The great British filmmaker John Boorman announced his presence in Hollywood with authority with 1967’s “Point Blank,” a brutal, blunt-instrument of a thriller starring Lee Marvin.

“Deliverance,” “Zardoz,” “Excalibur” and “Hope and Glory” were to come. But here was a guy who plainly knew his way around “hard boiled.”

“Point Blank” is based on a novel by Hollywood’s favorite crime fiction specialist Donald E. Westlake, stars Marvin as Walker, an underworld figure whose involvement in a robbery of “The Alcatraz Run” — a weekly cash handoff at the closed island prison — ends with his betrayal by the “friend” who begged him to help pull off the job.

John Vernon plays Reese, who not only stole Walker’s $93,000 share of the take, he walked off with his wife (Sharon Acker) after shooting Walker and leaving him to die in a long-abandoned cell on Alcatraz.

A year later, Walker wants revenge. And he wants that damned $93,000 he’s owed. He starts mowing through his contacts in his former life, starting with his wife — who kills herself — always hounded by a mysterious and manipulative “Fed” played by Keenan Wynn.

They aren’t just dealing with The Mob or A Mob. This is the revolutionary 1960s. Crime is more organized. It’s Reese and “The Organization” that Walker must batter and bludgeon to get his money back.

Lloyd Bochner, Michael Strong and Carroll O’Connor play members of the mob food chain Walker must contend with. His wife’s sister (Angie Dickinson) might be some honey trap help in getting his revenge.

Yeah, they could have a fling. If Walker can answer Chris’s question — “What’s my last name?”

“What’s my first name?” he shoots back.

Odd that Walker wouldn’t know the surname of his WIFE’s SISTER, and that she wouldn’t know his first name.

What’s striking, coming back to “Point Blank” after many years, is how much this violent, generic but impressionistic thriller forshadows the arty, dreamy touches Boorman brought to his later Camelot (“Excalibur”) and wilderness (“Deliverance,” “The Emerald Forest”) epics. The film’s sometimes surreal flashbacks have inspired some to see it as “a ghost story.”

Stylized sound, bizarre plot twists interspersed with memories conjured up in flashbacks, I can kind of see that.

Boorman had befriended Marvin upon his arrival in Hollywood, and they’d make their mark in two of Marvin’s best — this film and the primal, one on one WWII thriller “Hell in the Pacific,” co-starring Toshiro Mifune.

With “Point Blank,” remade in 1999 as “Payback,” a Mel Gibson revenge vehicle, they created an Urtext of the underworld revenge thriller genre. Themes, ideas, scenes and settings (the LA River basin) from “Point Blank” would show up in many a similar thriller in decades to come.

For instance, one of the people Walker wants answers from is a slimy “connected” used car dealer played by Michael Strong. Walker interrupts the creep leering at his salesman’s latest blonde customer, and they take out a ’67 Imperial convertible.

Walker proceeds to demolish the car, injuring and abusing the dealer — torture-by-test-drive — in a scene Walter Hill reprised for “The Driver.”

Dickinson gives one of her best big screen performances as a woman who doesn’t overtly grieve her dead sister until she takes out her fury on the overbearing Walker, a tiny waif of woman pummeling and slapping this gray-haired hulk until she collapses in tears.

“You’re a pathetic sight, Walker, from where I’m standing. Chasing shadows. You’re played out. It’s over. You’re finished. What would you do with the money if you got it? It wasn’t yours in the first place. Why don’t you just lie down and die?“

Vernon, later to gain a measure of immortality as the vile Dean Wormer of “Animal House,” may talk tough in a bass voice that rivals Marvin’s own. But Reese can be reduced to whimpering panic and tears, the classic “tough guy” who isn’t.

Future “Hill Street Blues” star James Sikking drops in and impresses as a pipe-smoking mob assassin.

A hallmark of great film noirs is the hardboiled dialogue, and “Point Blank,” with three credited screenwriters adapting Westlake’s prose, has lines that sing and resonate through the decades.

“Well, Cinderella, I was beginning to think you’d never come for your shoe.”

Boorman retired a few years ago, after a career that launched Burt Reynolds and Brendan Gleeson as film stars, that gave Nicol Williamson, Helen Mirren, Ian Bannen and others grand showcases, and that set up Lee Marvin for life with a late career comeback, thanks to “Point Blank” and “Hell in the Pacific.”

But for all the cult following “Zardoz,” “Excalibur,” “Deliverance” and “Hope and Glory” gave him, “Point Blank” remains his masterpiece, 91 minutes of a tough-as-nails anti-hero so single-minded that he seems anything but heroic, an anachronism dealing with an “organization” that he barely comprehends, save for the fact that the bastards still owe him $93,000.

Rating: TV-14, graphic violence, sex, nudity

SCast: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Vernon, Keenan Wynn, Lloyd Bochner, Sharon Acker, James Sikking, Michael Strong and Carroll O’Connor.

Credits: Directed by John Boorman, scripted by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse and Rafe Newhouse, based on a Donald E. Westlake novel. An MGM release on Tubi, et al.

Running time: 1:31