User Reviews

A fast paced thriller directed by Jacques Deray and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant as a French hit-man who goes to Los Angeles to kill a mob boss only to find himself pursued relentlessly by American hit-man Roy Scheider. With its European sensibility and LA locations, THE OUTSIDE MAN is something of an oddity. Trintignant is excellent --- nobody played an outsider better than him in the '70s. Scheider scowls and grits his teeth a lot. A barely dressed Ann-Margret is the bad girl who helps Trintignant out. The supporting cast is truly bizarre --- Georgia Engel is an uncooperative, publicity happy housewife, Angie Dickinson plays the mob boss's wife but has so few lines, it's a wonder why she was cast. Alex Rocco, Jackie Earle Haley and John Hillerman also have small roles.

Dear Jacques Deray,

your film The Outside Man was a really interesting, unusual and slightly boring 70s thriller. The plot was great. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays a cold-blooded French assassin who is in LA to murder a mafioso. After completing his job easily at the mafioso's home, he is intrigued by the fact that the mafioso's family releases wrong and misleading physical specifications about him to the media. He is also pursued by another man (Roy Schneider) who is trying to kill him. Ann Margaret is a nude dancer with a heart of gold who helps Trintignant acquire a passport to return to France.

Trintignant's character is in a state of disarray and he is reticent to American culture while he is on the run - he meets bikers, a Jesus freak and a single mom and her kid with whom he shares a TV dinner. The TV dinner scene was quite good but the scenes with the Jesus freak and the bikers were poorly written.

The two females in the film - Ann Margaret and Angie Dickinson are used as sex objects. There are many nude scenes including a pretty erotic nude lesbian dance inside a bar. The dancer's bodies were painted white! Michel Constantin being dragged by a funeral car across a lawn animates a dreary movie and a ridiculous shootout at the mafioso's funeral.

The parts were better than the sum. Even though it is an English language film, the film has a French feel to it. Maybe you were aiming for a Melville atmosphere, Jacques. But Michel Le Grand's loud funky score, the gaudy locales and the poor writing ruined your ambitious project.

Best Regards, Pimpin.

(6/10)

"Borsalino" director Jacques Deray's grim French mobster melodrama "The Outside Man," starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Ann-Margret, and Roy Scheider, chronicles the trials and tribulations of a Frenchman flown to Los Angeles to kill a wealthy crime czar, Victor Kovacs (Ted de Corsia of "Gunfight at the O. K. Corral"), in his palatial Beverly Hills mansion. Lucien Bellon (Jean-Louis Trintignant of "The Great Silence") isn't a professional contract killer. Instead, plagued by a gambling addiction, he must find a way to pay off his enormous debts. Unfortunately, the only way he can raise enough loot to liquidate his debts is to fly from Paris to Los Angeles and ice a notorious crime lord.

After landing in Los Angeles, Lucien checks into the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The desk clerk hands him a mysterious attaché case along with his room key. In his room, Lucien finds a loaded snub-nosed revolver and an envelope stuffed with cash in the case. Renting a car, Lucien drives out to the Kovacs mansion. The doorman admits him without frisking him for firearms. Victor surprises Lucien then realizes Lucien isn't the man he was expecting. Lucien brandishes his revolver and shoots him dead on the spot with one shot. Earlier, Lucien had emptied the gun in his hotel room and replaced only one bullet instead of the full six. No sooner has Lucien fled the scene of the homicide than an alert circulates about Kovacs's murder. The description of the shooter, however, furnished by Victor's wife Jackie (Angie Dickinson of "Ocean's Eleven") and Victor's son Alex (Umberto Orsini of "La Dolce Vita") doesn't fit Lucien!

While the LAPD struggles to catch the killer, Lucien discovers the Detroit mob has sent an assassin to rub him out. Lenny (Roy Scheider of "Jaws") arrives in town eager to kill Lucien. Fate has a quirky way of intervening on behalf of our protagonist, and Lucien survives three of Lenny's desperate attempts on his life. Meantime, the Frenchman catches up with a bosomy topless bartender, Nancy Robson (Ann-Margret of "Viva Las Vegas"), who agrees to help him get a passport. The dastards who hired Lucien stole both his passport and his plane ticket, so he cannot leave the country. He confers with his Parisian pal Antoine (Michel Constantin of "Violent City") about his predicament over a long-distance phone call. Antoine advises Lucien to look up one of his old girlfriends, Nancy. She arranges for Lucien to buy a forged passport from a cabbie, Karl (Carlo De Mejo of "Teorema"), who can get him one.

Eventually, a naïve Lucien figures out the contract was an inside job, and he served as a mere pawn. Victor's treacherous son Alex had orchestrated Victor's demise. Poised as our protagonist is to leave the country, Lucien has second thoughts and prefers to remain in L. A., so he can discover who set him up. Meantime, Antoine and his bodyguard fly in from Paris to attend Victor's funeral. Probably the most offbeat thing about "The Outside Man" is the funeral itself. When everybody pays their respects to Victor, they find his corpse sitting upright in a chair with a cigar in one hand. What a bizarre way to display an embalmed corpse!

An impromptu gunfight erupts during the funeral when one of Alex's gunsels, Miller (Alex Rocco of "The Godfather") tries to kill Antoine. Instead, Antoine guns down Miller and corners a cowardly Alex playing possum in the casket, finishing Alex off for good. Meantime, Lucien hijacks a hearse. Antoine dies during the getaway from the funeral home but urges Lucien to leave him behind. During the initial gunfire, Lucien himself was wounded, too. As "The Outside Man" concludes, Lucien is sitting behind the steering wheel of the hearse with blood-soaked hands.

This uneven but entertaining crime thriller has its moments. Initially, when Lucien goes on the run, he carjacks a single-mom, Mrs. Barnes (Georgia Engel of "Grown Ups 2"), and forces her at gunpoint to take him to her apartment. Lucien cools his heels there. Mrs. Barnes cooks him supper and her young son, Eric (Jackie Earle Haley of "Watchmen"), wants to know more about him. During a private phone call, Lucien catches the nosy adolescent listening in on his call and slaps him. Meanwhile, every step of the way, Lenny shadows Lucien but fails repeatedly to kill him. At one point, Lucien picks up a hitchhiker who rhapsodizes about Jesus. Cruising up alongside them, Lenny shoots from his car into Lucien's. Miraculously, he misses Lucien but blasts the Jesus freak.

During the rest of the film, Lenny pursues Lucien. He kills the cabbie that provided Lucien with a passport and finally tracks him down to a hotel where he is holed up with Nancy. Their adversarial relationship changes when Lenny decides to team up with Lucien and go to the Kovacs estate. At the last second before they enter the estate, Lenny tries to double-cross the Frenchman, but Lucien kills him with a single shot.

Deray and writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Ian McLellan Hunter complicate matters considerably throughout this brisk, 105-minute thriller. Actually, the filmmakers had not scheduled to shoot "The Outside Man." Unfortunately, the other movie they were going to produce fell apart. Deray's scenarists whipped up this tale in twelve days, and he lensed it before their work permits expired. Composer Michel Legrand garnishes this fish-out-of-water yarn with an interesting orchestral soundtrack that accentuates the action. The abrupt ending with our protagonist parked in the Los Angles river basin with blood on his hands and nowhere to run leaves too many plot threads hanging. Basically, this was 'an inside job' organized by Alex to liquidate his dad Victor using an "Outside Man" from Paris who knew no better.

--that is the embodiment of the stripped-down, lean, hard look of LA 'noir-in-broad-daylight' crime drama of the early 70's. Trintignant plays a 'shades of Camus' hit-man who's imported from France to make a completely impersonal hit on an organized crime figure he does not know; Scheider is the equally stony hit-man hired to kill him (I get a laugh out of the mental picture of these two actors probably having on-set competitions to see which one could remain the most poker-faced throughout the shoot. Tough call as to who'd win). Ann-Margaret is fetching and somewhat pathetic as Trintignant's hooker ex-flame who puts herself in danger to protect him in spite of his apparent coldness and indifference to her; Angie Dickinson is suitably ice-maidish as the crime boss's widow who has her own hand involved in his murder, and Alex Rocco is suitable sleazy as her lover and the boss's heir apparent. There are also some funny bits from Georgia Engel as a dippy housewife who manages to cross the paths of both hit men (and wants to know aloud 'where the TV people are' when she gets questioned by the cops a second time), and quick appearances by John Hillerman and Talia Shire. The ending is a particularly bleak 'nobody wins' scenario that smacks hard of French Existentialism; in fact the film's whole chill sensibility makes it easy to spot the European influence. The old Venice Amusement Pier also makes an effective guest appearance in all its rotting glory. A pretty good film in its own right, and if you're feeling a degree of nostalgia for the period, the backgrounds make for a good dose of the era's look and feel.

I have always loved this film since I discovered it, back in 1981. We don't see such features anymore. I would have never guessed to watch Michel Constantin and Ted De Corsia - the two best heavies for their own movie industry - together in the same film. And nearly in the same sequence. I will also say that Roy Scheider plays here a role, a character which reminds me the one the had in MARATHON MAN, WAGES OF FEAR, L'ATTENTAT, roles where he is not the lead but a character who is important and who also dies before the end.

Very dull hit-man 70's film that is partly inept and slow-going. Jean-Louis Trintignant is a monotonous, wooden hit-man who gets double crossed. He's followed by Roy Scheider, who can't seem to shoot straight. The only reason to sit through this dull film is Ann Margaret, who is super hot in a white wig, looking like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield. Angie Dickinson isn't bad either.

Also it's nice to see Downtown Los Angeles and Venice Beach in their 70's decrepitude (A Venice Beach Amusement Pier in decay, the old, one-level LAX airport, Beverly Wilshire Hotel, skid row, Tower Records on Sunset).

Story is lacking, so is the action, but look out for an assortment of TV and film characters from the era (Jackie Earle Haley, Alex Rocco, Talia Shire as a make-up girl, John Hillerman, etc.).

Just don't expect anything like director Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai (1967).