(Un Homme est mort). Jacques Deray is the post-Melville master of the série noire movie, and The Outside Man may be his masterpiece. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays “the outside man,” a hit man dispatched from Paris to Los Angeles to assassinate the local mob boss, but his employers have set him up to take a hit from inside man Roy Scheider. He becomes an involuntary tourist, dependent on the kindness of strangers, notably Ann-Margret, the manager of a topless bar. Stripped of his passport and his rental car, he must make his way through a city that is portrayed without false glamour, and it seems that the filmmakers are discovering the city along with their protagonist. In The Outside Man, Los Angeles is a city of constant motion where the anonymous public spaces of streets and parking lots provide more safety than the private spaces of homes and apartments. In a final reversal of our conventional psychic geography, a funeral parlor becomes the site of a climactic, paroxysmal gun battle.