John Flynn

The Outfit

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Joe Don Baker, Robert Duvall and Karen Black

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 … Read more

Rolling Thunder

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Major Rane in dark glasses

A guy comes back from Vietnam and runs into a whole load of trouble in 1977’s Rolling Thunder, the sort of “guy comes back from Vietnam” movie they used to make around then. Except this one’s all messed up. William Devane plays the guy, Major Charles Rane, who returns from seven years in a Vietnam prisoner-of-war camp where he’s been tortured but has survived. At what personal cost is what the film sets out to examine, until it decides to stop doing all that and instead turn into a genre movie. A film ostensibly about survivor’s guilt, PTSD and the sexual revolution that’s changed America while Rane has been inside, Rolling Thunder gets … Read more