n+1 Presents: The Outfit Introduced by A.S. Hamrah

Director: John Flynn

1973 / 103min / 35mm

In collaboration with the esteemed journal n+1, Metrograph and n+1 present a one-off screening of John Flynn’s The Outfit (1973), introduced by n+1’s acclaimed film columnist A. S. Hamrah.

“‘He is the last independent gangster, as crazy as private enterprise in the corporate state,’ David Thomson wrote about James Cagney’s Cody Jarrett in Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949). In a later series of crime films from 1973, Thomson’s observation really came to a new kind of self-conscious life. These include Don Siegel’s Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau; The Friends of Eddie Coyle, with Robert Mitchum; Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, with Elliott Gould, and The Outfit, with Robert Duvall—films in which lone protagonists are pitted against crime syndicates in films designed to make clear the precarity of individual operators in a poisoned society run by dark corporate interests.

“John Flynn’s The Outfit is generally recognized today as the best of the screen adaptations of Richard Stark’s “Parker” novels (“by far,” according to Quentin Tarantino in his 2022 book Cinema Speculation), more down and dirty than the modernist Point Blank (1967), with a stronger realist feeling for the American landscape of office buildings, hotels and motels, farms and scrapyards.

“Duvall is a monster in this film; his performance seems to predate something later found in Robert De Niro, a certain way of looking at people with confusion, pity, and resignation all at once. The rest of The Outfit’s cast—Karen Black, Joe Don Baker, Robert Ryan, Timothy Carey, Jane Greer, Marie Windsor, Henry Jones, Richard Jaeckel, Sheree North, and Bill McKinney, Emile Meyer (starkly individualistic stalwarts all)—performs here at the highest level of commitment to the genre. And I found that a particular line of Joe Don Baker’s spoke to me. Asked why he hasn’t heard some bit of news, the star of Walking Tall (also 1973) replies, ‘I been in the woods.’” —A. S. Hamrah