Review: Peter Yates’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle on Criterion DVD

Played by Robert Mitchum in the full slump of his iconic weariness, but without an ounce of heroism, Eddie Coyle is a small-time 50-year-old Boston ex-con whose slim chance at any future depends on gaming his upcoming sentencing for a stolen-liquor rap in New Hampshire. Coyle never throws a punch or brandishes a weapon, and when he threatens a gun dealer for trying to alter the terms of their agreement, it’s not with machismo, but with irritation at a young turk who doesn’t know the code: “Don’t ask a man why he’s in a hurry.” After he was stuck in mid-career neutral doing standard war pictures and flat epics, The Friends of Eddie Coyle restored some juice to Mitchum’s career by putting his famously subdued manner in the service of grittier New Hollywood fare and proving that he could play a defeated small man while retaining his compulsive watchability and gravity. As a loser, he fills scenes with stolid, semi-resigned desperation.

But Mitchum doesn’t remotely overshadow the film’s first-rate ensemble of character actors. While the screenplay somewhat streamlines the puzzle-like structure of George V. Higgins’s assured crime novel, director Peter Yates shifts from one uneasy conversation scene to another between players in Eddie’s milieu: the detective (Richard Jordan) who extracts tips from a menacing Irish-wiseguy bartender (Peter Boyle) for $20 a week, a gang of bank robbers (led by Alex Rocco) whose fate will be tied to Coyle’s, amateur buyers, and hopped-up suppliers. The titular “friends” is a representative sour joke; survival makes friendship unthinkable, or as Steven Keats, memorable as the properly paranoid, arms-dealing Jackie Brown, tells a client as he holds him at gunpoint, “This life is hard, man, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.” (Given the eyesore that is Jackie’s souped-up chartreuse car, being tasteless apparently isn’t judged an impediment.) The movie’s witty, no-nonsense word-jazz is mostly lifted from Higgins’s book: Mitchum’s opening negotiation with Keats in a coffee shop (“Ever hear bones breaking? Like a man snapping a shingle”) and Boyle’s musings to Jordan on the ubiquity of pigeons add color without strain, hitting the ear like Mamet crook-talk stripped of the studied minimalism.

British-born Yates, who had his first Hollywood success in the far slicker Steve McQueen policier Bullitt, keeps his eye on the low-end thieves’ nocturnal creepings and daily roostings in grungy bars, diners, trailer parks, and bowling alleys. It’s a slug’s-eye view of autumnal Greater Boston, remote when not sleazy; even when Mitchum and Boyle attend a Bruins hockey game, it’s in the nosebleed seats. Yates’s approach is most humdrum in the fairly pedestrian bank holdup sequences, with little help from Dave Grusin’s routine caper-score noodling, and in an unconvincingly semi-sunny glimpse of Coyle’s home life. But while the plot’s cops n’ robbers suspense rests mostly with Keats’s tactical evasions and Jordan’s stoolie-greased busts, this bleak sleeper’s corrupt but pathetic soul is in Mitchum’s sighing, worn form sitting at the end of Boyle’s bar: “If you were to ask me, I’d have to tell you I’m not having a very good day.”

Image/Sound

The seedy environs of the Boston Irish underworld often look as if they’d been artfully shot through a gray filter by day; the night scenes’ blacks are a tad unstable, but the intended visual grit generally transfers well. The mono soundtrack is nothing special, but clear enough for mostly live location audio.

Extras

Director Peter Yates’s feature commentary heaps praise on Robert Mitchum’s persuasive simplicity and mostly steady but understated Boston accent, and the naturalistic detail of George Higgins’s plot and dialogue. He also confirms that technical advice on gun drops and hits came from connected “friends” similar to Coyle’s. Judging from the stills gallery, which includes images from cut scenes that aren’t on the disc, the change of a key stool pigeon’s identity from the book may have been a late switch, but it goes unmentioned by Yates. However, a heftier than usual Criterion booklet has some real gold. Kent Jones’s appreciative essay salutes the filmmakers for “never do(ing) anything in the way of rhetorical underlining,” and identifies the punchy talk from the Higgins tome as the movie’s essential action. A lengthy 1973 on-set profile of Mitchum by Rolling Stone writer Grover Lewis is a neo-gonzo triumph, particularly in capturing the production’s environment: Teamsters whose background and daily lives are as mobbed-up as the characters’ merrily shoot the shit with the star, who scolds a couple of his omnipresent girlfriends for leaving a hash pipe lying around his trailer. Lewis also gets Mitchum, a heavy drinker from lunch onward, to open up on matters of business (“I learned early on that if you do well, you don’t get to do better-you just get to do more”) and philosophical (of his teenage stint on a chain gang for vagrancy: “I was busted for the simple crime of poverty, that’s all”). There are also anecdotes of his encounters with Faulkner, O’Neill, and a balls-sucking dog in the boudoir.

Overall

Downbeat ’70s crime with Beantown vowels, and a Hollywood icon’s masterful melancholy.