The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a the neo-noir triumph for Robert Mitchum. Mitchum plays a world-weary, low-level hood being squeezed between Boston’s Irish Mob and law enforcement. Double crosses abound.
Mitchum plays Eddie Coyle, whose criminal specialty is delivering guns to be used in armed robberies. His career has not rewarded him with riches, and he still lives a modest life in a hardscrabble Quincy neighborhood. Worst of all, he is facing a New Hampshire prison term that would ruin him. Can he bargain his way out of prison with the FBI, risking lethal retaliation from the mob?
Eddie Coyle is facing an array of bad choices, and he appreciates the risks of each pathway. He needs to calculate what he can get away with and to what degree there is honor among thieves.
Robert Mitchum’s performance dominates The Friends of Eddie Coyle. His Eddie Coyle is world weary, even beaten down, and anticipates almost every potential double cross. That qualification “almost” is very important.
In my opinion, Mitchum is the greatest male star of the classic film noir period. His most definitive noir performance was in that most definitive noir, Out of the Past. Along with Crossfire, Macao, The Locket, Undercurrent, Where Danger Lives and The Racket, Mitchum starred in noir’s most shocking ending (Angel Face) and the funniest, self-referential noir (His Kind of Woman).
In classic film noir, Mitchum demonstrated his insouciance and physical hunkiness. Most film noir protagonists are reaching – and overreaching – for something, usually money and/or woman. More than most, Mitchum’s characters know better than to overreach, but are motivated into risky situations by survival than greed or lust.
Mitchum carried that know-your-place, you-are-fucked attitude into neo-noir (Eddie Coyle, The Yazuka), long after he had aged out of his devil-may-care magnetism.
Peter Boyle plays Dillon, the bartender at the beer-and-a-bump joint where the hoodlums congregate. Dillon’s importance builds in importance during evolve The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Boyle delivers one of his best – and sleaziest – performances. This was the high point of Boyle’s career, with Eddie Coyle sandwiched between his turns in The Candidate and Young Frankenstein.
Other standouts in The Friends of Eddie Coyle are Richard Jordan as a hardball FBI agent and Alex Rocco as leader of a heist crew. The always reliable Joe Santos also appears.
The screenplay is adapted from the George V. Higgins novel. The authenticity of Higgins’ characters and Peter Yates’ direction combine for remarkable verisimilitude of the Boston setting.
Yates had an eclectic career, mostly known for top notch thrillers like Bullitt, Eyewitness, The Deep and Eleni, But he also directed the sensitive drama The Dresser, the coming of age classic Breaking Away and the subversive dark comedy Mother, Jugs & Speed.
Interestingly, it later came to be known decades after The Friends of Eddie Coyle that the top man in the Irish Mob (Whitey Bulger) was indeed playing the FBI by informing on gangland rivals.
The Friends of Edie Coyle can be streamed on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu and YouTube, and it occassiobally plays on Turner Classic Movies.
