DVD OF THE WEEK: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Directed by Peter Yates
1973, 102 minutes, USA
Criterion

It's all about Mitchum. Bullitt director Peter Yates' and screenwriter Paul Monash's faithfully grimy, tonally overcast adaptation of the crime novel by George V. Higgins (his debut, while still serving as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Boston) has a couple crackerjack bank heists and wall-to-wall street chatter that's unpretentious but could still shoulder through crowds. Yet what'll ultimately hook you on this picture is Robert Mitchum's hangdog anti-hero Eddie "Fingers" Coyle, a low-level Beantown gunrunner way past his prime. In a characteristically subdued performance for an uncharacteristic role, Mitchum dims his own marquee glow to anchor the whole shebang as a desperate, drained—no, outright defeated—man whose "friends" would rat him out for a hefty reward, or more likely, if their survival counted on it.

In a nutshell, that's what the film is about: haggling for survival amongst the stoolies and cops, criminal middlemen and the Man himself. Coyle, facing incarceration in New Hampshire after getting pinched but refusing to name accomplices, hopes turning fink will gain him enough political pull to not serve time. Plenty of colorful supporting players turn up with their own ambitions and compromises—Richard Jordan as the poker-faced police officer making dubious deals, Steven Keats as the jumpy arms dealer Jackie Brown (Oh, Tarantino and his references!), and an unexpectedly muted Peter Boyle as the bartender informant who earns his place in the film's epilogue—but it's the weight felt from Mitchum's self-realized melancholy (hello, rock; howdy, hard place) that gives this underrated post-French Connection taste of '70s urban suspense its muscle.

Included in Criterion's booklet is a lengthy excerpt from Grover Lewis' amazing profile on Mitchum entitled "The Last Celluloid Desperado," which appeared in the March 1973 issue of Rolling Stone. My favorite bit from that piece, taken from Lewis's visit to the Eddie Coyle set, captures the two-fisted legend in a sordid, too-strange-to-have-been-invented exchange—reprinted below. [Warning! NSFW.]

Alex Rocco seizes the moment to make some teasing comment about Mitchum's bulging bay section. "Yeah, I'm getting' a gut," Mitchum concedes with a philosophic shrug. "I'm lucky if I can stay under 190."

"Well, you eat a lotta cunt," [Mitchum's stand-in of then 24 years, Tim] Wallace puts in. "Plenty pro-teen in that."

"Nah, you're lyin'. I just breathe on it a lot. You ever see me doin' any of that stuff? That's against the law, man."

"You want me to tell the truth?"

"No."

"Listen, you guys, I gotta tell this story on Bob here. He was ballin' this babe this one time, see. He was in the saddle, see, and his nuts was swingin' back and forth in the air, see. And this babe's dog jumps up on the bed and takes his nuts in its mouth, see. Big sonofabitch."

"The dog was like half Great Dane and half bull mastiff," Mitchum muses. "Like a pony."

"Huge sonofabitch."

Mitchum nods. "Yeah, big yellow-eyed mother."

"So I walk into the room by accident, see, and this dog has hold of Bob's nuts like a retriever would hold a bird. I couldn't help it—I started laughin'."

Mitchum grins. "I told him, 'Don't laugh.' I very slowly got, uh . . . disengaged. And I smacked that motherin' dog—whap!—clear across the room. I woulda shot it if I'd had a gun."

"I tell ya, I had water in my eyes from laughin' so hard at 'im. There was water all over the place, in fact. The bed was wet, you can bet your sweet ass on that." Wallace cackles shrilly, then fixes the writer with a stern glare: "Don't put that in your fuckin' magazine, friend. It's a true fuckin' story, but jeez—Bob's wife, you know . . ."

Posted by ahillis at May 19, 2009 9:18 PM