"THE OUTSIDE MAN" **1/2 OUT OF ****

 

“Borsalino” director Jacques Deray’s  French mobster melodrama “The Outside Man,” starring Jean-Louis Trintignant, Ann-Margret, and Roy Scheider, chronicles the trials and tribulations of a Frenchman flown to Los Angeles to kill a wealthy crime czar, Victor Kovacs (Ted de Corsia of “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral”), in his palatial Beverly Hills mansion. Lucien Bellon (Jean-Louis Trintignant of “The Great Silence”) isn’t a professional contract killer. Instead, wrestling with a gambling addiction, he must find a way to pay off his enormous debts. Unfortunately, the only way he can raise sufficient funds to liquidate those debts is to fly from Paris to Los Angeles and ice a notorious crime lord. After landing in Los Angeles, Lucien checks into the luxurious Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The desk clerk hands him a mysterious attaché case along with his room key. In his room, Lucien finds a loaded snub-nosed revolver and an envelope stuffed with cash in the case. Renting a car, Lucien drives out to the Kovacs mansion. The doorman admits him without frisking him for firearms. Victor surprises Lucien then realizes he isn’t the man he was expecting. Lucien brandishes his revolver and shoots him dead on the spot with a single shot. Earlier, Lucien had emptied the cylinder of the gun in his hotel room and replaced only one of the six bullets. No sooner has Lucien fled the scene of the homicide than an alert circulates about Kovacs’s murder. However, the description of the shooter, furnished by Victor's wife Jackie (Angie Dickinson of “Ocean’s Eleven”) and Victor’s son Alex (Umberto Orsini of “La Dolce Vita”) doesn’t fit Lucien!

While the LAPD struggles to catch the killer, Lucien discovers the Detroit mob has sent an assassin to rub him out. Lenny (Roy Scheider of “Jaws”) arrives in town eager to kill Lucien. Fate has a quirky way of intervening on behalf of our protagonist, and Lucien survives three of Lenny’s desperate attempts on his life. Meantime, the Frenchman hooks up with a bosomy topless bartender, Nancy Robson (Ann-Margret of “Viva Las Vegas”), who agrees to help him obtain a passport. The dastards who had hired Lucien have stolen both his passport and his plane ticket, so our protagonist cannot leave the country. Lucien confers with his Parisian friend Antoine (Michel Constantin of “Violent City”) about his predicament during a long-distance phone call. He advises Lucien to find with one of his old girlfriends, Nancy. Happily, she arranges for Lucien to buy a forged passport from a cabbie, Karl (Carlo De Mejo of “Teorema”), who can get him one.

Eventually, a naïve Lucien figures out the killing was an inside job, and he served as a mere pawn. Victor’s greedy wife Jackie and his treacherous son Alex were instrumental in orchestrating Victor’s demise. Poised as our protagonist is to leave the country, Lucien has second thoughts and prefers to remain in L.A., so he can discover who incriminated him. Meantime, Antoine and his bodyguard fly in from Paris to attend Victor’s funeral. Probably the most offbeat thing about “The Outside Man” is the funeral itself. When everybody pays their last respects to Victor, they find his corpse sitting upright in a chair with a cigar in one hand. What a bizarre way to display an embalmed corpse! An impromptu gunfight erupts in the funeral home when one of Alex’s henchmen, Miller (Alex Rocco of “The Godfather”), tries to gun down Antoine. Instead, Antoine guns down Miller and traps a cowardly Alex hiding in a casket, finishing Alex off for good. Meantime, Lucien hijacks a hearse and careens away through the cemetery grounds with Antoine chasing after him. A policeman with a rifle shoots Antoine before he can get into the hearse with Lucien. Antoine tells Lucien to leave without him. Grabbing hole of the rear bumper, a mortally wounded Antoine is dragged behind the hearse until he dies. During the gunfight, Lucien caught a slug himself, too. As “The Outside Man” concludes, Lucien is sitting behind the steering wheel of the hearse with blood-soaked hands. Like Deray's later crime thriller "Three Men to Kill" (1980), the protagonist dies in the end just as Lucien dies here in "The Outside Man."

This uneven but entertaining crime thriller has its moments. Initially, when Lucien goes on the lam, he carjacks a single-mom, Mrs. Barnes (Georgia Engel of “Grown Ups 2”), and forces her at gunpoint to take him to her residence. Lucien cools his heels there. Mrs. Barnes cooks him supper and her presumptuous young son, Eric (Jackie Earle Haley of “Watchmen”), wants to know more about him. During a private phone call, Lucien catches the disruptive adolescent listening in on his call and slaps the stuffing out of him. Meanwhile, every step of the way, Lenny shadows Lucien but fails repeatedly to kill him. At one point, Lucien picks up a hitchhiker who rhapsodizes about Jesus. Cruising up alongside them, Lenny shoots from his car into Lucien’s. Miraculously, he misses Lucien and blasts the Jesus freak. During the rest of the film, Lenny pursues Lucien. He kills the cabbie that provided Lucien with a passport and finally tracks him down to a hotel where he is holed up with Nancy. Their adversarial relationship changes when Lenny decides to team up with Lucien and go to the Kovacs estate. At the last second before they enter the estate, Lenny tries to double-cross the Frenchman, but Lucien kills him with a single shot.

Deray and writers Jean-Claude Carrière and Ian McLellan Hunter complicate matters considerably throughout this brisk, 105-minute thriller. Actually, the filmmakers had not scheduled to shoot “The Outside Man” but another movie. Unfortunately, the other movie they were set to produce fell apart. Deray’s scenarists whipped up this tale in a matter of twelve days, and he lensed it before their work permits expired. Composer Michel Legrand garnishes this fish-out-of-water tale with an interesting orchestral soundtrack that accentuates the action. The abrupt ending with our protagonist parked in the Los Angles river basin with blood on his hands and nowhere to run leaves too many plot threads hanging. Basically, this was ‘an inside job’ organized by Alex to liquidate his dad Victor using an “Outside Man” from Paris who knew no better.