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Category Archives: Peter Yates
Parker on the screen #2: The Split (1968)

Several years ago on this site I referred to the 1968 film The Split as a Blaxsploitation style riff on Donald Westlake’s character, Parker. I have seen other reviewers make the same mistake, I suspect mainly on the basis that it was an action film starring a black man, ex-pro-footballer turned actor, Jim Brown, in the role of McClain (as the character of Parker is called). Not only did The Split appear several years before that cycle of films kicked off (1971 with the release of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft), but it displays none of the extravagant sexual and violent action stylings of that canon.
The second film in my series of Parker on the screen, The Split is a workmanlike neo noir based on Donald Westlake’s Parker novel, The Seventh. It is no Point Blank. I don’t even think it is as good as the 1967 French film, Mise a Sac, based on Westlake’s The Score, my first entry in the Parker on the screen series. But neither is it as bad as lot of people think.
The heist in The Seventh – stealing the ticket takings from a stadium football game – is over in the first dozen or pages of the book.… Read more
Posted in 60s American crime films, Blaxsploitation, Crime film, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Ernest Borgnine, Film Noir, Gene Hackman, Heist films, Jim Brown, Neo Noir, Peter Yates
Tagged Diahann Carroll, Donald Sutherland, Donald Westlake aka Richard Stark, Ernest Borgnine, Gordon Flemyng, heist films, Irwin Winkler, Jack Klugman, James Whitmore, Jim Brown, Julie Harris, Point Blank (1967), Quincy Jones, Robert Chartoff, Robert Sabaroff, The Seventh (1966), The Split (1968), Warren Oates