The Outside Man

After a family tragedy, Jean-Louis Trintignant was invited by Jacques Deray to make this picture in America aiming for clear your mind aftermaths of sad happenings, actually his character wasn't a hitman properly, he just had debts on games at Paris and had to kill a great mobster at Los Angeles in exchange to be free doing this assignment, sadly after fulfilled his task another real hitman tries kill him before leaving Los Angeles.

Then came up the gorgeous Ann Margret a former owner of a burlesque night club to aid him got a passport to get back to Europe, he soon figures out that such returning won't ensure laissez-passer even in Paris, so he decides stay to settle the things chasing the mastermind that ordering his death.

It's criminally underrated by large majority at IMDB's members in so unusual French Polar, it's has enough action, chasing streets and mainly many twists on the clever plot, also to enhance the offering the producers exposing the sinful nightlife of California on those peppery burlesque environment, fantastic casting and mainly by the Ann-Margret's decollete as the whole shaped body, what a vision of heaven!!

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First watch: 2024 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 8.

After reading the comments here I decided to go see this movie when it played at a revival house. Now that I have seen as much of "The Outside Man" as I could stomach, I'm baffled by these other responses.

What some film buffs will accept in the name of nostalgia for a "Lost LA" knows no bounds. If this movie were set in some other place, no one would ever give it his/her time. It is shot like a TV movie (I'm not entirely convinced that it was *not* a TV movie, given the number of TV actors who appear). It is very, very poorly written, acted, and directed. Shoddy, even. The dialogue is stiff, but not even stiff in a clipped, noirish way, or in a way that could provide camp value. The actors are so wooden that they often wait an extra beat and glance off camera before delivering their responses to one another. The editing is absurd.

The film boils down to a series of vignettes involving our alienated French hit-man encountering and negotiating "LA scenes"--the boring housewife, the biker gang, the jesus-freak, the 'tough' blonde hooker, etc. None of these scenes connects with any other in any significant way. They're all just slices of life in 'gritty' LA, but shot in such a fake way that there is nothing whatsoever of 'the real' about them.

Of course, I'm not really qualified to speak about the movie as a whole, because I walked out. I have now walked out of a grand total of 3 movies in my life. I felt so liberated when I left, though, that it almost made watching the first half an hour or 45 minutes worth it.

Perhaps for many people the nostalgia factor overrides these critiques. I understand nostalgia for old LA, too, but for a city that was in fact entirely different than the LA of today (such as the one portrayed in "Mildred Pierce," say). This movie, however, focuses on LA as a hip, modern city, with rivers of freeways and 6-lane boulevards swamped with traffic. How different this is from today's LA is unclear to me. Sure, one can look at this film and say, "Gee, I remember when that club was still open," or "Oh, I loved that old pier." But these feelings run entirely counter to what this film says about LA: that it doesn't care about people's sentimental attachments to particular places and things, so get out of the way or become part of the pavement.

Let's face it, post-1950 or so, LA became a city defined by rapid change, of plowing under the old so the young citizens of today can make their mark. (Of course, pockets of 'old LA' still remain, and always will; not everything can get plowed under as efficiently as late capitalism would like.) This notion of change defines LA. However, some people cling to nostalgia for a particular era, even if it runs counter to what LA was 30 years ago and is today. This is a typical American set of actions and sentiments: destroy what is in order to bring on something new; glorify this destruction and change while it's happening; regret that we have brought about this change once it has been effected; build monuments to that which we have destroyed; lovingly remember that which has passed because it seems to come from a more innocent time; rebuke ourselves for ever thinking that we should have destroyed what was; repeat.

I swear, in a few years people are going to be saying things like, "I really miss that pocked old parking lot that surrounded the Cinerama Dome."

This dramatic fast pace triller was written by Jean-Claude Carriere and directed by Jacques Derey. It tells the story of Frenchman Lucien Bellon (Jean-Louis Trintignant) a man deeply in debt with the French mob. To settle accounts he agrees to travel to America with the sole task of assassinating a high powered Mob Boss. The assignment goes according to plan with one snag, upon completing his task he discovers he has been targeted by Lenny (Roy Scheider) an American hit man. There are plenty of speedy shootings and get-aways with interesting and secretive meetings which keeps the audience guessing as to who the Bad guys are. Eye candy is provided by beautiful and seductive Ann-Margret and sultry Angie Dickinson. The movie is interesting in that perennial Good guy Roy Scheider plays the heavy and Felice Orlandi nearly always a heavy, plays Anderson a cop. Good entertainment. ****

Bizarre mixture of elements: character study, romance, crime melodrama and action flick. Terrifically filmed on vivid Los Angeles locales by a French director and crew, story follows foreign hit-man on assignment in L.A. being tracked down and targeted for death. Some of the characters here are delicious: Jean-Louis Trintigant is super-cool as the French gunman, Roy Scheider is his nemesis, Ann-Margret sad and desperate as a former flame of Trintigant's boss, Angie Dickinson as the cheating wife of a Bel Air crime czar, Georgia Engel as an innocent housewife who manages to get involved. Subtle--some may say somnambulant--thriller, less frenetic than most American pictures in the crime genre, with emphasis on character detail and emotion. Unusual and worth-watching. **1/2 from ****

Very low key actioner with sprinkles of offbeat humor. French hit man does a job only to find the roles are reversed and he is now the target of another hit man. Trintignant is well cast as a man not only confused with his unusual predicament, but also with southern California culture. There's been many, many films done in Los Angeles, but the excellent location shooting seems to show you a whole new city. Although the film stays very true to it's unique form the downbeat ending could've and should've been avoided. Georgia Engle is a delight as a dumb housewife.