I wouldn’t enjoy a shot-for-shot adaptation in a film—it would be too mean.

Without spoilers, I’ll just say Parker got burned on a previous job and is on a quest to get his fair share of the money. Every chapter presents an obstacle for Parker, which he overcomes with either threats or violence, and gives him a clue for the next part of his journey. He rarely seems to enjoy anything, nor does he feel the opposite—he stalks through the novel like a golem created by his own need for revenge. Parker has all the likeability of the Terminator—I mean this in two ways: there is a complete lack of humanity and therefore nothing to like, and also that the more I saw of him, the more I wanted to know about him, and I liked him as he achieved every goal he created. Parker’s an awful human but goddamn, he’s an amazing protagonist. I just wanted to know what he was going to do next, and usually that was something worse than what he had done in the earlier chapter.

Lee Marvin stars as “Walker”¹ in Point Blank. It’s not made too much later than the book, but it’s decidedly marked by its time: it’s a psychedelic-influenced crime picture made in 1967. There are crazy flashbacks, weird camera angles, and odd edits. The color palette changes from the standard black and white of film noir to a colorful, sometimes too brightly lit sixties film. And it works. It’s such a different feel than the book while still retaining the spirit of The Hunter. I own a copy of this but usually end up watching it when I see it’s streaming on TCM.

In the film, Walker was likewise burned on a job and out to get his money. For this version, he’s after a very specific amount of money, which puts its own signature on this telling. It’s a series of obstacles, one after another, like the book. John Wick uses the same structure. I assume the screenwriter, director, or producer was a fan of Point Blank—somebody involved must have been influenced. The violence of Point Blank, however, is nowhere near contemporary levels. And it’s not as viscerally brutal as what was in the prose version, either. But it has such a great look and feel—do people still say “it’s a vibe” and did I use it correctly?

Richard Stark’s The Hunter, the graphic novel, was written and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke. Cooke worked on five Parker adaptations before his passing. The black-and-white artwork on its own lends well to the source material, but then there’s a lot of blue where in an old noir film there would be grays and shadow. But while Cooke included original text while he could, while reading this version I came to realize that I love Richard Stark’s language much more than his storytelling. I like the way he describes things, not what he describes. A lot of this is lost in the graphic novel, but it still has a decided charm.

I’d also like to give a shoutout to the audiobook version. I picked it up from the library, but I was already ruined, in a way, by having read the book and the graphic novel so recently. It sounded well recorded, and it’s a good length for an audiobook—IIRC it was around five hours. I think had I not already knew everything that was about to happen, I would have enjoyed it more.

There’s also a Mel Gibson film called Payback that’s based on the same book. I didn’t quite care for that one when it came out so I didn’t give it a rewatch, but if you really want to watch everything Parker, check it out.

A few other good adaptations:

• Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity and the movie.

• Nick Hornby’s Fever Pitch and the British adaptation

• Hubert Selby’s Requiem for a Dream and the movie

• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the Vincent Price audio recording

• The Kid Stays in the Picture audiobook (that was better than the book) and the documentary

• Fight Club the book and the movie, although they’ve both been tainted by the Edgelords.

1. This was because the studio bought the rights to just the one book, not every book in which Parker appears.