But is Walker the good guy or the bad guy-and is he even alive, or have we been watching a ghost throughout the entire film? A reviewer in the Observer writes, “In Point Blank it’s because the single-mindedness of Walker’s quest for revenge and money is more recognizably human than the reptilian machinations around him.” Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) This film from Sergio Leone changed modern action cinema. Quintessential 1960s scowling movie tough-guy Lee Marvin stars as Walker, a man who winds up shot by a crime partner who’d been sleeping with his wife but manages to get released from prison and go on a quest to retrieve his stolen money and his honor. Point Blank (1967) In this debut film by John Boorman, it’s unclear whether protagonist Lee Marvin is living or dead. The movie was remade in 1991 by Martin Scorsese starring Robert De Niro as Max Cady and Nick Nolte as Sam Bowden and using Bernard Herrmann’s original score from the 1962 film.
Bowden, makes sexually predatory advances against their underage daughter, and stalks Sam at every turn, leading to a violent climax on a houseboat in Cape Fear, NC. Cady kills the Bowden family dog, terrifies Mrs. Robert Mitchum turns in a terrifying performance as Max Cady, a recently released ex-con who is set upon wrecking the life of Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck), the lawyer who put him behind bars.
A reviewer for the Criterion collection writes, “As for Stanwyck-by turns hard-boiled, tender, vengeful, and resigned to an essential loneliness-her character is the heart of a movie in which everyone else comes up sooner or later against the limits of their empathy.” Cape Fear (1962) Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) terrorizes the wife of the lawyer who put him behind bars.
Later on, she reinvents herself as a high-society woman named “Lady Eve” and successfully seduces Fonda’s character, only to mock him and reveal that she’s the same woman he rejected when he thought she came from the lower classes. This revenge comedy by famed director Preston Sturges is based on a short story called “Two Bad Hats.” Barbara Stanwyck stars as a woman of humble means who falls in love with an upper-class man (Henry Fonda), who rejects her because he doesn’t think she’s worthy of his social status. The Lady Eve (1941) Barbara Stanwyck shines as a woman who seeks revenge against a man who rejected her for being lower-class. What follows are some of the greatest revenge films from the 1940s to the present. If filmmakers actually cared about such questions, they’d find more success as philosophers or psychologists, because the fact is that audiences LOVE revenge movies.įrom the Wild West to the present, American mythology has seen the outlaw vigilante justice-seeker as heroic, because he or she operates under “natural law” rather than manmade law, and sometimes manmade law stands in the way of taking justice into your own hands. If you really think about it, “justice” is really a nice word for “revenge.” Or, viewed from another angle, “revenge” is just an illegal form of “justice.”Įven though we’re taught from childhood that “two wrongs don’t make a right,” why is it that audiences cheer when a victim strikes back ten times as hard against their attacker? Why is it considered a good thing when someone avenges a murder by torturing the killer and then murdering them? Let’s survey all the revenge movies from Hollywood.
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