Parker may not be a name that immediately grabs the attention of modern crime thriller fans. Yet the literary antihero of author Donald E. Westlake – or rather his pseudonym Richard Stark – has a legacy that threads across decades of the genre, from Lee Marvin’s iconic stride through LAX to the popularity of sort-of spiritual successor Jack Reacher. Despite a series of 24 novels over nearly 50 years, it is the cinematic Parker that’s arguably better known. The aforementioned Marvin, with his granite hair and granite features, tore through the Los Angeles mob in John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967). Michel Constantin, Jim Brown, Peter Coyote, Harvey Keitel, Mel Gibson, and Jason Statham have all embodied Parker in the years since, each bringing a distinct flavor to Stark’s steely calculating professional criminal. But only one Parker film emerged from the mean grit of ‘70s crime, and that was John Flynn’s 1973 thriller The Outfit.
In light of his Seagal vehicle Out For Justice and revenge staple Rolling Thunder (aka the one where Tommy Lee Jones and a hook-handed Will Devane kill a bunch of people), there couldn’t have been a better director to tackle Parker than John Flynn. While other versions are more stylistic or attuned for rollicking action, Flynn captures the low-key blue-collar spaces of the novels more accurately than in any other adaptation. Robert Duvall steps into the shoes of the character for this film, here named “Macklin” (Thus continuing the trend of Parker characters rarely being named as such in movies; Lee Marvin was “Walker,” Mel Gibson in Payback was “Porter,” and so on). With his taciturn menace and no-nonsense composure, Duvall is almost the ideal embodiment of Richard Stark’s Parker, only a tad too humanized to be a perfect incarnation.
Considering they share a central cast member in Joe Don Baker, The Outfit recalls another ‘70s crime thriller of similar tone and intensity: Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick. As in that film, low-level independents inadvertently rob a mob bank; now the syndicate is hunting down those responsible. But they make the grave mistake of killing Macklin’s brother and trying to kill him. While Walter Matthau’s Varrick went on cunning defense, Duvall’s icy crook commits to calculated retaliation, striking at the mob’s wallet until they relent and pay recompense for the inconvenience of messing with him.
After Macklin teams up with girlfriend Bett (Karen Black, unfortunately underserved) and partner-in-crime Cody (Joe Don Baker), The Outfit becomes a rural-noir road trip of brazen yet sharply executed heists against the mob. Rife with clipped threats, shrewd strategy, and measured violence, Flynn’s crime canvas offers both urgent action and causal peeks into a well-established small-town underworld. Preparations among cheap motels and sedan backseats lead to tense meetings at horse auctions and sly robberies of mob-owned fronts. The character-driven approach turns the simplest crime-story beats such as swapping cars or buying guns into their own purposeful intriguing episodes interacting with memorable personalities. When gunfire does erupt, the confrontations are blunt, dispassionate, and always just business even when it’s an exchange of bullets rather than words.
Genre icon Robert Ryan (among his final roles before passing from cancer) shows up as a mob heavy, becoming increasingly incensed by Macklin’s thousand cuts against his operation. His furious gravitas turns the final act into a cat-and-mouse battle between hard practical men looking to settle accounts permanently. That quite aptly sums up the movie’s unique pleasures as a whole. Other Parker films may be better known, but none captures the hard-bitten intensity or the workmanlike crime thrills of Stark’s stories quite like Duvall and Flynn. The Outfit isn’t just a lesser-praised adaptation, but an unsung gem of ‘70s crime that still deserves its proper due.
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