DIRECTOR: Peter YatesNo matter what picture he's in, Robert Mitchum is Robert Mitchum. He's an icon. A brand.
COUNTRY: USA
WRITER: George V. Higgins, Paul Monash
CAST: Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco, Steven Keats
GENRE: Action, drama, crime, neo-noir
MISCELLANY: 102m; Technicolor; on DVD; shot on location in and around Boston
In this incarnation, he's sloshed in the old Boston Garden, slurring odes to "Number 4! Bobby Orr!" He's imbibing in Back Bay dives, dropping New England expressions "like a bastard."
I'd long heard about the "best Boston movie ever," starring Robert Mitchum no less, and finally, Criterion has freed "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" from obscurity, releasing it on DVD in all its neo-noir anti-glory.
"I got that thing coming up in New Hampshire," Mitchum's Eddie Coyle reminds whoever will listen. "That thing" is the Irish mob middle-man's sentencing for driving a truck full of stolen liquor.
Sadder than Coyle's looming jail time is the possibility that a character played by Robert Mitchum is whining. His friends don't bother to fake sympathy when he drops hints about his upcoming court date and make no secret that he's boring them with his troubles. The movie catches up with Coyle as he pulls a few jobs leading up to his sentencing, raising money for his family and desperately trying to cash in on connections — cop and criminal alike — to put in a good word with the judge.
Long before Jack Nicholson's acting chops sprouted whiskers in "The Departed," "Eddie Coyle" wove its web of double-dealing cops and hoods. A series of shots in The Callahan Tunnel, through disorienting lights and perspectives, even seems to simulate burrowing rats.
"Eddie Coyle" distinguishes itself from the gangster movie pack with its quiet, authentic dialog, melancholy mood and relentless realism. Least gripping are the heist and bust scenes. No cliche display of heroics is proffered to distract us from the depressing facts. The movie is kind of like those cerebral "Sopranos" episodes that maddened its mainstream fans when "nothing happened."
"Eddie Coyle" strips Mitchum and gangster life of glamor, and paints Boston in dirty, low-lit color. Sixties optimism is dead. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon have not yet arrived on the scene. The city seems to shrug in resignation as a vicious selfishness roils below the surface.
Hippies shop for automatic weapons. Even the parish priest wants to buy a piece. Gun dealer Jackie Brown buys machine guns from teenagers and without irony swaps weapons for "bread" in grocery bags.
In the hockey sequence, old ladies scream for blood as a fight breaks out on the ice and the crowd exults in the violence.
The Boston Garden scene works on multiple levels. The beer-spattered haze. The competition and tribalism. The lust for a fight. Why'd you bring your target here where there are so many souls under one roof, the hitman is asked. Nobody cares, the hitman replies.
As Coyle's dilemma deepens, he sits in a pub rubbing the extra set of knuckles his friends gave him the last time things went wrong. The camera hardly can keep him in focus. He doesn't command sympathy, and if anything, the film provides ample evidence that he has it coming. But we want somebody to give a damn, even if we don't ourselves.
— Becky
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1 comment:
Very valuable piece
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