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."

"The Outside Man" is one of those films that I would classify as a "guilty pleasure." I first saw it as a child of eleven on the second half of a double bill with "Little Big Man" at a retro drive-in in 1974. This is exactly the type of film my parents would have walked out on in fifteen minutes, since my Dad is a strict law-and-order type and likes films where there are good guys and bad guys and the good guys win. Lucky for me, this film played FIRST, so they were stuck sitting through it. I, for one, loved it because it was fast-paced and action-packed (and very violent) and couldn't have cared less that everyone in it was a crook. (I still don't.) It's one of my favorite films of the '70's and remains one I watch again and again."The Outside Man"'s plot is simple: A French hit man (Jean-Louis Trantignant) travels to Los Angeles to kill a mobster. Upon completion of his assignment, he returns to his hotel to find he has been checked out and that his belongings (wallet and passport included) are gone. Upon leaving the hotel, he is ambushed by an American assassin (played with icy menace by Roy Scheider, a million miles from his "Jaws" sheriff), who has obviously been hired to kill him. After an exciting chase through the streets of L.A., and a brief respite in the apartment of a dippy widow and her smart-aleck son ("The Mary Tyler Moore Show"'s Georgia Engel and a very young Jackie Earle Haley), he contacts his boss and is told to find the boss's ex-moll Nancy Robson (Ann-Margret). He meets her in a topless bar and she agrees to help him get the hell out of Dodge. This sets up a series of chases and shootouts as she tries to help him leave town while he dodges Scheider's bullets.Sure, this film is at times as trashy as it sounds. But it's also highly entertaining and has a top cast which also includes Angie Dickinson in the small role of the gangster's widow. In spite of the fact that he's playing a cold-blooded killer, Trantignant actually elicits a certain amount of audience sympathy and the mostly silent Scheider (who probably has five lines of dialog, total) is a hair-raising villain. Dickinson is appropriately shady and Engel at times very funny (and touching) as the victimized housewife. And then there's the eye-popping Ann-Margret, who I believe filmed this before her near-fatal Vegas accident: Her plunging neckline, blond wig and mini-dresses alone are worth the price of rental. Add at least two exciting extended chase sequences and a uniquely filmed shootout in a mortuary (where the mobster has been embalmed in a sitting position, cigar in hand) and you have a highly entertaining melodrama in which everyone eventually gets their comeuppance.All-in-all, "The Outside Man" is a highly entertaining film lark from an era where films were actually distinguishable from each other, and didn't all look like yesterday's recycled trash. *** (out of *****)

The great chase on the VENICE AMUSEMENT PIER allows an old Santa Monica resident like myself to see the old pier before it was demolished. For years it sat, rusted, half standing due to fire and neglect. It was on the Santa Monica and venice border. It was broken into many times, as it was a good location to fish off of, or to go lurking, if one were into checking out what people enjoyed decades earlier. The Beach Boys played in the pink building you see in the film. The piers below, where you see Ann Margaret, you see those piers in THE DOORS video, THE UNKOWN SOLDIER. Also, this pier was used in the last episode of the 1960's TV action series, THE FUGITIVE. Richard Kimble tracked down and caught the 'one armed man' in that abandoned pier.

Very low key actioner with sprinkles of offbeat humor. French hit man does a job only to find the roles are reversed and he is now the target of another hit man. Trintignant is well cast as a man not only confused with his unusual predicament, but also with southern California culture. There's been many, many films done in Los Angeles, but the excellent location shooting seems to show you a whole new city. Although the film stays very true to it's unique form the downbeat ending could've and should've been avoided. Georgia Engle is a delight as a dumb housewife.