Time Capsule: The Split (1968)

When discussing Parker adaptations in a 1988 interview for The Armchair Detective magazine, Donald Westlake famously recalled a friend quipping, “so far, the character’s been played by a white man, a black man, and a woman. I think the character lacks definition.” To that effect, The Split (1968) starring Jim Brown as the Parker character (named McClain this time around) is remembered as a solid heist film but nothing to write home about. The average crime film enthusiast is hardly likely to remember the movie at all, and the average Parker fan has relegated this adaptation of The Seventh (1966) to the same rank as the oft-forgotten – and never beloved – Made in U.S.A (1966).

However, the film is remarkable for a number of reasons. First and foremost, it is one of the rare Parker adaptations that’s got nothing to do with The Hunter. Secondly, it’s got an absolutely stacked supporting cast with the likes of Gene Hackman, Donald Sutherland, Diahann Carroll, and Ernest Borgnine among many others. The first half of the movie, and especially the football stadium heist, is also effectively a word-for-word adaptation of the seventh novel in the series.

But Jim Brown is the real star of the film. Like Roger Ebert said in his review of The Split in the Chicago Sun-Times, “Brown looks like a Bogart type: tough, cynical, quiet-spoken, a loner.” Maybe Jim Brown’s McClain has a little more overt warmth to him than Parker ever does, but he’s got the physicality of the character, the good looks that account for the sheer amount of female attention (regardless of returned interest), and that picture-perfect portrayal doesn’t work in spite of a black man playing Parker – it works because of it. Above all, Parker is an outsider, and a visual adaptation surely demands that quality to be made evident through race and/or gender. If his demeanor is kept intact, nothing changes about the character on an internal level, just about the way the world interacts with him. That is an aspect The Split excels at beyond belief.

With that in mind, we present some obscure and hard-to-find contemporary accounts of reactions to the film, critical analysis, reviews, and a producer’s retrospective.