PimpinAinttEasy 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)

JasparLamarCrabb 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.

omit0 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."

jjcremin Being a native of Los Angeles, it's great a treat to see a overview of the city in 1973 supposedly from the plane to brings Trintignant. There are shots of "The Classic Cat", a club that no longer exists on Sunset Blvd. The chase scene filmed in Venice, CA, are also places that no longer exist as most of the development was still under construction. The music score is by Michel Legrand, whose "Umbrellas in Chernburg" is classic, here a little jarring, maybe intentional. Trintignant plays a hit man from France, who does commit cold blooded murder, so he's a bad guy. Roy Schneider, pre-Jaws, plays an even more gum chewing, sadistic killer after Trintignant.Ann Magret, at this time, was having a difficult time having just recently lost her father in real life. She plays her part well, but it is unclear why her charactor would go out on a limb for Jean-Louis T., as his charactor treats her with sheer indifference. Angie Dickerson is a 70's babe that gives A.M. competition in the eye candy department.The shoot out scene at the end of the movieis quite weird, the corpse in the funeral parlor displayed in a sitting position with cigar in hand and Trintigant's cohort being dragged by a hearse through the graveyard.A 3 out of 5.