In the film's best and most famous scene, Lee Marvin's forsaken criminal trudges purposefully through a white-walled corridor, the echoes of his leaden footsteps filling the empty chamber like gunshotsCLOP! CLOP! CLOP! The caroming reverberations seem to lull him into reflection, and as the camera suddenly cuts away from his impassive face, the following quickly edited images evoke the disorienting sensation of flitting back and forth through his memory. Some of these images, like the eternally recurring shot of him lying supine on a cell floor in Alcatraz, we've seen before; others curiously herald events yet to happen. As the camera jumps between mind fragments, his footsteps plaintively persist on the soundtrack, like a metronome keeping track of the cumulative effects of Marvin's regret, rage and guilt. Although this sequence only lasts several minutes, it is significant in how it carves out a first-person psychological perspective from which the film rarely wavers and it is provocative for suggesting that Marvin might just be imagining his bad ass quest for redemption as he lies dying an undignified death in a dirty, abandoned prison; what we may be watching are the confused, dying thoughts of one who is simultaneously regretful (that he hadn't gotten out of the crime game sooner), heartbroken (that his best friend and wife betrayed him for $93,000) and determined to recapture what's his (the money, his honor, his anachronistic moral code).
The rest of the film is also deeply unconventional: As Marvin makes his way through the ghosts of his pastincluding a deeply lyrical reunion with his wife and a hauntingly narrated (by her in distant, foggy undertones) stream-of-memory précis of their relationshipand he delves deeper into his mission, the world makes less sense. He has to negotiate with a shadowy corporation called "The Organization" that purportedly has his money; several bizarre deaths later, he is no closer to recompense and cripplingly unable to reconcile his direct moral universe of duty and accountability with the seriously corrupt bureaucracy he must contend with. The conclusions the film makes are profoundly anti-institutional: his perception is clearly the least cynical of the dialectic, and by film's end his mission seems almost benign, his revenge less an act of violence than in claiming a rightful bit of solace in death that The Organization won't allow him. This is one of the most innovative films of the '60sand clearly due to its overlapping, stream-of-consciousness narrative, one heavily inspired by the European vanguardpersuasively evincing a world where individual responsibility is dead (for once, a perspective on existentialism that sees the idea past simple notions of defeatist loneliness and despair) and the abstract, terrifyingly nondescript authority structure extends to God himself.
The rest of the film is also deeply unconventional: As Marvin makes his way through the ghosts of his pastincluding a deeply lyrical reunion with his wife and a hauntingly narrated (by her in distant, foggy undertones) stream-of-memory précis of their relationshipand he delves deeper into his mission, the world makes less sense. He has to negotiate with a shadowy corporation called "The Organization" that purportedly has his money; several bizarre deaths later, he is no closer to recompense and cripplingly unable to reconcile his direct moral universe of duty and accountability with the seriously corrupt bureaucracy he must contend with. The conclusions the film makes are profoundly anti-institutional: his perception is clearly the least cynical of the dialectic, and by film's end his mission seems almost benign, his revenge less an act of violence than in claiming a rightful bit of solace in death that The Organization won't allow him. This is one of the most innovative films of the '60sand clearly due to its overlapping, stream-of-consciousness narrative, one heavily inspired by the European vanguardpersuasively evincing a world where individual responsibility is dead (for once, a perspective on existentialism that sees the idea past simple notions of defeatist loneliness and despair) and the abstract, terrifyingly nondescript authority structure extends to God himself.