As a coda to our wonderful visit with author Dwayne Epstein, I wanted to post a review of
LEE MARVIN: POINT BLANK that I wrote which has been published in
Noir City, the quarterly publication of the Film Noir Foundation.
LEE MARVIN: POINT BLANK Review
With a cast of thousands reminiscent of a Cecil B. De Mille epic or the current screen version of
Les Miserables, Lee Marvin's vast external landscape included continents, captains, and a coterie of the famous, the infamous, and the unsung heroes. Marvin's life was lived large on the world stage. His time on earth has been chronicled by news reporters, biographers, two wives, and now Dwayne Epstein courageously updates the Marvin file with his archive of interviews and research in Point Blank, published by Schaffner Press.
Marvin, born in 1924 in New York, was known as a hard-drinking, hard-living, but talented actor who often operated by his own personal ethic of right and wrong. In May of 1942, he wrote to his parents of his decision to join the Marines because "it is the best place for someone that wants to fight and raise hell," and raising hell was as natural to Marvin as wrestling a live marlin on a turbulent sea. Epstein reveals Marvin started his first mission at the age of 4 when he ran away from home and "had disappeared for two days before he was finally discovered hiding on a train bound for Baltimore," but the first of these escapades did not prove to be the last.
The quicksilver nature of life as a Marine formed Marvin's own opinion about his personal experiences after he received a Purple Heart after the Battle of Saipan. He concluded that "it's everyman for himself...The most useless word in the world is h-e-l-p." Through poignant letters Marvin wrote to his parents during World War II, Epstein captures the nature of Marvin's commitment to his Marine buddies, his feelings about his service to his country, and the nature of his own evolving response to the personal devastation that war can evince.
After the war, Lee suffered from nightmares and would be classified by today's standards as a sufferer of PTSD, but in 1946 after a year of peculiar decompression from his war experiences, he became a plumber's assistant in Woodstock, New York, and was so gratified by his experiences at solving problems for his clients in the plumbing business, he maintained his union card long after his cinematic rise to fame. But revealing archival material from Epstein's collection indicates it was at a party that included local Maverick Theatre members in Woodstock, New York, where Lee was recognized as perfect casting for a loudmouth Texan, and claimed that after his first cue on opening night that the acting bug grabbed him "just like that!" After years of self-doubt, night terrors from the war, and the daily struggle of earning a living, Marvin found his calling. Epstein's interviews with Marvin's friends and co-workers provide detailed comments and in-depth revelations about his early struggles and eventual success, and highlight the facts as well as unveil the fiction of some of Marvin's own tales of bravado and braggadocio. Readers also discover exactly how Marvin felt about Michelle Triola, who sued Marvin in the infamous "palimony" case of the early 1970s, which added a new litigation term to the prosecution of civil cases involving unmarried couples.
The maligning villain in
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the pragmatically brutish sergeant in
The Big Red One, the wayward gunslinger who just wanted to be someone's hero in
Cat Ballou, the wistful Ben Rumson in
Paint Your Wagon, and Walker, the iconic, romanticized fatalist of
Point Blank in 1967 Los Angeles are all characters drawn from Marvin's panoply of performances as Epstein explains Marvin's motivation while leading the reader through a maze of Marvin's personal experiences and hands-on involvement in pre-production for several of his films. Integral to the revelations are the author's myriad interviews with Marvin's family members, friends, and contemporaries in the film industry like Angie Dickinson that reveal much more about Marvin that was left unsaid by his first wife, Betty Marvin, in her wonderful autobiography,
Tales of a Hollywood Housewife, and his last wife Pamela Marvin's biography of her late husband,
Lee: A Romance, a quasi-love poem to Marvin's heroic nature. In
Point Blank, Epstein fills in the gaps and readers discover Marvin had a desperate need to creatively express his rage, and the momentum of his career helped him connect and reveal that rage through his onscreen characters.
Bullseye.
For more information about the Film Noir Foundation, follow the link:
http://www.filmnoirfoundation.org/home.html