Friday's Old Fashioned: The Outfit (1973)

The 1973 crime-thriller “The Outfit” is based on a novel Richard Stark’s celebrated Parker series, yet in changing the character’s name to Earl Macklin, writer/director John Flynn is essentially remaking the role in the no fuss no muss air of his lead actor Robert Duvall. As the movie opens, Earl is released from prison to find his brother Eddie (Edward Ness) has been killed by a crime syndicate called The Outfit. Turns out, Earl and Eddie robbed a bank that was a front for The Outfit some years back and now that syndicates wants revenge. Rather than go on the run or wait around to get offed himself, Earl enlists his old cohort Cody (Joe Don Baker) to go on the offensive, working their way from Outfit goon to Outfit goon, and eventually all the way up to the man on top, Mailer, appropriately played by the dude of dudes, Robert Ryan, evincing the air of someone who has necessarily strained so much from his life as necessary protection that he has also strained out any sense of joy. He watches professional football games with the air of a man who has no interest in the game itself, just the money he wagered on it.

Like all the women in “The Outfit,” Mailer’s trophy wife Rita (Joanna Cassidy) is only half-acknowledged, but the script at least half-acknowledges that all the women in “The Outfit” are half-acknowledged. That includes Earl’s girlfriend Bett (Karen Black) whose presences mostly ensures that 70s audiences wouldn’t get the wrong idea since the real romance is between Earl and Cody. Indeed, Duvall and Black sculpt a genuine lived-in relationship as two guys getting too old for this kind of life but unable to part ways with it, nonetheless. That way of life involves some traditional action, a few shootouts and the like, but “The Outfit” surprises in just how much drama and tension it mines from moments in-between, like Earl and Cody having a stare down with two men from whom they hope to acquire a getaway car, a scene sculpted from nothing but pure attitude. Time and again Flynn’s script seems to set Earl up for an action hero wisecrack only for the character to decline, as if too serious for such childishness, echoed in Duvall’s turn. “The Outfit” never cuts loose until the last possible second, after Earl and Cody have completed their getaway, falling into a spate of laughter, as if the once the job has been completed, then, and only then, are dudes allowed to rock. 

In Memoriam: Robert Duvall

It’s funny what sticks in a person’s head about an actor, but when you have a career as long and varied as Robert Duvall’s, maybe that makes sense. He was in “The Godfather,” of course, need I say more, and literally started his movie career as Boo Radley in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” I mean, c’mon now, and is the guy who said he loved the smell of napalm in the morning in “Apocalypse Now,” for god’s sake, and yet I find myself thinking about the disaster movie “Deep Impact.” There’s a scene where Duvall’s astronaut is at a barbecue and drinking a beer with the NASA flight director (Kurtwood Smith), who is wearing a tropical print shirt, and talking about the crew for the big mission and expressing his fear and the whole thing can’t help but feel faintly ridiculous (did I mention Kurtwood Smith is wearing a tropical print shirt?) and yet Duvall just effortlessly speckles over it with this good-natured chuckle. He had a great chuckle, you know; Robert Duvall’s chuckle was as much an American national treasure as the late Gene Hackman’s. That’s not my favorite Duvall memory, though. No, my favorite Duvall memory comes from the same year, as chance would have it, 1998, in “A Civil Action,” where he’s playing the defense attorney who treats the law not as the rules and regulations helping bind together The Great Experiment but as the rules of a game that can be manipulated to engender a favorable outcome. (5 out of 4 Supreme Court justices rate him as their favorite movie lawyer.) Mostly, though, I just like the scene where he excoriates a clerk for daring to interrupt his lunch break, an argument and elegy for finding shelter from the capitalist storm. It’s the greatest courtroom movie speech of all time and it’s not even in a courtroom.

“You know, I’d make a point of taking an hour or so away from all the noise and insanity of this place. I’d find a place that was relatively quiet and peaceful, have a sandwich, read a magazine. Maybe listen to a game if one was on. I’d make sure everyone knew not to disturb me during that hour. Because that would be my time – my own private time, which no one, if they had any sense of self-preservation, would dare interrupt.”

 

After reading that Duvall had died at the age of 95, I reached for my copy of David Thomson’s New Biographical Dictionary of Film to see what he had to say on the actor. He starts by talking about Duvall’s role as consigliere Tom Hagen in “The Godfather,” as I suppose one would, writing that Robert Duvall the actor “relates to high stardom like an Irishman among Italians. He is not beautiful or forceful enough to carry a big film. But stars and Italians alike depend on his efficiency, his tidying up around their grand gestures, his being perfect shortstop on a team full of personality sluggers.” There’s a lot of truth to this, and oddly enough, it’s as much epitomized as it is refuted in Duvall’s great passion project, 1997’s “The Apostle,” which he wrote and directed and starred in as a Pentecostal preacher. Indeed, though the name Elmer Gantry might have Irish roots, Duvall is making the Irishman version of that movie, at least, in the way Thomson is cheekily defining it, resisting the obvious stereotypes, effortlessly evincing firm belief in and devotion to the Almighty despite all the baggage the character otherwise brings. It’s Duvall’s version of a personality slugger. 

Kevin Costner’s 2003 western “Open Range” has a climactic gunfight that tends to get cited as one of the genre’s best shootouts, but I have always preferred the moment just before the shooting begins when Duvall’s cattleman, Boss Spearman, goes into a drug store. “My friend and me got a hankering for Switzerland chocolate and a good smoke,” he says. No one ever seized the day with so little fuss. Costner directed, produced, and co-starred in “Open Range,” yet he downplays, to his own detriment even, ceding the stage to Duvall who in his easygoing jocularity appropriately suggests Walter Brennan taking the lead in a John Wayne joint. Costner might lay the American pioneer spirit on thick, but in the end, the movie is less a sentimental ode to American fortitude and independence than a lasting monument to his co-star.