The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Peter Yates (1929-2011) was a British film director who was “brought over” by Hollywood to direct Steve McQueen in Bullitt (1968), a film that has since taken on a cult status. His stay in the US resulted in a few film successes and a few failures. In the former category are Breaking Away (1979) and Eyewitness (1981), both based on Steve Tesich scripts. But his best American film is The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973). 

Based on a novel by George V. Higgins published in 1970, a novel Elmore Leonard called “the best crime novel ever written”, the film is set in Boston and explores the same territory as the Martin Scorsese film The Departed, made thirty years later, populated by crime syndicates, law enforcement and police informants. It also occupies the same grey area in which it becomes impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad and who we’re supposed to root for. There are only subtle gradations of grey. 

Eddie wants to retire somewhere south, where all hoods in a cold climate dream of retiring. The title is ironic. We’re visiting a world where there’s a thin line between a handshake and a bullet. When the film opens a group of men are following a bank manager from his home to the bank, gathering information for an upcoming heist. We first meet Eddie in a diner working out the details of getting some guns for the bank robbery. Eddie is already facing time for possession of stolen goods in New Hampshire. He’s also working as an informant for Dave Foley, an ATF agent. The film draws its way along methodically until about halfway through, when things start to go bad. A second bank robbery ends up with the shooting of a bank employee. Picking up more guns from his supplier, Eddie notices some M16s in the guy’s trunk. (They’re for a pair of IRA-looking hippies.) Eddie seizes his opportunity to get on Foley’s good side by telling him about the M16s. The gunrunner is caught, and poor Eddie, who thinks he’ll get off on the charges in New Hampshire, gets a contract out on him instead. 

If you’ve seen enough 70s movies, you’ll recognize almost every face: Alex Rocco, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Steven Keats, Joe Santos. All fine actors, adept at portraying mugs. But in front of them all is Robert Mitchum, who plays Eddie “Fingers” Coyle, a longtime crook with a double set of knuckles, no ambition and even less luck who’s getting old and doesn’t want to do more time in prison. He’s a good enough actor that we forget he was a Hollywood headliner for twenty years. You can even hear him aiming, if not exactly hitting, a Boston accent in some scenes. Mitchum shows us just enough of Eddie’s humanity to make us sorry – if not at all surprised – when his number comes up. 

If I were to compare The Friends of Eddie Coyle to The Departed, it is to the former’s extreme detriment in terms of entertainment. I looked for and only momentarily saw any of the typical trappings of a crime thriller in Peter Yates’s film: a frenetic style, that encompasses the acting, framing and pacing of shots, that aggrandizes moments of violence, that exercises your eyes while benumbing your brain. (There are plenty of guns on display in Yates’s film, but they are fired only twice, along with one shotgun blast.) The Scorsese film is, in this narrow sense, far more watchable. In fact, the people who thrilled to the violence of The Departed would be bored to death by Eddie Coyle. But, of course, we aren’t looking at a character vaguely modelled on Whitey Bulger or at the FBI. (Nor are we looking at questionable casting choices, like Jack Nicholson doing another turn as Tim Burton’s Joker without the makeup or Leo DiCaprio striving valiantly to seem like a tough guy or Mark Wahlberg mistaking a permanent scowl for acting.) And in terms of that elusive element called art, Yates’s film is far more substantial than Scorsese’s. Eddie Coyle wants us to believe that we’re looking at the world. The faces of all the “extras” in the film are convincingly real and human. Filmed in and around Boston, it has the look and feel of lived-in actuality. The bar in which Eddie meets Foley for the last time made me thirsty. The period cars, the bad haircuts, the clothes, along with the autumn trees and people exhaling steam all add up to the here and now – of 1973 or forever. 

But there is a funny story from behind the scenes of The Friends of Eddie Coyle. When Robert Mitchum arrived in Boston for the shoot, he is said to have requested a meeting with Bulger. George Kimball, sportswriter for the Boston Herald, claims that the meeting took place, despite George Higgins’s warnings against it. As Kimball wrote in a piece for the Irish Times: 

Mitchum, who had in 1949 served time in a California prison – an experience he likened to “Palm Springs without the riff-raff” — on a marijuana possession charge, reminded Higgins that it was actually Bulger who was imperiling himself, by associating with a known criminal. 

Everyone in The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a realist. Since the only way to survive in the place and time where they live is to double-deal, betray friends and in extreme cases even shoot them in the head, they adapt to it and accept it. But not entirely without protest. The last scene in the film is on the Commons between Dillon, who has just killed Eddie, and Foley. As they walk along, Dillon says, 

I heard a guy on television the other night. He was talking about pigeons. Called them flying rats. I thought that was pretty good. He had something in mind, going to feed them the Pill or something, make them extinct. Trouble is, he was serious, you know? There was a guy that got shit on and probably got shit on again and then he got mad. Ruined his suit or something, going to spend the rest of his life getting even with the pigeons because they wrecked a hundred-dollar suit. Now there isn’t any percentage in that. There must be ten million pigeons in Boston alone, laying eggs every day, which will generally produce more pigeons, and all of them dropping tons of shit, rain or shine. And this guy in New York is going to, well, there just aren’t going to be any of them in this world any more.

The speech is in the novel, but then Paul Monash, who adapted the novel and produced the film, jumps forward in Dillon’s speech and he concludes: 

You see what I mean? Man gets desperate, he does a few things, he knows it won’t work, pretty soon he quits, just packs it all in and goes away somewhere. Only way there is. 

Once a man faces the fact that he can’t kill all the flying rats in the world, he has to accept getting shit on, maybe even get into the dry cleaning business.

Everything about the last ten minutes of the film is so heartbreakingly sordid: Eddie getting plastered, happily watching the Bruins beat the Blackhawks in the old Boston Garden (fittingly, none of the players, not even Bobby Orr, is wearing a helmet), passing out in the front seat of the car that's supposed to drop him off wherever it was he parked his own car, and Dillon giving the kid driving careful instructions about where to drive until he pulls out the .22 and carries out Eddie's quietus. Parked in front of a bowling alley is where they leave the car, with Eddie deposited inside. At least they locked the doors so the "volunteers" don't find the body first. Poor Eddie never got his place in the sun.