If you ask Leonard Burling why he left London and traveled to Chicago, of all places, to set up his little suit-making shop, he’ll tell you that it was because the Savile Row tailoring business was under attack. “Oh, the war?” you’d ask, with sudden awareness that WWII wasn’t all that long ago. “No,” he’d reply with the slightest of smiles. “Blue jeans.”
That’s the type of man Leonard is. He’s unassuming. Reserved. He’s as quiet and precise as you’d want a British suit maker to be. A man with cutting and sewing skill and just enough wit to humbly keep you out of his business while assuring you that he has no interest of being in yours.
In fact, that’s exactly the type of man that mob boss Roy Boyle is happy to help out. Not only is the L Burling tailor shop a nice place for some of Boyle’s, uh, business dealings, Leonard himself is the perfect man to turn the cops away if they come sniffing around.
It’s a nicely balanced business arrangement.
Trouble is, having mob guys picking up deliveries in the back of your shop isn’t always good business. Mob guys have a rough edge. Sometimes they have a bloody edge, too.
So when Boyle’s son, Ritchie. comes staggering in during the middle of the night, and gunman Francis demands that Leonard pick up his needle and thread to sew up a hole in Richie’s side, things get a little out of hand.
There’s a certain package that scores of cops and crowds of rival gang members are looking for, you see. And Leonard is told to watch it and the wounded man now lying on his fabric cutting table. Otherwise, Francis will return and use the gun in his hand on a certain English tailor.
As Francis storms out into the night, Leonard is left once more to his quiet thoughts in his quiet shop.
There are times when he wonders if making blue jeans wouldn’t be easier.
Leonard and his young female receptionist, Mable, have something of a father-daughter relationship, though neither would openly admit that. Both find some familial care and connection—the kind that they either lost or never had in the first place—in each other. That caring concern causes Leonard to put himself in harm’s way to try and protect Mable when mob guys want to physically hurt her.
Ultimately, Mable wants to run off and start a new life. She offers to protect Leonard and to take him with her. But he refuses, wanting her to enjoy the prime of her life without worrying over the waning years of his.
A mob guy talks briefly of evolution separating men from monkeys.
It’s implied that Mable may be sleeping with a mobster.
“I want so bad to be good,” Leonard says at one point. But bad and ugly things swirl all around him. Not only does Leonard have to use needle and thread to stitch up a wounded man (the camera eyeing the process), but a number of people are killed or wounded in his shop, too.
A man is shot in the arm, another in the back. Someone gets shot in the throat and falls to the floor to gurgle and die in a large pool of blood. We watch a man frantically try to mop up the bloody evidence with swaths of suit fabric. Someone is stabbed in the neck with a large pair of scissors.
A woman gets manhandled and slapped to the floor. Leonard is hit in the head with a pistol butt. We hear of people being ambushed and murdered. Someone tells the story of his wife and daughter dying in a fire. And we see a raging fire started.
Protagonist Leonard isn’t a profane man, but everyone around him seems to be. Dialogue includes some 50 f-words, nearly a dozen s-words and one or two uses of “b–ch” and “d–n.”
We hear four combinations of God’s name with “d–n.” And several exclamations of “pr–k.” The British crudity “bloody” is used once.
It’s 1956, and nearly everyone smokes in a number of scenes. In spite of Leonard’s warnings, Mable goes out drinking with a mob guy and comes in hungover the next morning.
Lies abound as various people betray others.
Knowing that this is an R-rated film about an English suit maker and his rickrack relationship with mobsters in 1950’s Chicago, you might suspect that it would come in dripping nasty language and gore. And indeed, it does.
What you might not expect is how The Outfit would be so well stitched together. Like the Savile Row suit cutter and the fabric we watch him chalk and craft, this pic is perfectly measured. Its cinematic movements around a single tailor shop set are finely constructed. Its dialogue is crisp and appealing to the ear. And its tense and surprising story secrets are revealed one layer at a time, right up to the closing credits.
There are no spiritual elements here to speak of. But the film is nevertheless an immersive story of a fallen soul reaching for some form of new beginning and redemption.
The problem, of course, is all those tossed f-bombs and gaping wounds. They leave a stain.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
