1970s neo-noir doesn’t begin and end with Chinatown and The Long Goodbye. Here, for instance, is The Outfit, director John Flynn’s lean adaptation of one of the 24 novels Donald Westlake wrote under his Richard Stark pseudonym. Many Stark stories feature the no-nonsense career criminal Parker and in a mini-festival of Parker adaptations, The Outfit would sit snugly alongside Point Blank (where he’s renamed Walker), the Jean-Luc Godard movie Made in USA (he becomes a she named Paula), Play Dirty (Mark Wahlberg as Parker) and Parker, in which Jason Statham plays Jason Statham.
Here it’s Robert Duvall as Parker – renamed Earl Macklin – fresh out of stir and setting off on a mission to avenge the death of his brother at the hands of criminal organisation The Outfit, accompanied by his dead brother’s woman, Bett (Karen Black).
Earl has a secondary motivation – to save his own skin. His brother was killed for turning over a bank belonging to The Outfit. Earl was in on the job. That’s why he was in jail. But now he’s a free man again he’s also a target. As is the third member of their team, Cody (Joe Don Baker). Best way to neutralise the threat, Earl reckons and Cody agrees, is to take the fight to the top. Earl adds a little kicker to the proposition, reckoning that The Outfit also owes him $250,000 for the trouble they’ve caused him.
As Earl, Cody and an increasingly involved Bett work their way up the gangster hierarchy, from freelancers and associates to henches and right hand men, following the pared back prose of the original books, Flynn delivers economical, hard-boiled direction in one seedy location after another – a hotel room with an illicit poker game going on; a run down bar where the boss hangs around in a dank room out back; a white trash homestead; a church full of bums sitting through the service so they can get to the handouts.
In between, Earl, Cody and Bett turn over operations run by The Outfit, stealing their money but avoiding violence if at all possible. To any goon thinking of taking them on Earl likes to point out that they’re just an employee. Is your life a price worth paying, he asks. Class politics somewhere in the rearview mirror, you could say.
Flynn opens it with classic noir visuals – the cars, the clothes, the lenses, the way it’s framed, but pulls back a bit as he gets into the meat of the movie. By the end, like Altman’s The Long Goodbye, his film has become the perfect noir/neo-noir hybrid, clearly 1970s (it’s in colour, for one) and yet with many stylistic throwbacks and a score that mixes Schifrin-esque rhythms with 40s-style brass.
The bulk of the work is done by Duvall, Baker and Karen Black (dressed throughout in clothes reminiscent of Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde). But there’s a rogue’s gallery of noir faces to add flavour – Elisha Cook Jr, Marie Windsor, Timothy Carey, Jane Greer and, as the boss Earl is ultimately after, Robert Ryan, in his last film role. Consumed with cancer and his limbs obviously wasted, Ryan is nevertheless his usual brilliant self as the urbane gang boss.
Also worth more than a mention is Sheree North in a standout role as the floozie of one of the men Earl and co are bothering on their way to the source of their woe. Tits out, head tilted in a “come and get me” manner, she is libido on stilts. Her minutes on screen are scant but she cuts through, even though she shares most of them with a barking dog.
There’s even a blink-and-miss-her cameo by Anita O’Day, the jazz singer who famously got herself off her addiction to booze by taking up heroin.
Bruce Surtees’s dark and shadowy cinematography means it’s visually appealing but throughout it’s Flynn’s dirty but straightforward direction that is really noticeable. He’s taken as his cue all those short, fast B movie noirs of old. Say what you’ve got to say and get out. As Westlake himself later said, when interviewed by Patrick McGilligan for his book Backstory 4, The Outfit is the “one movie made from a Stark book that got the feeling right.”
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
