Film Summary DXXXI (The Outfit)

The Outfit might be the most basic 1970s crime film I've ever seen. And I love it for that.
The film doesn't pretend to be bigger than it is or have some misleading message about how crime doesn't pay.
It just wants to give you a story about a guy robbing a bunch of monsters because they wronged him in some way.

So Robert Duvall plays a criminal who's just getting out of prison. He's being taken to a motel by his girlfriend and involved in the assassination attempt.
 Afterwards he finds out that his girlfriend had set him up but she's very distraught about the whole thing.
He's a guy with little to nothing to lose because his brothers already dead.
So he decides to take them (the Mafia) on directly.
After all, it was robbing one of their banks that got them in jail to begin with.
So essentially he's a guy with a mission with little to lose.
He has a girlfriend but at some point she'll end up dying. And then he just becomes a suicidal man who needs to take care of the mob boss just to prove a point.
And unlike other Mafia films he succeeds as goal and gets away.

We also have Joe Don Baker who plays his second hand man in the film. He has this ridiculous accent which I can only describe as a halfway decent Elvis impersonation.
He miraculously survives this film as well.
Even though this movie is very formulaic and its structure it was overall impressed that neither of the main characters died.
Usually in films like this one of these guys has to bite the bullet at the end just to raise the steaks. 
But we don't get any of that. Instead we get a pretty clever scenario where they evade police activity after blowing up a chunk of a mansion owned by the mobster they were trying to rob and or kill.

And that's it.
It's a very straightforward movie. We get a little bit of setup as to how these guys acquire weapons and a few of their minor heists they perform just to keep the pressure up so the mafia so they'll pay their Ransom.
But otherwise we don't see anything else.
It's just a straightforward action flick and if you like 1970s criminal movies you'll probably find something good here.
It's Robert Duvall who's just a lot of fun to watch and he gets the play the tough but sincere criminal lead. A role that I don't see him playing in movies after this too much.