Shut Up and Drive
Robert Duvall moves down the hallway and catches the goon off-guard. Duvall asks him at gunpoint about how many people are at the poker game, and if there’re any more guns. “They’re not paying you enough not to tell me.” Duvall marches him to the fire escape, and right before getting knocked out, the hired hand says, “Make it on the left side, will ya? I got a bad right ear.” Duvall pistol-whips him, and the man’s glasses fall in slow motion down the side of the building. It’s obligatory, another day on the job.
John Flynn’s radical 1973 crime film The Outfit often has Duvall’s Earl Macklin intentionally highlighting the violent absurdity of his own profession. Macklin gets out of jail to find out his brother got hit, and it turns out the bank they nabbed was run by the Outfit, which is enacting revenge. Macklin regains control of the situation after hitting the Outfit-run poker game, and starts in on a cat-and-mouse game with its leader, Mailer (Robert Ryan), demanding $250,000 in compensation for his brother’s death. When Macklin tries to bring his brother’s widow the cash from the poker game, she wants no part of it—she thinks Earl should’ve gotten killed instead of her husband, who just wanted a peaceful life. Besides, she says that Earl doesn’t even know what he wants with the money to begin with.
Earl’s scorched-earth robberies against the Outfit can be explained about as logically as Lee Marvin’s nihilistic crusade against the top echelons of LA crimes just to get back the $93,000 in Point Blank. And like Point Blank, or the burn-it-down ending of Michael Mann’s Thief, Macklin’s menacing of the Outfit makes sense emotionally. “Send a guy out to kill somebody, maybe his feelings get hurt,” Macklin tells the Outfit Lieutenant Menner (Timothy Carey) while he’s robbing him at the poker game. “That’s no way to look at it. It’s nothing personal,” Menner assures him about the hit he put out. Macklin shoots Menner in the hand for burning cigarettes on his girlfriend.
What’s interesting about the use of violence that in The Outfit (or Point Blank, or Thief), is that the act of sending a bullet through a body doesn’t ultimately feel cathartic in its vengeance, and instead it’s only a momentary, masturbatory act that leaves cooling streaks of blood on the walls. The real jubilation is with the act of robbery itself; it’s not the physical killing or maiming they’re chasing, but that shift of power, like how a single gun can change the dynamic of a whole room. To borrow a phrase from a different Michael Mann film, the action is the juice—Earl and Cody (Joe Don Baker) cheer and laugh after barely getting out of a heist intact. They’re not in it for the cash they take out, but the thrill of the ride. They’re cowboys.
When Macklin first catches up to Mailer, the Outfit leader calls him a wannabe Dillinger, a small-time robber with no scope. He tells Macklin that his operation brings in that $250,000 he’s asking for by noon on a good day. Macklin retorts that it will make it easy for Mailer to part with it. Mailer sets up an ambush at the drop—again, it’s all just business, at least to Mailer. Mailer seemingly takes no pleasure in what he does at all, instead sitting idly annoyed at his underlings’ fuck-ups and trying to accumulate wealth to avoid any inconvenience. To Mailer, the highest order of living is lounging beside the tennis court while a servant brings him iced tea. To Macklin, robbery’s life, but he still knows how everyone else approaches the game. Macklin might say he’s just there for his $250,000, but that’s only an excuse to get into the action. The door guys and the henchmen, however, Macklin proves are just in it for the money.
After finally gunning Mailer down, his girlfriend confronts Macklin, “Damn you. Why’d you have to kill him? He owed me money.” Macklin tries to flee with Cody, who’s too wounded from the fight to stay on his feet and has to rest. A half dozen goons storm in. “Stay out of it. He’s dead, you’re unemployed,” Macklin tells them. Amazingly, they stand down and leave. While Macklin says he’s in it for the money, he knows that really no one is willing to put up the real life-or-death fight just for that. Because of that, Macklin and Cody are able to sneak out, stealing an ambulance and, in their disbelief, get away. They’re laughing again at what they were able to pull off. Cody looks up and says, “Earl, the good guys always win.”