Posted on 02/14/2026 2:45:18 PM PST by Twotone
Lee Marvin had a reputation for being a great interview, obliging the press who expected the ultimate movie tough guy with more than they expected. His agent, Meyer Mishkin, said that Marvin gave his best performances for the press, going so far as to play with a knife during interviews.
"Most people only wise up when they are down on the floor with the blood everywhere," was one such gem. In another he said that despite their brutality, he didn't think his films had a bad influence on the audience. "The Shirley Temple movies are more likely to do that; after listening to 'The Good Ship Lollipop' you just gotta go out and beat up somebody. Stands to reason."
He spoke like one of his profession's foremost authorities on violence: "When I do a scene I make it as rough as I can. Knock a man down with one round, then walk up on him and put three or four more in his face. Roll him over and put one in his back. Make it ugly... I say make it so brutal that a man thinks twice before he does something like that."
But as Dwayne Epstein recounts in Lee Marvin: Point Blank, his biography of the actor, Marvin was taken aback when he rewatched the film that gave his bio its title – probably his greatest role – near the end of his life.
"I saw Point Blank at a film festival a year or so ago and I was absolutely shocked," Marvin recalled. "I'd forgotten. It was a rough film. The prototype. You've seen it a thousand times since in other forms. That was a troubled time for me, too, in my own personal relationship, so I used an awful lot of that while making the picture..."
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
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One of my favorite movies. Great cast.
If Lee Marvin encountered a man in a dress, I wonder if he would have used the knife to complete the “transition.”
Then again, Lee Marvin had 3 daughters. Imagine if one of his daughters said “daddy, there is a man in a dress in my bathroom.”
My favorite Lee Marvin movie was Hell in the Pacific [=
https://youtube.com/shorts/-OpG51daGh8?si=D2YXiKwgHmPUdnvf
“Six dollars?”
Loved him as A#1 in Emperor of the North.
All I know is there was an amazing amount of wasted ammo in those old movies. Thousands of rounds fired and no one gets hit. Not even cars.
Don Westlake’s Parker series has inspired maybe a dozen movies that licensed his books for movie adaptations. But Westlake always insisted that any studio that used the Parker name also adapt the entire book series. As a result, none of the Parker movies so far has had a protagonist named Parker. The issue is probably that Parker isn’t a likeable character. The guy does robberies for personal enrichment, hurts people who get in the way and is kind of taciturn, a bit like Charles Bronson’s Paul Kersey character, but bent. So any studio that commits to two dozen Parker movies is taking a big risk for a franchise yet to prove its bankability.
Thanks for the reccomend!
Great actor, great Marine.
[All I know is there was an amazing amount of wasted ammo in those old movies. Thousands of rounds fired and no one gets hit. Not even cars.]
That was a really brutal film, Mel Gibson’s Payback was a kind of remake.
Who was more brutal, Marvin or Gibson, both were pretty menacing.
There is. great story behind how they got that horse to do that scene with its legs crossed.
Not only that but old west towns were full of horses but there was never a pile of horse poop, piss puddles, or flies. And no matter how long the men were out on the range, clothes were dirt free and pressed, faces were clean shaven, and nobody sweated. What an amazing time to be alive.
I liked him in Monte Walsh.
POINT BLANK. (1967) Saw it back then. Now got it on DVD. Brutal for it’s time before the movie industry in 1968 dumped the Hays Code and chose a joke of a ratings system (GMRX) to reign in “violence” on the screen. Instead it unleashed some of the most vile brutal bloody and sex films ever seen.
Some ever reshot scenes to add more blood, guts, most vile cursing, and lots of sex.
As an adult in 1969 I saw a Glen Ford movie HEAVEN WITH A GUN rated “G”. ids were in the audience. Posters still show the “G” on them.
Saw it not long go on the STARZ Westerns channel with added topless nude scenes that would have given it a heavy “R” rating in 1969.
Great flick…. Ernest Borgnine was excellent in that movie too…
Lee Marvin and Donna Reed appeared together in the 1952 movie Hangman’s Knot, where Marvin’s intense performance as a menacing Confederate soldier who tries to assault Reed reportedly terrified her so much that she avoided him off-set.
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