Verdict
Summary
A cold and calculating thriller about two soulless hitmen, The Outside Man is a cool case study of two very unsympathetic antagonists / protagonists who do nothing to make you like them. Director Jacques Deray did an admirable job in conveying the almost reptilian aspects of a life of a contract killer.
Plot:
After a French hitman successfully kills a mob boss in Beverly Hills, another hitman goes after him so that there are no loose ends.
Review:
French hitman Lucien (Jean-Louis Trintignant) arrives in Los Angeles and goes about his business: He beelines it for Beverly Hills, knocks on the door of the home of a well-known mob boss, and assassinates him, easy as pie. But there’s a big problem: Lucien’s employer has also hired another hitman named Lenny (played by Roy Scheider) to kill him so that there are no loose ends. Lucien is a true pro and manages to evade Lenny, sometimes by the skin of his teeth, but the streets of Los Angeles over the next few days and nights are going to smell like burning rubber and gunpowder as the two hitmen go at it. Lucien makes a few quick connections to help him get a new passport – namely, a stripper named Nancy (Ann-Margret) – and a few others, but Lenny is an intrepid pro as well and keeps just a heartbeat’s pace behind Lucien at every step. Once Lucien is able to get his bearings, he manages to turn the tables on the mob, but with so many cards stacked against him, he might not make it back to Paris in one piece …
A cold and calculating thriller about two soulless hitmen, The Outside Man is a cool case study of two very unsympathetic antagonists / protagonists who do nothing to make you like them (especially Trintignant, whose character kidnaps a woman and slaps her young son – played by Jackie Earl Haley – around for a minor infraction). The film has a significant amount of built-up tension that gets released in fits and spurts, and the violent climax set at a wake is a doozy. Margret is super sexy in her role, while Angie Dickinson has a supporting part as the slain mobster’s wife. The film has a very minimalist score by Michel Legrand, and director Jacques Deray did an admirable job in conveying the almost reptilian aspects of a life of a contract killer.
Kino Lorber brings The Outside Man to Blu-ray in a newly restored 4K scan, and offers two discs with two versions of the film to watch: The English language version is 112 minutes, while the French language version (titled Un Homme est mort) runs 111 minutes. There are two different trailers, plus an audio commentary by three film historians to listen to.
