Film: Healing old wounds with acts of violence

When Lee Marvin played hard men he wasn't just acting, he was expressing his own brutalisation as a Marine in the Second World War, writes Nick Hasted

Lee Marvin stalks down the corridor in an anonymous suit, heels clacking on the cold floor. A woman sits quietly in her apartment. A second later, Marvin crashes in, grabs the girl, points a gun, head veering one way, body the other. Then he flings her away and enters the bedroom, arm jerking with the force of bullets he is pounding into her empty bed. Then, the storm has passed. He looks distracted, as if something deeper than murder is gnawing at his mind.

Marvin orchestrated that scene in Point Blank (1967), looking one way as a signal that he would move the other, maximising the dynamic, the disorientation of his violence. He was so fast, the cameraman missed him twice. Three decades later, the scene still shocks. Marvin moves like a comic-book character, the angles of his body bursting from the frame.

But violence wasn't only a matter of the actor's craft. He served as a Marine in the Second World War - his platoon was almost wiped out in an ambush on Saipan. Marvin, shot in the buttocks, saw his friends' bodies as he was carried away on a stretcher. On a hospital ship offshore, he was offered ice cream and comfort. He wrote later: "I was a coward! and cried."

He was underrated in his lifetime - he died in 1987 - but he and his art, and the hard experience it was rooted in, will be difficult to miss in the next few weeks. Apart from Point Blank's re-release, a biography, Lee, by his widow Pamela, is out in paperback, and a documentary by John Boorman, his director in Point Blank and Hell in the Pacific, is on at the National Film Theatre.

Taken together, they reveal a complex, contradictory talent; a man whose experience of war left him wishing to act in parts revealing "the glory of man", but who did so in a cinema of violence, the effects of which are still felt in films today.

The defining moment of Marvin's life was the instant the bullet hit him. "When I made Point Blank, it was to some extent a documentary about him," Boorman remembers. "I was intrigued that he went off at 17, fought in that war and was brutalised by it, shot and almost killed. His platoon was wiped out, and he had guilt about surviving, but he came back. That was what Point Blank was. It was about a man who's shot, comes back, and is searching for his soul. Lee did that every day."

In Point Blank, Marvin's character may actually be dead, dreaming his vengeance. Boorman feels that something died in Marvin on Saipan, and Pamela Marvin agrees. "I'm sure that part of Lee went, when that bullet went through his body," she says. "There was a part you couldn't touch that was back on the beach."

Early in his acting career, Marvin defined the brutality beneath the surface of post-war America, making his name as the psychopathic thorn in the side of his country's heroes: Marlon Brando's dark side in The Wild One (1953), or the small-town thug assaulting Spencer Tracy in Bad Day at Black Rock (1954).

But the consistency of those roles wasn't conscious. It was only in 1961, in People Need People, that Marvin became aware of the wounds he was opening. The role called for him to be tormented by war dreams. "The film gave me a chance to break through the wall of acting," he recalled. "Because I was in the Marine Corps, I did have all those dreams. Here was a chance to act out my fright, my cowardice, my very weaknesses. Ever since then I have been free. Because I know that I am acting out me."

The violence in Marvin's best work afterwards carried an awful authenticity, a conscious search for the truths war had lodged in his soul. First, there were the war films themselves. A year after Point Blank came Hell in the Pacific (1968) with Boorman. Marvin played a soldier stranded on one of the islands he had fought on himself, and returning touched on his deepest wounds. In a scene near the end, Marvin starts to talk about returning to America, then breaks off. "What's the use," he says to himself. "All my crew are dead." It was a digging for truth he extended to all his war films, even The Dirty Dozen.

There was another, still darker strand that more clearly defined Marvin's work. It was the fulfilment of his early roles as an implacable fury coursed through peacetime America. It began with the unstoppable gunman in The Killers (1964). By the end of the film, he's an angel of death, swerving, dribbling blood; the picture of the dead man walking he sometimes felt himself to be. Point Blank was the most perfect expression of that cold violence, but it was pushed still further in Prime Cut (1972), his enforcer pursuing dope-peddler Gene Hackman into the mouth of a meat-grinder.

Angie Dickinson, his co-star in Point Blank and The Killers, recalls "his concentration, his deliberate style, no hidden meanings, go for the throat. He was clean of movement and of character. He was so clearly defined." Boorman recalls: "The most chilling thing about Lee's violence was the coldness, the precision, and its extraordinary speed, that's what he liked, almost like an executioner. I was terrified of him in some ways."

It is a coolness that still exerts a hold. Tarantino told me of his deep admiration for Marvin when Reservoir Dogs was released; its characters are Marvin fans. It's a legacy he might not have been proud of, but every time you see a cool killer shoot, the ghost of Marvin in Point Blank helps pull the trigger.

"It's an odd thing, isn't it, the relationship between the cinema and reality," Boorman says. "I was reading the other day about the Western hero, the lone hero who comes in and is implacable and emotionless. This was the Western guy trying to assume a quality that Indians had. Lee was the Indian. These other guys are just cowboys, trying to work out how he did it."

But there are aspects of Marvin that can never be pinned down. His widow's book reveals a man whose inner life ran more deeply and mysteriously than even she could follow. "His mind was so open to mythology of any type," she remembers, "going on wonderful flights all the time, exploring everything -- Aboriginal dream-times, Jungian archetypes, Zen Buddhism. Lee meditated, in a way. When he thought about something, he'd think about it with such depth. He had a mythical mind."

That comes out in his acting, just as much as the war. When they are not committing violence, his characters have a quiet curiosity. You can see it in his odder roles, like the king hobo in Robert Aldrich's The Emperor of the North (1973), or the tragic cowboy in Monte Walsh (1970). Roles he pursued in his last decade, such as John Irving's The Cider House Rules, also show a contemplative nature.

"I felt, making this documentary," says John Boorman, "that I was penetrating the mystery of the man, and finally I felt that wasn't the right thing to do. It distorts him. There's something essential I didn't get to. I saw him as a hero. He had a scar from his wound, the wound that doesn't heal. Like Lancelot's." He had a mind that understood archetypes. But did he see himself as one? "I don't know," says Pamela Marvin. "But he was. And he was a hero. I had a fear of flying, but I'd get on any plane with Lee. I knew it couldn't go down with him on it."

'Point Blank' is re-released 19 June; 'Lee' is published in paperback, by Faber on 22 June, price pounds 9.99. John Boorman's documentary, 'Lee Marvin: American Artist' screens as part of the Marvin season, 'Wandering Star' , on 19 June at the NFT