John Boorman

John Boorman

John Boorman, 1). Shepperton, England, 1933 1965: Catch Us If You Can 1967: Point Blank. 1968: Hell in the Pacific. 1970: Leo the Last. 1972: Deliverance. 1973: Zardoz. 1977; Exorcist II: The Heretic. 1981: Excalibur. 1985: The Emerald Forest. 1987: Hope and Glory. 1990: Where the Heart Is. 1991: / Dreamt I Woke Up. The embattled mentality of anyone who has tried to make films in Britain shows through in most of John Boorman's work. Blank is the most authentic film made by an Englishman in America, almost as a challenge to the cramping attitudes of the British industry. Yet Boorman never became American, or settled into fixed genres. At sixty, he finds it hard to keep in work. He is as commercially unreliable as he is artistically unpredictable. The commercial success of Point Blank and Deliverance brought him to a position of eminence. That both films were intensely American shows how far the cinematic instincts of a young British filmmaker could fit into American subjects and idioms. The brilliant atmospheric eye that distinguished Boot-man i'rom most of his British contemporaries was itself an attribute of the American emphasis on violent action growing out of environment. And the fact that Point Blank was so urban and Deliverance such a unique portrait of wilderness showed, once again, Boorman's will to stretch the range of his own talent. The serious box-office failures in his list—Hell in the Pacific, Leo the Last, Zardvz, and The Heretic—hear witness to the strain of guessing where the next film is coming from. For there is a tension in his work between full-blooded entertainment and allegorical significance. HeU in the Pacific may have incurred the interference of distributors because it fell uneasily between a war film and a sort of Robinson Crwoe/Terri-toriat Imperative in which Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune could not dispense with the enmity thrust upon them by war. Boorman tends to see subdivisions within the species of man.