for a Life Magazine exclusive against the backdrop of the prison. Acker was accidentally hurt by the blanks that Vernon used to shoot at Marvin early in the film. Director Boorman chose locations that were "stark". For example, the airplane terminal walkway down which Marvin walked originally had flower pots lining the walls. Boorman had the pots taken out to "make it all bare". After Boorman showed the finished cut to executives, they were "very perplexed and mumbling about reshoots". Margaret Booth, a supervising editor working for the studio, told Boorman as the execs filed out, "You touch one frame of this film over my dead body!" Reception Box office The film earned $9 million during its initial release. Critical In her 1967 New Yorker review of Bonnie and Clyde, Pauline Kael wrote: "A brutal new melodrama is called Point Blank, and it is." Kael later called the film "intermittently dazzling". Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and said, "as suspense thrillers go, Point Blank is pretty good." Leonard Maltin gave the film three and a half stars: "Taut thriller, ignored in 1967, but now regarded as a top film of the decade." The New York Times found it a "spectacularly stylized and vividly photographed film that hints at some of the complex organization and hideous humanity of the modern-day underworld" and that director Boorman had "done an amazing job of getting the look and smell of Los Angeles into the texture of his picture....But, holy smokes, what a candid and calculatedly sadistic film it is!....This is not a pretty picture for the youngsters--or, indeed, for anyone with indelicate taste." Slant reviewer Nick Schager notes in a 2003 review: "What makes Point Blank so extraordinary, however, is not its departures from genre conventions, but Boorman's virtuoso use of such unconventional avant-garde stylistics to saturate the proceedings with a classical noir mood of existential torpor and romanticized fatalism." The film has a 92% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 38 reviews. Themes Viewers and critics have often questioned whether or not the film is really a dream that Walker has after he is shot in the beginning. The film's Director John Boorman claims to not have an opinion on the matter. "What it is, is what you see", responded Boorman. While filmmaker Steven Soderbergh has described Point Blank as "memory film" for Marvin. Boorman believes the