Donald E. Westlake wrote his Parker crime novels under the name Richard Stark, turning a professional thief into one of the genre’s great antiheroes. He felt The Outfit captured the spirit of those books particularly well, and it’s not hard to see why. First, though, a small clarification: this is the 1973 Robert Duvall movie, not the very different The Outfit from 2022 with Mark Rylance and a very unfortunate tailoring appointment. The two films don’t share much beyond a title and an interest in men who know their jobs.

Earl Macklin (Duvall, Tender Mercies & The Paper) comes out of prison expecting to pick up something resembling his old life. Instead, his girlfriend Bett Harrow (Karen Black, Five Easy Pieces) tells him his brother Eddie has been murdered. The two brothers once robbed a bank that turned out to be controlled by organized crime, and the Outfit has decided nobody gets to embarrass it and walk away. There’s a contract on Earl as well. He could disappear and hope the syndicate loses interest, but that would require a level of patience he doesn’t possess. Instead, he tracks down his old partner Cody (Joe Don Baker, Walking Tall) and proposes a wonderfully direct solution: rob the people who are trying to kill him until they decide to settle the account.

What follows is a series of confrontations with gangsters who aren’t accustomed to being treated like targets. Earl and Cody hit gambling operations, intercept cash, and steadily make themselves the most irritating problem in the organization. At the top sits Mailer (Robert Ryan, The Wild Bunch), an aging mob boss whose authority depends on convincing everyone that resistance is expensive. He’s accustomed to issuing orders from a comfortable distance, and he doesn’t particularly enjoy dealing with a thief who ignores the customary rules of intimidation. Bett gets dragged into the trouble, too, as Earl’s personal vendetta makes it increasingly difficult for anybody close to him to stay out of harm’s way.

Director John Flynn was a longtime fan of the Parker books, and his adaptation benefits from that affection. With uncredited help from Walter Hill, he pares the story down to a series of jobs, threats, and negotiations, dispensing with the usual speeches about what makes a criminal tick. Bruce Surtees shoots the Los Angeles locations with an appropriately weathered look, and Jerry Fielding’s score adds a little sting without trying to make the story larger than it is. Duvall, only a year removed from playing Tom Hagen in The Godfather, gives Macklin the attitude of a man who has spent his life keeping his intentions to himself. He doesn’t waste words, gestures, or ammunition. Baker’s Cody is the perfect counterweight, friendlier and looser on the surface but no less capable when things turn ugly.

It’s also a terrific little gathering of old Hollywood faces. Ryan lends Mailer an exhausted authority in one of his final roles, and noir veterans Marie Windsor, Jane Greer, and Elisha Cook Jr. turn up along the way. Their appearances give the movie a welcome link to the crime pictures that came before it. None of them needs a lengthy introduction; they’ve spent careers teaching audiences how to distrust a face across the table. That lived familiarity suits a story in which almost everybody seems to know somebody they shouldn’t.

Flynn keeps the plotting straightforward, sometimes to a fault. The robberies begin to resemble one another, and Macklin’s motives rarely deepen beyond the initial promise of revenge. Compared with Point Blank, another Parker adaptation that turned a similar premise into something strange and stylized, The Outfit is almost stubbornly plain. Yet that simplicity is part of its character. Duvall and Baker make a convincing criminal partnership, the violence arrives without ceremony, and the movie wastes very little time making excuses for the people we’re following.

MGM gave the film little support in 1973, and it eventually became the kind of title crime-film fans passed around as a discovery. Four years later, Flynn would direct the even tougher Rolling Thunder. You can see his appetite for hard men and unhappy consequences taking shape here. The Outfit may not be the most elaborate heist movie of its decade, but sometimes watching two professionals make a very bad decision with complete confidence is entertainment enough.