Point Blank, dir John Boorman, 1967; Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, dir Sam Peckinpah, 1974; Night Moves, dir Arthur Penn, 1975; Prime Cut, dir Michael Ritchie, 1972 ; Cutter's Way, dir Ivan Passer, 1981

Towards the end of the 1960s, Hollywood finally began to pick up on the cultural Zeitgeist -- flower power, the civil rights movement, Vietnam -- and directors with new visions dancing in their heads and artistic control over their product began to displace the macho, crudely populist robber-barons who'd hitherto run the studios. As Peter Biskind put it in his book about the period, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: ‘Everything old was bad, everything new was good. Nothing was sacred; everything was up for grabs. It was, in fact, a cultural revolution, American style.' In crime films, as four recent releases to DVD here and in the States amply demonstrate, this revolution turned outlaws, robbers and other outsiders into good guys struggling to free themselves from moral strictures imposed by authority figures, legitimized sexual liberation and violence against the establishment, elevated a new generation of grittily realistic actors to stardom, and prized ambiguity, style and downbeat endings above conventional, feel-good narrative arcs.

Biskind suggests that Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate heralded the New Hollywood revolution in 1967, but Point Blank, shot in the same year by British director John Boorman and now at last available on DVD, is arguably just as revolutionary in style, structure, and subject matter. Certainly, no other British director has made such an authentically American film. Boorman had arrived in Hollywood following the success of his first film, Catch Us If You Can, a vehicle for the Dave Clarke Five. As Boorman recounts in the excellent commentary track he shares with Steven Soderbergh (whose The Limey was heavily influenced by Point Blank), Lee Marvin gifted him the right to final cut, and he won script approval because the crucial meeting was interrupted by a phone call from David Lean. Heavily influenced by the French nouvelle vague, Boorman and screenwriters Alexander Jacobs and David and Rafe Newhouse took advantage of their unexpected freedom from studio interference to fillet a straightforward revenge story (taken from The Hunter, a novel by Donald E. Westlake, writing as Richard Stark), and by use of intricate crosscutting, flashbacks and ruthless pruning of cliches turn it into a mythic quest by Lee Marvin's relentless dark knight, Walker, for the money owed him by his treacherous former partner. In a famously ambiguous opening set on the prison island of Alcatraz, Walker is shot and left for dead by his partner, Mal Reese, who takes not only the loot they stole from the shadowy ‘Organization', but also Walker's wife. It's possible to read the film as a dream of revenge flickering in the mind of a dying man, and a schematic colour design, moving through neutral shades of grey to blood-red matched by unexplained costume changes by the principals, and a recurrent motif of bars that echoes the bars of the cell in which Walker was left for dead, adds to the dream-like atmosphere. Certainly, how the escape from Alcatraz is elided by intercutting shots of a badly wounded Walker staggering into the freezing water of San Francisco Bay with Walker hale and hearty on a tourist boat a year later, listening to a mysterious man telling him how to find Reese, now an important man in the Organization, while in the background a tour guide breezily explains the imposibility of escaping from the island. Walker travels to L.A. and confronts his wife, who promptly appears to commit suicide (a cutaway to the mystery man outside their house suggest otherwise), uses his sister-in-law, played by Angie Dickenson, to gain entry to Reese's penthouse, and pursues his money to the very top of the Organization, only to find that all along he has been manipulated by his shadowy advisor and that his revenge has turned into an empty gesture.

With his stony face and imposing physical presence, Lee Marvin turns in a famously taciturn and physical performance as Walker, an unstoppable, elemental force growling ‘I want my 93 grand' while brandishing a .38 (although unforgivingly brutal, he never actually kills anyone). The film is faithful to the noir convention of the hero's romantic fatalism (Boorman was one of the few directors to capture the hopeless yearning behind Marvin's wintry gaze) and isolation from ordinary society. Walker is a loner cast adrift in corporate America, where even criminals deal in cheques rather than hard cash; Carroll O'Connor's crime boss isn't angered by his demand for his cash but by the mess he's caused pursuing it, and has to stop and think before he can work out where to lay his hands on $93,000 in folding money. But Boorman's use of visual storytelling rather than expository dialogue, the sunlit colours of L.A. streetscapes instead of black and white shadows, and a non-linear, cut-up narrative refracted through the protagonist's mind, not only broke new ground in narrative construction but also completely recast conventional noir tropes. Warner's Region long-anticipated Region 1 DVD presents the film in the original Cinemascope aspect ratio of the original theatrical presentation, with excellent reproduction of the vibrant colours. Extras include a terrific two-handed commentary by Boorman and Soderbergh, and two vintage featurettes.

Two other Region 1 DVD releases highlight the New Hollywood era's love of moral ambiguity and unrestrained depiction of sex and violence. Like several other veteran directors, Sam Peckinpah found that the freedom of the late 1960s and the 1970s enabled him to commit some of his best work to celluloid, including The Wild Bunch, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Getaway. However, many critics at the time believed that he was wallowing in unpleasantly detailed violence, dubious morality, and repugnantly macho attitudes towards women: in short, he epitomized all that was bad about the New Hollywood, and few films of the era attracted as much disapproval as his Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia.

Shot in Mexico on a relatively low budget in 1974 after Peckinpah suffered studio interference and a disappointing reception for Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid, and critically reviled for its unflinching depiction of violence, including a notoriously ambiguous near-rape, a new DVD release reveals that the film has aged remarkably well. Making good use of authentically seedy locations, and anchored by fine performances by Warren Oates and Isela Vega, it's a bleak and unflinching story of the corrosive effects of the desire for revenge. When bar owner Bennie (Oates) hears from two smooth-talking hitmen that a land baron has offered a million dollar reward for the head of Alfredo Garcia, the man who impregnated his daughter, he seizes on the chance to make some easy money and change his life. Because his girlfriend, Elita (Vega), was once in love with Garcia, Bennie knows that he was killed in a car accident, and sets off towards the grave with Elita in tow. Although white-suited Bennie believes that he's a hero in the Humphrey Bogart mould, he's out of his depth from the very beginning. Elita, who in a painfully intense idyll agrees with much misgiving to go along with Bennie's quest, is a stronger and much more sympathetic character, and his adoption of the role of macho hero quickly makes things worse rather than better. When they're held up by a couple of bikers, Elita tells Bennie to stay cool -- ‘I've been here before. You don't know the way.' -- but before she can defuse the situation in a scene that's part seduction, part rape, Bennie manages to shoot and kill the bikers, inflating his opinion that he's the hero of the story and kicking off a relentless slide into unending violence. When Bennie and Elita reach the grave, Bennie is knocked unconscious by two thugs who have been following him. He wakes to find the head gone and Elita dead, manages to kill the thugs and retrieve the head, and sets off for the land baron's estate while being chased not only by Garcia's family, who want revenge for the desecration of their relative's grave, but also by the two hitmen, who want the head. Shot through with black comedy, especially as, in a parody of Hollywood buddy films, Bennie confides his petty ambitions to the rotting, severed head lolling in the passenger seat of his car, Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia is by turns a brisk and brilliantly shot action film and a bleak and surprisingly old-fashioned moral fable in which the promise of easy riches and the desire for revenge corrupts just about everyone. The MGM Region 1 DVD, like many of the former studio's DVD offerings, delivers an excellent print in the original aspect ratio. Apart from the original trailer, the only special feature is an informative, amusing and enthusiastic commentary track by a trio of Peckinpah scholars.

While Peckinpah was a veteran revitalized by the New Hollywood, Arthur Penn, after helming Bonnie and Clyde in 1967, was at the forefront of the first wave of New Hollywood directors. But less than ten years later, his star was on the wane again; like Robert Altman, he had moved too far ahead of contemporary taste by deconstructing genre tropes rather than playing up to audience expectations, and Night Moves (1975) did little box office business. A Chandleresque story in which (as in Altman's version of Chandler's The Long Goodbye) the hero's motivation becomes increasingly cryptic as he moves closes in on the heart of the mystery, and the moral distance between hero and villain more or less vanishes, it's frequently acclaimed as a key film of the 1970s, but it now feels more like a footnote, albeit an important and interesting one. Harry Mosey (Gene Hackman), a former professional American football player turned investigator in L.A., discovers that his wife is having an affair, and takes refuge from his marital problems by taking on what seems like a simple job as a favour to a stuntman friend, Joey Ziegler (Edward Binns). But when he travels to Florida to retrieve a runaway teenage girl, Delly (a coltish Melanie Griffith), he finds himself embroiled in an unsavory setup involving the girl's stepfather, Tom Iverson (John Crawford), and Iverson's attractive and flirtatious wife, Paula (Jennifer Warren). Harry is instantly attracted to Paula, shares some of the film's best lines with her, and welcomes her into his bed after a nightfishing boat trip turns up a plane wreck on the seabed with a corpse in the pilot's seat. He persuades the traumatized Delly to return to her mother in L.A., but shortly afterwards Delly dies in car driven by Ellman, and Harry finds out that Zeigler, Iverson, and one of Delly's stuntmen paramours were involved in a smuggling operation. He returns to Florida, learns that Iverson lied when he claimed to have notified the coastguard about the plane wreck, and persuades Paula to help him uncover the truth.

The film boasts a screenplay spiked with dozens of sharp one-liners, and Gene Hackman's terrific performance of a man who has lost confidence in himself. With his blunt physicality and battered features, Hackman is possibly the supreme example of New Hollywood's credo that authenticity was more important than looks. Elevated to stardom by his role as Popeye Doyle in The French Connection, he gave energetic performances even in also-rans like Prime Cut, and his portrayal of Harry Moseby is one of his best. Harry is the film's only innocent, sticking to his line of work more from integrity than commitment, believing that observation rather than confrontation is the key to success in his line of work (early on he triumphantly nails a philandering husband he's been shadowing), yet often unable to see what's going on around him as he stumbles ever deeper into a plot as complex as Chinatown's. When Paula admires a winning move he shows her in a replay of a classic chess game from the 1920s, he tells her, ‘Yeah, but [his opponent] didn't see it. He played something else and he lost. He must have regretted it every day of his life. I know I would have. As a matter of fact I do regret it, and I wasn't even born yet.' The problem with Harry is that he doesn't see what's happening around him -- in his marriage, in the case -- until it's too late. Even his own motivations are unclear to him: when he returns to Florida, his stated intention is to uncover the truth, but it's clear that he's also smitten by Paula, and forgives her when he discovers that she seduced him because Iverson wanted to divert his attention from what was really going on. But although it embodies key 1970s themes of betrayal, corruption, and paranoia, and was one of the first films to explore the idea that the personal problems of the detective can be as important as the mystery he's investigating, Night Moves is also wilfully obscure, its allegory of personal failure as a metaphor for post-Watergate America's unease is never fully resolved, and too many scenes set in L.A. are laden with clunky exposition -- the story flows much better in Florida, which foregrounds the more conventional thriller elements. Nevertheless, its release to DVD has been long overdue, and it's a shame that, while Warner's Region 1 release nicely reproduces the grainy realism of the many night scenes, the only extras are the theatrical trailer and a short, vintage featurette, both of which play up the film's action elements rather than its nouvelle vague ambition.

Prime Cut, by the way, features Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman in a cat-and-mouse narrative in which Lee Marvin's gangland enforcer, only slightly less impassive than Point Blank's Walker, rescues naked, drugged teenage girl (Sissy Spacek in her screen debut) from the harem of crazy cannibalistic meat-packing plant owner Mary-Ann (Hackman in eye-rolling manic form). Directed in 1972 by Michael Ritchie, there's plenty of nudity and stylish violence (a chase involving a combine harvester; a shootout between Marvin's mobsters and coveralled hicks in a cornfield), and the story bowls along at a hectic pace, but at heart it's a conventional thriller in which the good guy is clearly delineated from the bad, dressed up in borrowed conventions rather than fully embracing them. Paramount's Region 1 DVD presents it in wide-screen format sans extras.

The final selection, Cutter's Way, has been available as a Region 1 DVD for some time, but has only recently been released to DVD in this country. Although it was shot in 1981, it's based on a 1976 novel, Cutter and Bone, by cult author Newton Thornburg; in fact, the film originally debuted under the same title as the novel, and was retitled and rereleased after it flopped at the box office but garnered a host of rave reviews. Directed by Ivan Passer (a Czech emigre who worked with Milos Foreman), with a sharp screenplay by Jeffrey Alan Fiskin, an alert eye for the weirdness lurking beneath ordinary American life, and an ethereal score by Jack Nitsche, Cutter's Way is a finely-cut gem of a film, its character-driven plot an effective examination of 1970s paranoia and the helplessness of individuals in a society corrupted by power and money, by turns savagely comic and bleakly tragic. Richard Bone (Jeff Bridges), a Santa Barbara boat salesman and part-time gigolo, is trying and failing to start his beat-up convertible in an alley one rainy night when another car briefly stops by some trash cans, and the driver, a man in sunglasses, nearly runs him down. The next day, Bone is arrested on suspicion of murder, because a girl's body was found in one of the trash cans, and his broken-down car puts him at the scene. He turns to his friend, disabled Vietnam veteran Alex Cutter (John Heard), for help, but when they discover that an influential businessman, J.J. Cord (Stephen Elliott), may be implicated in the murder, Cutter and the murdered girl's sister hatch a plot to blackmail Cord that soon goes horribly wrong. At the heart of the film is a marvellously orchestrated anatomisation of the relationship between Bone, a good-natured wastrel who yearns to do better, (a precursor of Bridges's iconic performance in The Big Lebowski), the angry, self-destructive Cutter, and Cutter's mournful, alcoholic wife Mo (Eichhorn), who is having problems working out which man she really loves. Heard's performance is a career-best, subtly intimating the vulnerable tenderness that hides beneath Cutter's armour of vitriolic sarcasm, but both Bridges and Eichhorn, playing people whose lives have lost shape and meaning, are more than a match for him. When Mo is killed in a fire that may have been accidental or may have been intended as a warning by Cord, Bone is finally galvanised into action, helping Cutter pursue his revenge in a climactic scene that is a rousing yet catastrophic conclusion to a film that consistently refuses to play to genre expectations. The 16:9 transfer on the MGM DVD is typically excellent, but the only extra is the original theatrical trailer. This great film, one of the best of the 1980s, deserves more, but nevertheless the DVD is an essential purchase for fans of crime movies from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

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