directed by Peter Yates
Robert Mitchum’s quiet and shabbily dignified Eddie Coyle is well aware of the score; he is about to go to prison after getting busted driving a truck full of stolen goods. The sentence is likely to be two years and when he goes away, his wife and children will have no choice but to go on welfare. In Coyle’s eyes, needing a hand out for his family is a much bigger disgrace than a two year stay in the pen. But he’s not bitter. This is how things go when you’re in the business of small time crime.
Unlike other cinematic gangster types, Coyle has no appetite for the big score or the long con. He leaves the machinations of big crime to the idea men. In one of the film’s early scenes, Eddie tells a young buck gun runner about the time when his fingers were crushed in a drawer as punishment for a screw up on a job that landed the wrong guy in jail. Mitchum relays this tale in an utterly non-dramatic and unsympathetic way. To Coyle this is a lesson he learned the hard way and he plans not to repeat the experience again.
The narrative weaves between a trio of bank robbers (one played by Alex Rocco) that Eddie is supplying guns to as he attempts to stockpile cash before he heads to prison; bar owner/Fed informant/gun for hire Dillon (Peter Boyle); a conniving US Treasury agent Dave Foley (Richard Jordan) and the youthful and brash gun peddler that Coyle gets his weapons from.
It’s the treasury agent that becomes the thread that weaves all these lives in tighter with the cloth of Eddie Coyle. A promise of reprieve from his prison sentence is held over Coyle’s head if he can prove to “Uncle” that he is working on their behalf. The closer the prison stay gets the more Eddie considers handing some of his “friends” over to Uncle if only to help protect his family. This inner dilemma becomes interspersed with the comings and goings of Eddie’s colleagues to create a pitch point of culmination in the film’s final 30 minutes.
The Friends Of Eddie Coyle is a beautiful film to look at, despite its bleak and sometimes hopeless story. Yates masterfully captures the early 1970s Boston crime world with peeks into parking lot meet-ups, stakeouts, pool halls and dive bars. This is a blue collar crime world where these men would be going to work in a ship yard or a steel mill were they not gangsters. The crime here is not elegant. These are men of meager aspirations. At one point, Coyle waxes poetic about being able to have enough money to retire to Florida. It’s a humble goal and the subtext of Mitchum’s delivery belies Eddie’s own realization that the dream will never, ever become reality.
This is not a perfect film. Too much attention is paid to the bank robber angle and the details of three separate jobs they pull. Yates handles these scenes with a certain panache and they are done quite well for what they are, but they remove us from the Coyle story line and after more than one sequence they become redundant. Dave Grusin’s score is also terribly distracting and utterly out of touch with the film’s make-up and characters. A vaguely funk-oriented instrumental soundtrack that might have worked brilliantly in other films of the time, here just seems out of place and haphazard.
The film’s climactic sequences (no spoilers) seems almost anti-climactic by the time it arrives. Yet Yates builds suspense and tension by incorporating a Bruins game at Boston Garden into the mix. Dillon remarks at seeing Bobby Orr, “What is that kid, 24? What a future he’s got.” It’s a future that Coyle and his “friends” will never have. It is a future of security, peace and prosperity.
In the world of Eddie Coyle, no one tells the truth. At least not the whole truth. The only real and genuinely ardent fact in Eddie’s immediate realm is that he’s stuck in his early 50s with a dead end dilemma that allows for no easy choices.
Ultimately, it is Mitchum’s restrained and toughly honest performance that elevates The Friends Of Eddie Coyle to be greater than the sum of its parts. Dignified gangsters who live by a jagged criminal code are a dime a dozen, but Eddie Coyle carves out a niche in the genre because he's not hunting for respect or hustling to move a rung up the ladder. He is genuinely trying to do things the right way in the only ways he knows how. The decisions are flawed and the results are doom-like. The path to hell is paved with the best of intentions.
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