New Criterion Collection release of the cult classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (IMDb) / Wikipedia / [Netflix]
“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (Peter Yates)
The gritty 1974 cult classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, directed by the criminally underrated Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away), is now available for the first time ever on DVD, in a Criterion special edition. In it, classic Hollywood tough guy Robert Mitchum plays the titular small-time Boston gunrunner, nicknamed Fingers, who’s caught between remaining loyal to his criminal cohorts and turning them in to avoid jail time, and Mitchum does it with a poignant, effortless precision that makes the film’s brutal twists all the more effective. With its evocative sense of time and place, and expert pacing, Eddie Coyle is a brilliant, quintessential work of seventies American cinema.
Kent Jones writes, in part:
Offhanded fatalism is embedded in every word of every exchange, each of which alternates between hide-and-seek games and verbal tugs-of-war. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an extremely faithful adaptation (in structure, spirit, and flavor) of the first published novel by the Brockton, Massachusetts–born Higgins, whose career as a United States prosecutor and then big-time criminal defense lawyer (his clients included Eldridge Cleaver and G. Gordon Liddy) coincided with his ascendancy as a novelist, and whose dialogue is one of the glories of American literature. “I’m not doing dialogue because I like doing dialogue,” Higgins once said. “The characters are telling you the story. I’m not telling you the story, they’re going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.” What is remarkable about the film is the extreme degree to which Yates and the producer and writer, Paul Monash, adhere to Higgins’s aesthetic, banking on the contention that if you render the action among the characters as faithfully as possible, their entire moral universe will be revealed.
And so it is. “Look, one of the first things I learned is never to ask a man why he’s in a hurry,” says Robert Mitchum’s Eddie to Steven Keats’s inappropriately relaxed arms salesman, Jackie Brown (guess who’s a fan of this movie), in what might be the film’s most emblematic bit of table talk. “All you got to know is that I told the man he can depend on me because you told me I could depend on you. Now one of us is gonna have a big fat problem. Another thing I’ve learned: if anybody’s gonna have a problem, you’re gonna be the one.” As in every good dialogue-driven film, talk in The Friends of Eddie Coyle equals action. In this case, maneuvering for leverage and self-preservation.
Nothing could be further from Higgins’s full-immersion approach to fiction than a collection of prima donna thespians vying for attention; thankfully, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a true ensemble piece if ever there was one. It’s amazing that a star of Robert Mitchum’s caliber even considered this movie (he was originally offered the role of the bartender); that he integrated himself so fully into the ensemble and the working-class Boston atmosphere is some kind of miracle. Mitchum is on-screen for roughly half of the movie, and never for a moment does he or the filmmakers play the movie star card—no special isolated “moments,” no hammy overplaying or sneaky underplaying. Golden-age Hollywood’s most notorious bad boy arrived in Boston ready for action on every front, as amply chronicled by Grover Lewis in his Rolling Stone profile “The Last Celluloid Desperado.” Apart from the usual shenanigans (think blondes and booze), Mitchum went right to work, getting an “Eddie Coyle haircut” (which might have been executed with a lawn trimmer) and allegedly hanging out with the notorious Whitey Bulger, the prototype for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, and his Winter Hill Gang. Higgins was worried, Mitchum was unfazed. “It’s a two-way street,” he told Lewis, “because the guys Higgins means are associating with a known criminal in talking to me.” Apart from a few slippages here and there, Mitchum mastered the exceptionally difficult Boston accent. More importantly, he found the right loping rhythm, the right level of spiritual exhaustion, the right amount of cloaked malevolence. If Mitchum betrays anything of himself as Eddie, it’s his sense of poetry, which, for roughly three-fourths of his career as an actor, seems to have manifested itself off- and not on-screen. But when he rose to the occasion, he was one of the best actors in movies. Thinks like a poet, acts like a jazz musician, hitting on the perfect melancholy chord progression from his initial appearance and playing quietly dolorous variations right to the end.
[Click to continue reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle:They Were Expendable – From the Current]
Sounds intriguing, consider it added to the queue, maybe the book too…
“The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (John MacRae Books)” (George V. Higgins)