The French director Jacques Deray had an international hit with the period gangster film Borsalino, starring Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo. That probably helps account for his getting to make The Outside Man, a thriller whose special appeal derives in part from its outsider's look at both Los Angeles and the kinds of movies that grow there. The movie, whose script is credited to Deray, Jean-Claude Carrière (who also worked on Borsalino as well as Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Return of Martin Guerre, and Godard's Every Man for Himself) and Ian McLellan Hunter (an English writer best known for serving as a front for the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo on Roman Holiday), is notable for being the only movie I know of to lure Jean-Louis Trintignant to the States. (The only other English-language production I've ever seen him in, 1983's Under Fire, was set in Nicaragua and shot in Mexico.)
Trintignant plays a hit man who is seen arriving in L.A. and taking a cab from the airport to the accompaniment of a blaxploitation-worthy song, with a vocalist named Joe Morton braying a catalog of the never-ending headaches that go with being an outside man. (Despite extensive research, I have been unable to determine whether this is the Joe Morton, star of stage and screen. But based on the sound of the singer's voice and the state of Morton's career circa 1972, I will list the possibility that it is him as "plausible" until given reason to believe otherwise.) He has been flown in to dispatch a leathery old gangster (played, in his final performance, by the veteran movie tough guy Ted de Corsia, of such second-string noir classics as The Naked City, The Enforcer, and The Big Combo), a task he performs before the movie has hit the fifteen minute mark. For a minute there I thought this was going to be one short movie. Luckily, Trintignant has been hired by the kind of people who think that allowing the smart professional killer who has done the job you flew him in from Paris to do simply get on the next plane and go back home makes less sense than hiring Roy Scheider to run all over creation trying to kill him. No wonder that former gangsters ranging from George Raft to Henry Hill in professional experience have had no trouble making sense of how they do things in Hollywood.
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