Past Misdeeds: The Outfit (1973)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

At just about the same time when professional robber Earle Macklin (Robert Duvall) is released from jail, his brother Eddie is murdered by killers working for the Outfit (the artists formerly known as The Syndicate). Turns out a bank Earle, Eddie and their partner Cody (Joe Don Baker) robbed belonged to the Outfit, and when there's one thing you don't do, it's stealing from them, at least if you ask Outfit boss Mailer (Robert Ryan).

Eddie's not the only one Mailer wants to see dead, but hits on Earle and Cody fail. Once he understands what's going on, Earle decides the best way to stay alive is to go on the offense. From now on he, sort of joined by his girlfriend Bett (Karen Black), and a bit later on by Cody, robs every Outfit establishment he can find. They're pretty easy marks, too, for the unspoken "don't touch the Outfit" rule among professional criminals has resulted in rather lax security measures in the organizations' establishments.

Mailer could make his new problem go away peacefully if his organization would only be willing to pay Macklin $250,000, and leave him in peace afterwards. Not surprisingly, that's not a deal he's willing to make; instead he intensifies his attempts killing Earle and Cody, until they see no choice but to come after him. Not that this wasn't their preferred outcome all along, given their actions.

The Outfit is an adaptation of one of Donald E. Westlake's/Richard Stark's Parker novels (one of my favourites in the series to boot), and as always one that does star Parker neither in name nor character. As far as I know, that's because Westlake didn't want the Parker name used unless an actor agreed to an actual series of films, which sounds rather like avoiding finding more readers for one's books to me, but then I'm not the pulp-y paperback writing master here.

Duvall's Macklin is nearly as ruthless as the character he's based on, but clearly still has more regular human feelings than the empathy-less sociopath Parker. Consequently - and wouldn't Parker just love this as proof for his usual thesis that emotions are bad for his business anyhow - Macklin may be nearly as brutal as Parker but does tend to sometimes let his emotions get in the way of his planning abilities. He even has actual feelings for Bett beyond her use as an object to relieve his sex drive with.

Of course, it is much easier for a viewer to relate to Macklin than to a more closely adapted Parker. Emotional shorthand does, after all, work better with characters that do have emotions their audience can relate to; and once we can relate to something on that level, we do tend to excuse little things like mass robberies and a lot of dead bodies much easier. Duvall as an actor is at the height of his powers here, providing just enough glimpses of the emotional intensity and rage working under Macklin's cold and professional surface to breathe life into his character.

I also appreciate how Flynn attempts to provide a somewhat more sympathetic view of women in his film than you'd ever find in a Stark novel, obviously having caught up with the scientific news that women are actual human beings, just like men; early on in the film I even dared hope he'd give Karen Black's Bett just as much room for development as his male characters. That hope, alas, isn't really fulfilled, despite Black's - an actress I love but not for anything that has anything to do with subtlety - surprisingly subtle performance. In the end, The Outfit trades Stark's borderline misogyny for that common cliché of the female character having to die to motivate the male lead to his climactic violent act. However, Flynn does go through these motions at least with a bit more interest in Bett than typical, and really, compared to Stark's treatment of women in the books, he's golden.

It's also difficult for me to mind this flaw much in a film that does nearly everything else right. I love how Flynn's script adapts the novel, leaving most of its set pieces intact while imagining a different, more human character like Macklin (without two novels before as the set-up for certain scenes) going through them. A lot stays as it is in the novel, yet there are little shifts in meaning and emphasis that aren't just caused by the necessity of filmic language; they are also products of a director with a slightly different philosophy than Stark's, replacing cynicism that at least borders on nihilism with the laconic, strangely sympathetic fatalism so typical of US crime movies of the era. In The Outfit and other movies like it, everybody is a sinner and everybody is most probably doomed, but there's still room for small, defiant gestures of humanity, even if these gestures are violent and morally dubious.

This - to my European eyes - very particularly American way of looking at the world of the early 70s takes place before a background of unspectacular ugliness: a brown world of mud, dark bars, motel rooms and houses that look as if they could crash down on the characters any minute now. The Outfit's USA are a place far from small town romance or the supposed sexiness of the big city - not that we ever get to see anything that looks like you'd imagine the Big City (Flynn retools a short dialogue between Parker/Macklin and Handy/Cody about the shittiness of cities quite wonderfully in that regard). Obviously, the American Dream is not impervious to mud.


Flynn is also simply a great director of semi-realistic action sequences. Everybody, their amount of professionalism in the cause of violence notwithstanding, is somewhat awkward in these scenes, and even when clearly used to the violence they are committing, still caught up in the little failures and stumbles that come with the chaos surrounding them. Despite the conscious decision to use awkwardness and the sudden chaos of real-world violence, Flynn also manages to keep the action exciting and tight. This way, whatever else one may look for and find in The Outfit, it's also a great, exciting 70s crime film.