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The Outside Man

The Outside Man

Crime · Thriller · 1972

A French hit man is hired by a crime family to end the life of a rival mobster, but things fall apart when the boss who hired him is killed.

Movie details

The Outside Man

“If you kill the most powerful man in organized crime, they've got the rest of your life to get you.”

1972 Crime · Thriller 1h 51m

Critical arithmetic

The consensus, allegedly.

IMDb

6.5 / 10

1.6K votes

Rotten Tomatoes

40 %

Tomatometer

TMDB

6.2 / 10

Community rating

External scores via OMDb · CC BY-NC 4.0. Values normalized for display; availability varies by title.

A French hit man is hired by a crime family to end the life of a rival mobster, but things fall apart when the boss who hired him is killed.

CriticWise case file

What this film says about your taste.

Not a recommendation score. A measure of how closely the film’s taste signals resemble yours.

The archetype split

Who fights over The Outside Man?

The split comes from the same five-axis model used by the test, not audience ratings or review sentiment.

Taste neighbourhood

Nearby on the taste map.

TMDB supplies the candidates. CriticWise reorders them by craft, strangeness, prestige, emotion, and pace.

Burn Out

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In Paris, a gold smuggler is at war with other local gangsters who want piece of the action. Then the mob shows up and makes things worse. And an undercover US Treasury Department agent is trying to infiltrate the smuggling business.

The Butcher

The Butcher

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An unlikely friendship between a dour, working class butcher and a repressed schoolteacher coincides with a grisly series of Ripper-type murders in a provincial French town.

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A sleazy Paris nightclub owner and ex-detective flies to Hong Kong to rescue the young son of a friend murdered by the Chinese mob.

Le Samouraï

Le Samouraï

Crime · 1967

After carrying out a flawlessly planned hit, Jef Costello, a contract killer with samurai instincts, finds himself caught between a persistent police investigator and a ruthless employer, and not even his armor of fedora and trench coat can protect him.

The Man Who Cheated Himself

The Man Who Cheated Himself

Crime · 1950

A veteran homicide detective who has witnessed his socialite girlfriend kill her husband sees his inexperienced brother assigned to the case.

The Blue Gardenia

The Blue Gardenia

Crime · 1953

Upon waking up to the news that the man she’d gone on a date with the previous night has been murdered, a young woman with only a faint memory of the night’s events begins to suspect that she murdered him while attempting to resist his advances.

The Crime Is Mine

The Crime Is Mine

Crime · 2023

In 1930s Paris, Madeleine, a pretty, young, penniless, and talentless actress, is accused of murdering a famous producer. Helped by her best friend, Pauline, a young, unemployed lawyer, she is acquitted on the grounds of self-defense. A new life of fame and success begins, until the truth comes out.

No Name on the Bullet

No Name on the Bullet

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When hired killer John Gant rides into Lordsburg, the town's folk become paranoid as each leading citizen has enemies capable of using the services of a professional killer for personal revenge.

A Gang Story

A Gang Story

Crime · 2011

After growing up in a poor gypsy camp, Edmond Vidal, aka Momon, has retained a sense of family, unfailing loyalty and pride in his origins. Most of all, he has remained friends with Serge Suttel, with whom he first discovered prison life - for stealing cherries. The two of them inevitably got involved in organized crime. The team they formed, the Ganf Des Lyonnais, made them the most notorious armed robbers of the early 1970s. Their irresistible rise ended in 1974 with a spectacular arrest. Today, as he nears 60, Momon would like to forget that part of his life. He has found peace by retiring from the "business". He tends to his wife Janou, who suffered so in the past, and to his children and grandchildren, all of whom have great respect for this man of simple and universal values, so clear-headed and full of kindness. But then Serge Suttel, who has disowned nothing of his past, comes back into the picture.

Where it lives

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Names above the title

The people responsible.

Directed by

Jacques Deray

Written by

Jacques Deray · Jean-Claude Carrière · Ian McLellan Hunter

Jean-Louis Trintignant

Jean-Louis Trintignant

Lucien Bellon

Ann-Margret

Ann-Margret

Nancy Robson

Roy Scheider

Roy Scheider

Lenny

Angie Dickinson

Angie Dickinson

Jackie Kovacs

Georgia Engel

Georgia Engel

Jane

Felice Orlandi

Felice Orlandi

Anderson

Carlo De Mejo

Carlo De Mejo

Karl

Court is in session

Put The Outside Man on trial.

Two incompatible taste archetypes. One film. Read the arguments, then issue a completely binding cultural ruling.

The defence The Big-Idea Head

“Its refusal to behave is the point.”

The strange choices create the kind of friction that follows you out of the theatre and into the argument.

The prosecution The Popcorn Loyalist

“Oddness is not depth.”

A film can break every rule and still leave nothing behind but the memory of how hard it tried to be singular.