The Friends of Eddie Coyle
(1973, Peter Yates; Criterion spine 475)
If a viewer had never seen Robert Mitchum in any other movie, what would they think of him based on this performance? He’s a loser, two-bit, defeated, sort of weasely; once a master safecracker (known as “Fingers”) and yet now with crushed and broken hands, working the outside edges of his remaining underworld contacts, acting as a middleman to supply hoods with the one-time-use guns they need to pull their bank jobs. He talks (and talks) a good game — well, he thinks he does; he pushes an old-timer tough-guy act on his young supplier (who’s just another middleman farther down the chain); he hangs around his former haunts in an attempt to stay in touch; and, most critically, he tries to build himself up into a position of relevance to an undercover agent in an effort to clear himself of a jail sentence. It’s at least one too many “friends” to balance.
Meanwhile, the movie shows a kind of grim 1970’s Boston that isn’t usually depicted in a crime movie — instead of a vibrant city or even a grimy one, there’s rundown suburban spaces, with clandestine meetings in endless sad parks, remote train platforms, faceless parking lots, and after-hours gravel pits. There’s a running visual theme of men in cars spying on events in the street and on each other, and then when they meet to talk in person, they talk about cars. (The payoff to that one is Peter Boyle’s bartender character, who holds some central locus of information and power in the underworld’s matrix but doesn’t know how to drive.)
Eddie Coyle is one of the indisputably great (if oddly overlooked) downbeat movies of the early-1970’s American realism movement, so the audience never expects things to end well. But it has so many grace notes, many of them centered on Mitchum, including his aforementioned attempts to mentor the gunrunner (Stephen Keats), his concern with keeping the heists incident-free if possible, and a simple, touching domestic scene with his wife (Helena Carroll). Mitchum seems to physically shrink into himself as if he’s trying to fade into the background and out of notice; even as it becomes clear that no amount of snitching is going to satisfy Richard Jordan’s agent, he continues to look for a new angle. Whatever loquacious magic allowed him to escape his earlier misadventures with only a set of broken fingers is at its last ebb here. And Mitchum isn’t the only actor at the top of his game: Keats has a mesmerizing magnetism; he’s fantastic to watch. Jordan moves from blandly friendly and jocular into, eventually, chilling disregard. Boyle is as great as always, and so on — there are eight or nine more excellent character actors in the ensemble. They play Eddie’s immediate contacts in an implied, much larger web of criminals and stoolies, encompassing both the savvy and jaded (the three members of the bank heist team, slipping on their new set of one-time masks for the next job like they’re clocking in for their factory shift) and the even younger newbies, the green wanna-bes who are just getting started (the kids selling stolen rifles, the baby-faced couple working out of their windowless van).
In every instance, and even in the case of the undercover cops, each person seems unwilling to do any more than their tiny piece of work; each wants to be the smallest possible cog in the crime machine. Contrast this with the many movie depictions of criminals (and especially bank robbers) as public figures, vigilantes just as interested in notoriety as cash, who see themselves as avengers of their society’s ill-dealing to them or their class — Bonnie and Clyde, Gun Crazy, Honeymoon Killers, Natural Born Killers. Mitchum’s role as the weapons middleman emphasizes both his unimportance and also the idea of (loosely) organized crime as a kind of bureaucracy; whereas organized organized crime movies (the Godfather trilogy, The Yakuza, Goodfellas, even Youth of the Beast) show the Mafia or the Yakuza as a family and as a societal order which trumps the government’s order. Crime in Eddie Coyle is filled with misinformation, broken contacts, and infiltrations from undercover police who hardly even need informants to make their collars.
Reminds me of:
Film scholar and director Kent Jones’ Criterion booklet essay makes the point that no one should mourn the fact that movies like this aren’t made anymore because there are no other movies like it. And it’s true that it is surprisingly difficult to find film parallels to Coyle. There’s no outrageous colors, images or cuts like in a Tarantino or Suzuki crime film. There’s no bloody showdown ending in which, a la Hamlet, various factions mow each other down like in L. A. Confidential or a revisionist Peckinpah (or Eastwood) western. There’s no stylized heightened genre dialog evoking films of another era, like a Coen brothers film or something written by Elmore Leonard. If the characters didn’t talk as much as they do, it would be comparable to one of those great French or Swedish films about a character’s world where we watch them go about their business without explanations, like Bresson’s Pickpocket or Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. But Eddie and his friends do talk, with some of the best naturalistic dialog ever, courtesy of George V. Higgins’s source novel.
The most recent #WTW that involved bank heists was obviously Thieves Like Us; these two films are set in very different eras but are similar in their pared-down approach to showing how the crimes are executed. Both also show a successful job first so that the audience is oriented to the gang’s modus operandi before having subsequent jobs introduce issues. Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, with its single, interminable bank job that turns into a siege, is never far from my mind when watching any robbery in a film; there, we have so much time to consider the inner states of the robbers, the bank manager and the employees, and the police that it almost becomes a kind of universal back-story for the terser, usually close to wordless iterations in films like Coyle.
But then — the guilt!
Peter Yates was a British director with a wide range of notable movies including several which, like the Boston of Coyle, embody American towns and regions: Breaking Away, about competitive cyclists in central Indiana, is a great example; there’s also the San Francisco streets of Bullitt, the Los Angeles of the comedy Mother, Jugs & Speed, or the late-sixties New York singles scene of John and Mary. I haven’t seen Breaking Away in twenty years and I’ve never seen the others. (Though one of my favorite films as a kid was his The Hot Rock with Robert Redford, and I own that one. I’ll leave you all to shake your heads sadly at the guy who was first in line to buy The Hot Rock and yet has never seen Bullitt.)
Similarly: Mitchum was a highly prolific actor. I’ve got some choice Mitchum in my collection: will likely have to double-dip someday and pick up another (the Criterion) copy of the amazing The Night of the Hunter, and I have one of his two turns as Phillip Marlowe in my D-I-Y Marlowe collection (mentioned back in #WTW 4) . . . but there are so many more. He sings in What a Way to Go! (and others), has a drop-dead impressive accent in The Sundowers (Australian) and Ryan’s Daughter (Irish) (and many others!), and can do comedy just as well as he can do tough-guy. His Dick Cavett interview (collected on Shout Factory’s The Dick Cavett Show: Hollywood Greats, sadly out of print) is a fantastic late-career interview for him; he’s funny and smart. So many more Mitchum performances to seek out.
Pitch:
I love every frame of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. (I must not be alone — Stephen Keats’s character is named Jackie Brown, after all.) You’ll know if you’re going to be similarly bewitched after the early scene between Keats and Mitchum where they talk in the first of many coffee-shop conversations:
“One of us is going to have a big fat problem. And another thing: If anyone is going to have a problem, you’re gonna be the one.”
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