THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (Masters of Cinema) BLU-RAY

Robert Mitchum was well known for his laid-back style (and, indeed, life in general) and quite often in his early career suffered from this because critics mistook this for an inability to act or to act the same way every time. As he progressed into better films, it was obvious to everyone that he was one of the best actors around and this film is one of those films that show just how good he was.It does so mainly because, as opposed to the huge figure of a man that Mitchum was (he was physically very imposing and you wouldn't want to mess with him), the character he plays here is a minor crook, a basically frightened and desperate man but a fundamentally decent one who has been left with very few choices in his life.He is never going to pull a major heist and get rich, he is never going to be in the newspapers as a glamorous crime figure on the run, and he's never going to be able to offer his loving and loyal wife the sort of life that he thinks she deserves.It's all going to get a lot worse as well very shortly for him and for her as he has a hearing in a month at which it will be decided whether he has to go to prison again, this time for 5 years or more, leaving his wife on her own with no money.This leaves him even more vulnerable than ever to suggestions from more rutheless criminals and from the the police, both of whom want his co-operation. So, does he help the criminals, the police, or both, or neither?There is no glamour in this film, or smart lines that obviously were never originated in the characters but seemed slick to the writer so he put them in anyway, and there are no sexy car-chases or explosions or anything like that. Instead, you get a real sense of what being a small cog in the criminal underworld might be like, and it doesn't appear that it would be much fun, or very lucrative, or very exciting.The film is superb, in sum, as is Robert Mitchum.

‘Jackie Brown at twenty-six, with no expression on his face, said that he could get some guns.’ This is the opening line of The Friends of Eddie Coyle, George V.Higgins first novel, a book that Elmore Leonard said was the best crime novel ever written. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s a very good book and I’ve read it three times. It made Higgins famous and assured his status as an influential crime writer, and was later made into a gritty film starring Robert Mitchum. Higgins was a Boston lawyer, so knew a lot of lawmen and criminals and how they spoke, and his novels are largely told in dialogue, pages and pages of them, which is really quite a groundbreaking style. After reading Eddie Coyle, Elmore Leonard said something like, ‘after reading that book I knew how I wanted to write. I wanted the story driven by dialogue.’ Or as Leonard often said about his own style, ‘I leave out the parts that most readers skip.’ Eddie Coyle is about a Boston small-time criminal and gunrunner, who, while awaiting trial for another crime, is forced to become an informant for the local cops. But his ‘friends’ suspect as much, so Coyle is never far from a sudden death, as he scrambles around from gun deal to gun deal trying to make a living. With this dialogue driven style you are sometimes not too sure what’s really going on, as the action is all happening in people’s talk, very little is shown. Higgins wrote 29 novels and I’ve read about nine of them, and given up on a fair few too, some of his books being very difficult to read, especially the political ones. He also wrote a book called On Writing which is worth reading, and I still have a signed copy. Higgins died from a heart attack at the young age of 59 in 1999, and it was a sudden end to a solid career. Because of his unusual style of writing he rarely cracked the bestseller market but he didn’t really care. He was a successful lawyer and didn’t give a damn about the literary scene or sales, he just wrote what he wanted to write, and that’s the way it should be.

A gangster film that avoids almost all the spectacular scenes and shows the underworld as bleak and mean. Probably one of Mitchum's best performances, but the other actors deliver too. Less famous than the Scorsese mob films, but after watching it, you just can't understand why!

It surprises me now that I didn't see this film until it was over forty years old - I'll have to make up for that with a few more viewings. I also saw 'The Yakuza' for the first time recently and it reminded me what a class act Robert Mitchum could be. Knowing relatively little about 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' until I noticed that it had been released as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, I thought it might be worth a look.The first thing to say about this film is that it has an authentic feel - it's almost as if the viewer is an invisible observer looking in on the shady deals and conversations taking place in the early 1970s Boston underworld. That is down to the directorial talent of Peter Yates and to Mitchum and his excellent supporting cast - being based on George V. Higgins' first novel did no harm either. Peter Boyle, Robert Jordan, Steven Keats and Alex Rocco are all excellent here, and the minor supporting characters fit in seamlessly as well. It's Mitchum's film though - a perfect depiction of a man who has lived his life as a criminal, yet never made it 'big' and is now facing a second jail term. It's a tremendous performance, portraying a man who has been bad but is by no means wholly evil, lives in a dangerous world yet has a family and bills to pay just like anybody else. As the film progresses Eddie becomes increasingly desperate in his attempts to avoid another spell in prison and the 'game' becomes more perilous.Great dialogue, not too much in the way of violence or "action", but brutal and gripping all the same. There aren't many laughs here but this is a lesson in fine film-making and one or two modern directors - and actors - might well benefit from seeing how good a "crime thriller" can be.