John Flynn?s The Outfit, a brutally efficient bit of business based glancingly on Richard Stark?s procedurally inquisitive and poetic crime novel, is a movie that feels like it?s never heard of a rounded corner; it?s blunt like a 1970 Dodge Monaco pinning a couple of killers against a Dumpster and a brick wall.
And not just any Dodge, but one driven by Karen Black in a Faye Dunaway Bonnie & Clyde beret!
Substituting headlong, arrogant force for the mapped-out strategies detailed in the book, Flynn pile-drives forward just like his protagonist, setting up one cast-iron set piece after another in clean, broad strokes, as cinematically equivalent to Stark?s lean, unfussy prose as one could imagine being without galloping forward into insufferable self-consciousness.
[snip]
It?s easy to wonder if those probable budgetary restrictions had anything to do with Flynn?s scrapping of the idea to film The Outfit as a full-on noir period piece set in the postwar ?40s. Personally, I think what we?ve got works just fine, probably better than any attempt to predate even the novel and recreate a shadowy atmosphere which would likely only call attention to its artificiality. As is, The Outfit, set in 1973, is only 10 years removed from the cars, the styles, the guns, the diners and the entire milieu of Stark?s novel, which was published in 1963. Not much in the way of adaptation in terms of production design was really needed to stay true to the cynicism-soaked atmosphere originating from Stark?s typewriter.
Maybe because right now I'm immersed in the 70's and watched the movie just this weekend, the result strikes me as better than fine--there's an authentic cruddiness to the interiors and exteriors (diners, motels, gas stations, back offices, poker rooms), all of the lower-echelon men sitting behind desks or loitering at the fringes are meaty and look as if they down a lot of antacids, the cars look like they've been driven hard, not wheeled off some studio backlot, and the cloudy skies clamp a glum, sulky lid over the action, making it look even meaner and more entrapping. It doesn't look all art-directed and anally lit to perfection, its functional utility more faithful to the Parker world than the attitudinizing of nearly all the other adaptations.
Cozzalio rightly pays tribute to Sheree North (seen "first in a knockout black turtleneck sweater and then in a clingy, pointedly thin bathrobe, as the brother?s shrewish"), who's like a dirty-blonde version of Julie London, but my eyes were equally agog at how gleaming and gorgeous Joanna Cassidy was in a small role as Robert Ryan's moll, dressed in classy white as if her expensive wardrobe had laundered his ill-gotten gains.
Robert Duvall, Joe Don Baker, Sheree North, Robert Ryan, Joanna Cassidy, Richard Jaeckel (love him), plus all of the noir familiars (Elisha Cook Jr., Jane Greer, Roy Roberts) studding the cast--it's one hell of a lineup, going about their business with no muss no muss expediency, a dead-ahead stance loosened only by Joe Don Baker's leering grin in every getaway.
The explosion of Stark/Parker reissues continues apace, and I've just knocked off Deadly Edge, which I recommend unreservedly. The novel that moves him into the lakeside hideaway he shares with Claire in a rural pocket of New Jersey where the state lines of Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania converge, Deadly Edge begins with a heist that goes without a hitch until the crew returns to the safe house where their stuff is stashed and discover--well, no spoilers here. This is one of the most scarifying of the Parker novels. Where most of the violence in the Parker series is meted out with thuggish blunt force on anyone who stands between the crooks and the money, here there's a sadistic psychopathological zeal to the lethal punishments inflicted on Parker's crew by their pursuers that looks backward to the Manson family and forward to Peckinpah's Straw Dogs, especially once the Jersey home comes under siege. Parker is used to dealing with tough-guy tactics--this is a whole different witches' brew. Everything about Deadly Edge is distinctive; only its title is generic.
Source: http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2011/02/dennis-cozzalio-stops-and-smells.html
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