'The Outfit' Starring Robert Duvall Was Overshadowed by 'The Godfather'

Robert Duvall will forever be remembered for his work in the first two Godfather movies, and that legacy helped overshadow The Outfit, his other slick ’70s gangster film. Directed by John Flynn, The Outfit follows Duvall as Earl Macklin, a hard‑boiled gangster who emerges from a 27‑month sentence to find his brother murdered by the Chicago mob and soon realizes he is being hunted.

An ambush at a motel forces him onto the offensive against one of America’s most powerful crime organizations. Like The Godfather, The Outfit is a book adaptation, loosely based on the novel by Richard Stark, the pseudonym of Donald E. Westlake. Charlton Heston read the script before Duvall was cast and later wrote he might have erred in passing on it.

Critics admired the film — Roger Ebert called it a “classy action gangster picture,” and Quentin Tarantino wrote a chapter about it in his book Cinema Speculation — but the movie arrived at the worst possible time, trapped between the first Godfather and its sequel, and it never built major buzz.

United States, Chicago

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