Joe Don Baker died on May 7th at 89. I didn’t know until an obituary in the Guardian a few days ago. Baker had a long career beginning in TV drama in the late 1960s and gradually building through small roles across feature films. He had a big success as the lead in Walking Tall, an independent film from 1973 in which he played a real life character, a small town sheriff in Tennessee. In the same year he appeared in Charley Varrick and this film, The Outfit. Add in his secondary role as Steve McQueen’s brother in Peckinpah’s Junior Bonner a year earlier and this was a golden period for him. Later he was very successful in the UK in the TV serial, The Edge of Darkness (1985).

Robert Duvall and Karen Black, iconic lead actors for the 1970s. At this point, press photos (at least in the UK) were often still in black and white for newspaper printing. Ms Black looks stunning in this posed shot.

These titles were all mentioned in the obituary and I remembered The Outfit as an excellent crime film that impressed me greatly at the time. I saw the film on release in the UK in March 1974 in a double bill with Westworld. I couldn’t remember The Outfit in any detail when I saw it referenced in Baker’s obituary so I rented it from Apple and it proved as good as I expected. It’s a taught revenge thriller headed by Robert Duvall who is released from prison to find that his brother has been killed and that he is next on the list. It seems that the bank job he carried out with his brother before his prison stretch was owned by the ‘Outfit’ an organised crime group headed by Mailer (Robert Ryan). Duvall’s character Earl Macklin is determined to avenge his brother and to take $250,000 from Ryan. He is met from prison by his girlfriend Bett Harrow (Karen Black) and he seeks out an old buddy Jack Cody (Joe Don Baker). The Outfit are already on to the trio. That’s the plot in a nutshell. Essentially the narrative is a succession of well thought out attacks on the Outfit’s operations, culminating in a direct attack upon Mailer at his well-guarded mansion. The plot outline makes the film sound a routine crime drama. It is certainly a crime drama picture but a very good one for a number of reasons.

Joe Don Baker as Jack Cody, like Duvall as Earl Macklin in the clothes of a working man for a surprise raid.

The Outfit was directed by John Flynn (1932-2007) at the early peak of his career. It was his third film following The Sergeant with Rod Steiger in 1968 and The Jerusalem File in 1972, an Israeli-US co-production, written by Troy Kennedy Martin and featuring a British-Israeli cast with photography by Raoul Coutard. To complete the run, Rolling Thunder (1977) was a Vietnam vet revenge drama scripted by Paul Schrader. After this run, which attracted strong casts, creative talent and scripts, Flynn’s career stalled and the highlights seem to have been TV films rather than cinema features which never achieved the same standards as the earlier films (at least as far as the IMDb ratings suggest).

Robert Ryan as Mailer with Joanna Cassidy as Rita, his wife.
Sheree North as the disaffected wife of a minor character, a character there simply to test Jack’s self-control.

There is an interesting interview with John Flynn here in which Flynn says that the writer of the original novel he adapted, Donald E. Westlake (in his guise as ‘Richard Stark’), told him that it was “one of his favourites of all the films based on his novels”. The film was made for MGM and the other significant names on the team include Jerry Fielding as music composer. He was known for his complex music tracks on his work for Eastwood and Peckinpah. For me the best musical moment in the film is Anita O’Day singing the Cole Porter song ‘I Concentrate on You’ in the background as Macklin sets up a raid in a bar owned by the Outfit. Elsewhere, Fielding sets up the tension very well. Bruce Surtees as DoP also worked with Peckinpah and later for Eastwood. With these kinds of collaborators, Flynn might expect a solid production but it is the cast that really stands out here. There have been suggestions that the film was at one point envisaged as a form of 1940s crime film, something like the concept of a ‘neo-noir’ – an updating that preserved elements of characterisation, dialogue and ‘feel’. I see it as a resolutely 70s picture with a fairly rundown US and all those terrible cars. I know there are people who like all those Detroit products with the long bonnets (‘hoods) and boots (trunks) but they were gas guzzlers with poor handling just waiting to be crashed. I think the Japanese and the Germans did Americans a favour selling them cars more suited to the period. I don’t really know all the bit players but a trio stand out with Elisha Cook turning up as a counter-hand in a diner, Jane Greer as Macklin’s sister-in-law and Marie Windsor as a bartender – the first two were icons of film noir in the 1940s and Marie Windsor was one of several young women awarded the title of ‘Queen of the Bs’. The tragedy about the film is the terrible sexism and misogyny. That’s the seventies I guess with both Karen Black and another uncredited woman getting punched in the face and both Sheree North and a young Joanna Cassidy as Mailer’s wife Rita are presented as simply to be considered as sex objects. To be fair, Sheree North is more of a potential vamp who interrupts ‘men’s work’ but poor Joanna has nothing to do except pout.

Jane Greer as the widow of Earl’s brother – a woman who makes the sensible decision to grieve rather than deal with Earl
Elisha Cook, like Jane Greer a reminder of 1940s noirs

So the women are presented badly but Macklin and Cody are strong characters and as contemporary reviewers remarked, Duvall and Baker fitted the roles of the male buddy movie, popular at this time. Duvall is hard and controlled with Baker as seemingly softer and more inclined towards humour, but they make a great couple. The other strengths of the narrative are the intelligent approaches to the various confrontations in which the duo defeat the Outfit’s gunmen by careful planning and calmness under fire, in one case escaping by setting of the fire alarm – no stupid heroics, just quick thinking. The only real let up is the final scene with a ‘happy ending’ of sorts, reportedly demanded by MGM. Some critics called the film a ‘B movie’. It isn’t, at 103 minutes it’s definitely an ‘A’, especially with that cast and crew. The programme I watched in 1974 was a double ‘A’ feature, an indicator of the cinema’s attempt to hang onto its audience. Some contemporary critics like Vincent Canby thought it was just a TV movie. I do wonder what he was on to see something as ‘hard’ as this on TV in 1973. In my view this sits alongside an Anthony Mann crime film from the 1940s or a Robert Aldrich from the 1950s or 1960s. I hope it gets a restoration and a Blu-ray release with some decent extras.

The Outfit is definitely an important film in the fine career of Joe Don Baker

Here is a ‘Warner Classics’ long clip from the film with two of the best scenes – Warner Bros. own the MGM archive from this period I think: