In this film’s most indelible combination of sound and image, the revenge-bent Lee Marvin (character name: Walker) is seen striding purposefully down a white hallway, each smack of his footsteps resonating like the sound of marching armies, or of a rifle being cocked. Director John Boorman cuts away to other images, across space and time, but still the cadence of that peculiar kind of madness — clop! clop! clop! — beats relentlessly on the soundtrack, giving Marvin’s rage ever-more-palpable form every time the camera alights on his steely set face. It’s scary and exciting at the same time, nicely establishing Marvin as the original Terminator. (This was remade, with some semblance of wit, as the Mel Gibson vehicle Payback, but Gibson is way too cuddly to properly inhabit the same role as Marvin.)

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