Cinema Speculation

The Outfit

(1973)

Beginning in 1962, the mystery writer Donald Westlake, under the pseudonym Richard Stark, wrote a series of books about a professional armed robber named Parker.

I discovered the books sometime in my twenties and went gaga for them.

Parker was a cold, emotionless bastard whose only identity was his armed robber’s code of professionalism. He robbed banks, bonds, rare coin collections—you name it, Parker stole it.

The conflict in most of the novels came from the fact that, usually, the other members of whatever crew he was working with weren’t as professional as Parker.

And that’s when Parker the armed robber could become Parker the unstoppable killer.

Parker may not have been burdened by the normal human emotions most of us have, but that shouldn’t suggest he was cynical.

In book after book, he kept expecting his criminal colleagues to be as professional as he was and when they weren’t he was appalled.

Some of the books featured Parker helping a former colleague out of a jam, or righting wrongs for a former colleague, or going after a greedy former colleague.

Even though Parker wasn’t a professional killer, he dealt in armed robbery and all that implies.

He wasn’t trigger-happy (that would be unprofessional), but he wasn’t afraid to use his gun if need be.

You always risk certain consequences when you carry a loaded firearm into any endeavor. And Parker was always willing to face those consequences.

In Stark’s first Parker book, The Hunter, our main character ties up and gags a female secretary in an office he’s robbing, and inadvertently ends up suffocating her to death.

Well . . . that’s unfortunate . . . especially for her . . . but them’s the risks. And Parker never shied away from the risks inherent in his chosen profession.

What makes both the character and the books so interesting is their insistence on the code of ethics involved in a criminal activity.

It’s as if, by insisting on a professional code of ethics, the characters can convince themselves that being a thief is a trade.

The closest thing to a humanizing trait that Stark allows the character is Parker’s genuine fondness, bordering on affection, for his only friend, a fellow thief named Cody. Cody appeared in the books every so often and his presence is always welcome.

When I first discovered Parker, what made the character so memorable was he served as an antidote to the horrible homogeneous movies Hollywood was making in the eighties. After growing up in the anything-goes seventies, the eighties marked a play-it-safe decade, like that other horrible decade for Hollywood movies, the fifties. But the eighties were even worse. In the fifties you could claim that it was a repressed society that imposed restrictions on Hollywood, their movies, and their artists. But in the eighties the restrictions Hollywood imposed on their own product were self-imposed. The harshest censorship is self-censorship. And it doesn’t always come from the big bad studio either. Many filmmakers watered down their own vision right from the beginning.

The idea that an American studio film of 1986 could have an opening scene like Pedro Almodóvar’s Spanish film Matador, where a character masturbates to a montage of the goriest scenes in slasher films, was unthinkable.

Elizabeth McNeill’s novella Nine and a Half Weeks was barely a book. But it did have a certain something. It was racy, naughty, and fun. And inside of its slim page count, it suggested an even better movie. You could imagine Radley Metzger making a classic out of it in the early days of seventies erotica. But the movie Adrian Lyne made was scared of even that pipsqueak of a book. And if anybody complained he didn’t do justice to the book, he could legitimately say they practically hung me for what I did make! And he’s right, they practically did.

De Palma was drawn and quartered for his toothless porn satire Body Double. Causing him to retreat to the silly mob comedy Wise Guys.

When it came to artists whose film work was of an uncompromising nature in the eighties, you had David Lynch, Paul Verhoeven, Abel Ferrara, Terry Gilliam, Brian De Palma (sometimes), and David Cronenberg.

And that’s it.

Yeah, there were one-offs. John Carpenter’s The Thing. William Friedkin’s Cruising, Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher. Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark. Michael Cimino’s Year of the Dragon. Hal Ashby’s 8 Million Ways to Die. Jim McBride’s Breathless. Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. But, Hellraiser aside, these directors were usually punished for their perceived transgressions, by the press, the public, and the industry.

I remember when I worked at my Manhattan Beach video store, Video Archives, and talked to the other employees about the types of movies I wanted to make, and the things I wanted to do inside of those movies. And I would use the example of the opening of Almodóvar’s Matador.

And their response would be “Quentin, they won’t let you do that.”

To which I replied back; “Who the fuck are ‘they’ to stop me? ‘They’ can go fuck themselves.”

Now I wasn’t a professional filmmaker back then. I was a brash know-it-all film geek. Yet, once I graduated to professional filmmaker, I never did let “they” stop me. Viewers can accept my work or reject it. Deem it good, bad, or with indifference. But I’ve always approached my cinema with a fearlessness of the eventual outcome. A fearlessness that comes to me naturally—I mean, who cares, really? It’s only a movie. But at the right age (mid-twenties), and at the right time (the fucking eighties), the fearlessness demonstrated by Pedro Almodóvar led by example. As I watched my heroes, the American film mavericks of the seventies, knuckle under to a new way of doing business just to stay employed, Pedro’s fearlessness made a mockery of their calculated compromises. My dreams of movies always included a comic reaction to unpleasantness. Similar to the connection that Almodóvar’s films made between the unpleasant and the sensual. Sitting in a Beverly Hills art house cinema, watching Pedro’s vividly colorful, thrillingly provocative, 35mm images flickering on a giant wall—demonstrating that there could be something sexy about violence—I was convinced there was a place for me and my violent reveries in the modern cinematheque.

But the curse of eighties cinema wasn’t that they wouldn’t let you shoot somebody jerking off to Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace. It was that the complex and complicated lead characters of the seventies were the characters that eighties cinema avoided completely. Complex characters aren’t necessarily sympathetic. Interesting people aren’t always likable. But in the Hollywood of the eighties likability was everything. A novel could have a low-down son of a bitch at its center, as long as that low-down son of a bitch was an interesting character.

But not a movie. Not in the eighties.

After the seventies, it seemed film went back to the restraints of the fifties. Back to when controversial novels and plays had to be drained of life, changed, or turned into morality plays. As happened with 9½ Weeks, Less Than Zero, Bright Lights, Big City, First Blood, The Color Purple, White Palace, Stick, Miami Blues, and The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Okay, what about Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being? Its open sexuality more or less made it to the screen intact. That meant you can do that kind of thing, didn’t it?

Yeah, if you made it dull enough.

The Unbearable Boredom of Watching.

And if you did make a movie about a fucking bastard, you could bet that fucking bastard would see the error of their ways and be redeemed in the last twenty minutes.

Like for example, all of Bill Murray’s characters.

How does Murray in Stripes go from being an iconoclastic pain in the ass, who deserves to get beat up by Drill Sergeant Warren Oates, to rallying the troops (That’s the fact, Jack!), and masterminding a covert mission on foreign soil?

And Stripes was one of the hip movies.

Film critics always preferred Bill Murray to Chevy Chase. Yet, more often than not, Chase remained the same sarcastic aloof asshole at the film’s end he was at the beginning. Or at least his conversion wasn’t the whole point of the movie as it was in Scrooged and Groundhog Day.

Admittedly, when you don’t give a fuck about other people’s feelings, it probably does wonders for your caustic wit. But I’ve always rejected the idea that Bill Murray’s characters needed redemption.

Yeah, maybe he charmed Andie MacDowell, but does anybody think a less sarcastic Bill Murray is a better Bill Murray?

They were no more prepared to do a real biography of Jerry Lee Lewis in 1989 than they were a real portrait of Cole Porter in 1949.

In Wall Street, it was so obvious that Gordon Gekko was going to have to go to jail at the end that it might as well been preordained by the Hays Code.

Naturally, Michael Douglas would end up realizing the error of his ways and drop dime on The Star Chamber.

In Something Wild and Into the Night, was there any chance that Melanie Griffith and Michelle Pfeiffer wouldn’t inexplicably return to the male hero? Of course not, that would have been a bummer ending.

But it makes no sense why they’d return? Who cares, the movie’s over. The people making movies didn’t think audiences cared whether or not the happy endings they gave them made sense or not. And while I’d like to say those Hollywood professionals were wrong, I’m not sure they were.

At Video Archives I dealt closely with the movie-watching public (usually on a one-on-one basis). Much closer than any Hollywood executives. And, for the most part, they didn’t care how unrealistic or implausible the jerry-rigged climaxes they were spoon-fed were. They just didn’t want the movie to end like a bummer.

Just ask the makers of Demi Moore’s version of The Scarlet Letter, aka: the triumphant ending version.

Or ask Demi Moore: “Not many people have read the book.”

When the pursuing posse of local yokels fuck around and flip the On Switch of one-man killing machine John J. Rambo in First Blood, instead of slaughtering them like he does in David Morrell’s book, he just wounds them.

Does that make the point of the book—that once the government turns a man into a killing machine for the purposes of warfare, keeping that machine turned off back home during peacetime isn’t so easy—irrelevant?

Of course, but as Demi Moore would say . . .

As in the fifties, this juvenilization of cinema was a distinctly American problem. Other countries were still making movies for adults. Hong Kong, France, Holland, Japan, and especially England. Alan Clarke’s Made in Britain, Alen Cox’s Sid and Nancy, Stephen Frears’ London Trilogy (My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears & Sammy and Rosie Get Laid).

All of Almodóvar’s Spanish films and Verhoeven’s Dutch ones.

Every year Nicolas Roeg came out with some crazy movie starring Theresa Russell. Ken Russell still did whatever the fuck he wanted to do, even when he went to America (Crimes of Passion).

Still, discovering a heartless, lethal, uncompromising character like Parker, during that fucking wasteland of a decade, was a breath of much needed foul air.

The first three Parker books, The Hunter, The Man with the Getaway Face, and The Outfit are drastically the best ones. Once it became next book, next score, they lost something. But even in the later Parker books I started but never finished, Parker was always true to Parker.

The first three books in the series are connected. The first book, The Hunter, was made famous by John Boorman’s cinematic adaptation Point Blank, with Lee Marvin becoming the first of many movie Parkers (in this one named Walker).

The movie doesn’t really follow the plot of the book that much, but they both get to the same place. Parker stalking, terrorizing, and murdering a bunch of high-powered mobsters—who aren’t used to this type of treatment—over his share of a score they owe him (46,000 dollars). By the end of the book, he’s created such bloody havoc throughout the organized crime syndicate (or “the Outfit” as they call it in Stark’s universe), that even Parker knows he must disappear.

And his attempt to disappear is the plot of the second book, The Man with the Getaway Face, which has never been made into a movie.

On the first page, Parker gets a completely new face from a shadowy underground plastic surgeon, who performs such operations for people trying to disappear (a la David Goodis). Unfortunately for Parker, after the operation the plastic surgeon is murdered. The doctor’s family believes Parker is responsible. And they intend to alert the Outfit about Parker’s new identity and face. Parker insists he had nothing to do with it, and he asks for a week to track down the real killer before the doctor’s family does anything drastic.

He spends the rest of the book accomplishing this.

Even, in a stroke of poetic justice, removing the new face the shadowy plastic surgeon gave his killer.

At book’s end, he arrives back to the family, explains who the murderer was and why he did it, and presents them with the cut-off face. Only, the doctor’s family—sure of Parker’s guilt—didn’t give him the week he asked for. They’ve already informed the Outfit of Parker’s new identity and new face. Thus rendering everything that happened in the book ironically useless.

The Outfit is the third book in the series. Knowing his powerful enemies are going to come after him—instead of running away from the mob—he runs at them.

Considering what a rough customer Parker is, he’s remarkably well represented in movies. There’s been as many Parkers as there’s been Philip Marlowes. And when you consider Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Mel Gibson, and Anna Karina have all played some variation of the character, quite a wide array.

They haven’t always been called Parker. Till recently they never were. Stark didn’t mind selling his books, but he never sold his character.

As the director John Flynn explained to me, “Westlake didn’t want his character to be affected by whatever happened in some dumb movie.”

In my opinion the best movie Parker isn’t from an adaptation of one of Stark’s novels. It’s Robert De Niro as armed robber Neil McCauley in Michael Mann’s Heat. While it’s not literally based on a Richard Stark novel, it’s pretty fucking obvious McCauley is, at least inspired—if not outright based on—Parker.

His professionalism, his creed, his held-in-check emotions, even McCauley’s motto, “Allow nothing in your life that you can’t walk out on in thirty seconds flat if you spot the heat around the corner,” sounds like some shit Parker would say. McCauley is a little more expressive than Parker, Mann having him verbalize lines Stark would have expressed in prose. And the end—McCauley missing his window of opportunity of escape and staying in L.A. to get revenge for a respected colleague—is totally a Parker dilemma.

However if it had been a Stark book, Parker’s professionalism would have led him to flee. Because Parker knows there’s nothing more important than not getting caught. Sticking to the code is how one maneuvers in this world without getting caught.

Consequently, in twelve books Parker never gets caught and never gets killed. At the end of Heat, McCauley gets shot by the law. I never liked the ending of Heat. Not just because I wanted to see De Niro get away, not just because I didn’t want him to break his code, and not just because I didn’t want Al Pacino’s detective to win. But from the moment Jon Voight tells him he found the guy who killed Danny Trejo, you know how the movie’s going to end. The close-up of De Niro driving, making up his mind . . . incredible. But once he jerks the wheel, you know he’s doomed. The by-rote moralistic functionality of the last fifteen minutes, compared to the two hours and thirty-five minutes that preceded it, is a drag.

Of the straight Parker adaptations, most people choose Boorman’s Point Blank and consider Lee Marvin the living embodiment of Parker.

I’ve never understood the reputation that baby-boomer critics assigned Boorman’s nonentity crime film.

Yes, it has a dazzling (for its time) opening ten minutes. But the truth is, it seemed more dazzling when I was twenty-six than it does now. Even in terms of ruthless Lee Marvin gangster film openings, it can’t hold a flickering birthday candle next to Don Siegel’s opening for The Killers.

What’s effective about Boorman’s opening is the way it builds and keeps building. The way the forward momentum of Marvin’s shoes tap out a rhythm on the floor, brings to mind both the sizzle of a dynamite fuse and the screech before a car collision. And the sequence pays off when Marvin bursts through Angie Dickinson’s door, blasting his pistol. But that’s by far the best filmmaking in the movie. After the opening ten minutes, except for the violent fight in the discotheque, it never hums again.

After the show-off opening, Point Blank settles down into sixties television. It’s pretty much indistinguishable from a Mannix episode of the same era (actually Mannix star Mike Connors wouldn’t have been a bad Parker. In fact, when I read The Hunter—Parker before plastic surgery—I see somebody like Connors).

I disagree that Lee Marvin is the quintessential Parker. I don’t even think it’s a good performance. Marvin was one of the most exciting actors of the fifties (Gorilla at Large, Shack Out at 101, Hangman’s Knot, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and especially Attack). And in The Professionals and The Dirty Dozen he modulated that excitement into stardom. But starting with Point Blank, Marvin went from his greatest lead performance in The Dirty Dozen to acting like a leafless tree. And for the whole rest of his acting career he swung wildly from these boring iconic death-mask non-performances (Prime Cut, Hell in the Pacific, Avalanche Express) to overplayed comedic buffoonery (Pocket Money, The Great Scout, Cathouse Thursday, Shout at the Devil, and Paint Your Wagon). In the fifties, the way Marvin delivered theatrical dialogue in movies suggested a great theatre actor who knew he was better suited for the camera (his reading of Norman Brooks’ dialogue from his play Fragile Fox in the movie adaptation Attack shows you how it’s supposed to sound). But in the seventies, he practically stopped speaking. And then when he did, in Frankenheimer’s The Iceman Cometh . . . he didn’t have it anymore.

But Point Blank, when compared to other Stark adaptions, like the abysmal Jim Brown one The Split (not Brown’s fault), the practically comedic Point Blank remake with Mel Gibson, and Godard’s non-adaptation Made in U.S.A., which wastes Stark’s book, the audience’s time, and a lot of Kodak film stock, Boorman’s movie is at least an honorable effort.

My nomination for best Richard Stark novel adaptation (by far) is John Flynn’s The Outfit, starring Robert Duvall as Macklin (Parker), Karen Black as Bett (in the Angie Dickinson role from Point Blank), and a perfect Joe Don Baker as Cody.* If you like Point Blank, fair enough, then The Outfit is its de facto sequel. The events in the book The Hunter and Boorman’s movie is what leads the syndicate to target both Parker and Cody. And then leads Duvall and Baker to execute a full frontal assault against The Outfit. Flynn, forced to start from scratch, has Duvall’s Macklin finishing up a prison sentence for getting picked up by the cops in a bar during a vice raid for carrying a hot weapon. He relates that story to someone and they reply, “Damn, that’s some hard time.”

As he gets out, his brother is assassinated by two mob triggermen (in a real cool opening that just screams seventies cinema). Then two triggermen (familiar ugly face Tom Reese, who would’ve been a great post-plastic surgery Parker), disguised as quail hunters, show up at the woodsy breakfast diner that Cody (Joe Don Baker) runs when he’s not doing a score. However, they pick the wrong time, because the local sheriff (who has no idea about Cody’s double life), is in the joint having his morning coffee. But now Cody knows a couple of out-of-town torpedoes are on his trail.

Macklin/Parker (Duvall) is picked up from prison by his old lady, Bett (Karen Black), who sets him up for a hit at a local hotel. She’s forced into this betrayal after she endures a torture session conducted by the Outfit, where they burned a cigarette up and down her arm (we later find out it was none other than Timothy Carey who used her arm as an ashtray), but she informs Macklin in time for him to ambush the gunman (Walter Hill regular Felice Orlandi), by breaking a bottle across his face (“I’ve got glass in my face”). Duvall tortures him for information, learning why the Outfit is targeting him.*

Apparently, before he got pinched in the vice raid, Macklin, his brother, and Cody robbed a bank that unbeknownst to them was a mob front. Upon his release from jail, the word has come down from the Outfit’s big boss man Mailer (snicker-snicker) played by Robert Ryan to eliminate these small-timers (Ryan was as thin as a rail, and like Marvin, had a face that looked like it was carved on a totem pole. But unlike Marvin—in the seventies—Ryan only got better. It’s Ryan, not Marvin, who rises to the challenge of Eugene O’Neill’s dialogue in The Iceman Cometh).

Macklin and Cody figure the best defense is a strong offense. Instead of running away from the mob, they run at them. With Black operating as their getaway driver, Duvall and Baker start robbing Outfit-fronted operations. Not used to being fucked with, almost every robbery starts with somebody screaming, “Do you know who runs this place?” To which Joe Don Baker yells back, “I don’t give a rat’s ass if your mother runs it!” Or Duvall just smashes them in the teeth with his gun. A big part of the movie’s enjoyment stems from the mob associates’ shock at the brutal treatment they receive at the hands of Duvall and Baker. But there’s more to our heroes’ plan than just revenge for Duvall’s brother and a mad crime spree. Both Macklin and Cody figure if they can cause enough trouble and hurt the syndicate where they’re most sensitive, in the pocketbook, since Mailer fancies himself a businessman, maybe they can broker a deal. Well, naturally that doesn’t work.

So the movie ends with Duvall and Baker doing an all-out assault on Ryan’s home compound. And it’s one of the more satisfying sequences of that type I’ve ever seen, far better than the similar action climax in Michael Mann’s Thief. While it’s not as amazing or as violent as the whorehouse pump-action-shotgun shootout in John Flynn’s next film, Rolling Thunder, it’s still cool and exciting. And the scene between Duvall and Baker on the stairs is the epitome of poignant masculinity. With the picture’s final freeze-frame capper displaying a self-mocking tone that ends the whole film on a hearty macho guffaw.

In a 1981 cover story for the magazine American Film (done to promote Duvall in True Confessions), the writer described him as a “Hard-boiled Olivier.” Not a bad description of Duvall’s performance in this movie. In the Santa Clarita, California, newspaper The Signal, film critic Phillip Lanier wrote about Duvall as Macklin: “Earl is one of the most interesting gangster figures to screen in a while. He is intelligent and his brutality is as calculated as it is unsympathetic. To him, robbing and killing is just a nine-to-five job which he has to take home with him too. His [Duvall’s] quiet determination brings across a character who appears to be a desperate man by choice. It’s a mysterious kind of masculinity that only he seems to possess.”

Macklin may be Stark’s Parker, but both Flynn and Duvall open up the character. Macklin definitely has more of a sense of humor than Parker (in the movie Duvall laughs every once in a while). But it’s Macklin’s affection for Cody that separates him from the literary Parker. The Parker of the books has affection for Cody as well. But Duvall’s masterful performance conveys it stronger without abandoning that turtle shell he uses as a face. And he and Baker make a marvelous team, with Duvall mumbling all the cryptic lines and Baker spitting out all the funny ones. When the two men discuss how they’re going to attack Ryan’s heavily guarded home compound, they even predate Flynn’s greatest cinematic moment, the “I’ll just get my gear” scene between William Devane and Tommy Lee Jones in Rolling Thunder.

While I doubt any actor could be the definitive Parker, Joe Don Baker is absolutely the perfect embodiment of Cody. Joe Don has always been one of my favorite screen actors, but for me, it’s his performance in this film that’s my personal favorite. The movie even gives Baker the film’s terrific curtain line. According to fat hack James Bacon in a profile he wrote on Baker, when director Flynn, producer Carter DeHaven, and MGM studio head James Aubrey went to a screening of Walking Tall together, halfway through the picture they shouted in unison, “He’s our man!”

As I pointed out earlier, Point Blank has that canned quality of sixties television. Marvin aside, it even has a television cast.

The whole supporting cast could have been the guest star lineup of an episode of Cannon (Angie Dickinson and Keenan Wynn, terrific as they were, did a lot of television).

John Vernon, in the sixties and early seventies, was constantly playing the heavy on episodic TV. And while I like Vernon, it was after The Outlaw Josey Wales and Animal House that I started liking him a lot more. But back in 1967, Vernon’s part in Point Blank was too big for him. He couldn’t hold his own with even a low wattage Lee Marvin (Keenan Wynn would have been better in Vernon’s role).

Carroll O’Connor, before he settled into his role as TV icon Archie Bunker, was all forced comedic bluster. A phony powerhouse, he played everything comedic, because he wasn’t a strong enough actor to play it dramatic. But, like Ed Asner with the character of Lou Grant, his ownership of the Archie Bunker role led him to do much deeper work later on (he’s terrific in Ivan Passer’s Law and Disorder. It’s Ernest Borgnine who’s a braying donkey). But in Point Blank, even giving a non-performance, Marvin thoroughly dominates windbag O’Connor.

And then there’s fish-faced Lloyd Bochner. The type of tight-lipped stiff who regularly appeared on Quinn Martin–produced TV shows.

Any movie that casts Lloyd—fucking—Bochner has serious casting issues.

But by contrast the supporting cast of The Outfit is filled with one terrific actor’s face after another (Timothy Carey, Richard Jaeckel, Sheree North, Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, Henry Jones, Bill McKinney).

Director Flynn told me he cast the film with his buddy Walter Hill by going through a book of great B-movie character actors.

When it came to casting, Flynn told me he was happy with the lead cast of the movie. He liked Baker and Black, and thought Duvall was a fine actor and an interesting rising star. But they wouldn’t have been his first choice. If he could have, he would have rather gone less modern-day seventies casting, and more film noir. His dream cast would have been Burt Lancaster as Macklin, Kirk Douglas as Cody, and Angie Dickinson as Macklin’s wife. I considered doing an adaptation of the book in the late nineties, with Robert De Niro as Parker, Harvey Keitel as Cody, and Pam Grier as Bett. And just writing that now makes me wish I would have done it.

The Outfit was one of the last films made under the tenure of MGM studio head James Aubrey (aka the smiling cobra). And the studio head honcho instituted a new release pattern for his remaining pictures.

Aubrey was pissed off at the way the New York and Los Angeles critics had treated his slate of MGM films. So he began opening new MGM movies regionally first. It took The Outfit an entire year to make the rounds through the United States. Starting off in October 1973 in Chicago and Baltimore, and not opening in California (its last stop) till a year later in October 1974. The first press clippings (aside from casting announcements) to appear about Flynn’s film were almost all from fat hack James Bacon, who wrote in his syndicated column on Oct 23, 1973, “Saw The Outfit the other night at a cast and crew preview and it’s The Godfather of 1973.” Wow, pretty impressive, huh? But then ask yourself what was James Bacon doing at a cast and crew preview? Because Bacon had a small cameo in the movie, and that was sort of the deal back then. If you stuck James Bacon’s fat ass somewhere in your movie, you could guarantee a few positive notices in his column. But the less-biased critics across the country were in a three-way split between declaring the film a routine crime picture, a slightly above routine crime picture, or a drastically below routine crime picture.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times wrote, “The Outfit is not really a bad movie. It doesn’t fail in an attempt to do something beyond its means. It doesn’t attempt to do anything except pass the time, which simply isn’t good enough when most of us have access to television.”

Greg Swem of the Courier-Journal (out of Louisville, Kentucky) obviously enjoyed the movie, but ultimately concluded, “It’s well written and well directed by John Flynn, but the script and direction are fragmented. The film as a whole doesn’t have any great attraction.”

But Gary Arnold of the Washington Post declared it “a lugubrious, derivative thriller.” After he described the plot he concluded, “This sounds like the outline for a fairly tense little crime exercise, but Flynn has a flat, dawdling way of spinning a yarn, so the essential grubbiness and brutality of the conception aren’t leavened with much flair or excitement.”

Jeanne Miller of the San Francisco Examiner referred to Flynn’s work as “dismal direction” and the film itself as “disastrous.”

Bernard Drew of the Journal News, out of White Plains, New York, disparaged Flynn further, “Writer-director John Flynn, who once unwittingly made one of the funniest pictures of the sixties, The Sergeant, and later succeeded in making a bore out of the holy land in The Jerusalem File, now rises to new heights of ineptitude in The Outfit.”

But Roger Ebert, in his Chicago Sun-Times review in October of 1973, gave the film three and a half stars out of four, and wrote; “The Outfit is a class action picture, very well directed and acted, about a gangster’s revenge on the mob death of his brother. An outline of the plot would make it sound pretty routine, but what makes the picture superior is its richness of detail.” Then Ebert went on to clarify, “We don’t care much about what happens, the same things are always happening in action movies, and when you’ve seen one car burst into flames you’ve seen them all. But the people in this movie are uncommonly interesting.”

Then a full year later in October 1974, in the Los Angeles Times, Charles Champlin concluded his positive review with the summation, “There is always a particular pleasure in watching a movie which is in command of itself all the way, an exercise in professionalism, and The Outfit offers that kind of satisfaction as the bonus beyond the surprises, the suspense, and the vivid portrayals.”

But it was only John Fox, writing for the Oakland Tribune, who offered any serious insight that went beyond a plot summary and a good, bad, or indifferent verdict. “The film is perceptive in its understanding of the attitudes men have towards each other. And although the violence may prevent some viewers from seeing the message, there is a fine statement about an individual’s ability to overcome a threatening force if only he can find the means and the nerve.”

I first saw The Outfit when it played in Tennessee in March of 1974, under the title The Good Guys Always Win (actually, if you’ve seen the movie, not a bad title). Due to Joe Don Baker’s incredible popularity in that state because of Walking Tall, it was Baker and the Buford Pusser connection that was emphasized.*

And eight months later, when it finally opened in Los Angeles under its original title of The Outfit, I saw it again at the United Artists Cinema in Marina del Rey on a double feature with Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (talk about an action-packed PG-rated double feature!).

I actually thought I was buying a ticket to the sequel of The Good Guys Always Win. No worries. It was even better the second time. And the hearty audience of macho guys scattered around the little cinema made it even more fun. They laughed at everything Joe Don Baker said. Including his terrific curtain line that brought the little house down.