Karen Black

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

Burnt Offerings

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Marian and Ben

1976’s Burnt Offerings can’t really bear the analysis often heaped on it. Regularly described as either a weighty commentary on materialism or as a metaphorical analysis of the dissolution of the American family, it’s much better seen as a mood piece with not that much to say but an awful lot to give if you give yourself up to it. There is an American family in it, though, and it does get put through its paces after Ben Rolf (Oliver Reed), wife Marian (Karen Black), son David (Lee Montgomery) and Ben’s aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis) take on a vast, palatial house for the summer at a rent that is at the low end … Read more

Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies

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Fawn in a black bikini top

Made in the 1990s but smelling like something from the 1970s, Auntie Lee’s Meat Pies is the product of a porn director and a few Playboy ladies getting together and making something in their downtime. The results are as impressive as the stars’ superstructures, though there’s scant pickings if you’re only here for a leer. The plot is a lift from Sweeney Todd – humans repurposed as baked goods – with Karen Black as Auntie Lee, a faded Southern belle and enterprising baker who uses the wayward men her nieces entice in from the street, or wherever, as the savoury filling in her celebrated pastries. Black isn’t the only actor whose name you might … Read more

Family Plot

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Bruce Dern at a graveside

If you were idly flicking through the TV channels on a wet afternoon and hit upon Family Plot, chances are you wouldn’t immediately think it was a Hitchcock movie – it looks more like an episode of Columbo. That bright TV lighting, those mid-range actors who look like they’re trying not to be fingered as this week’s criminal, one who’s once again not as smart as the man in the mac. I’ve looked up Bruce Dern, Karen Black, Barbara Harris and William Devane and not one of them ever did make an appearance on Columbo but they don’t quite fit the standard Hitchcock bill either, or not the bill containing Cary Grant, Grace Kelly, … Read more