In 1962, a small time Somerville,
Massachusetts, hood named Alexander Federico Petricone, Jr., on the fringes of
the fabled Winter Hill gang that was later to be led by Whitey Bulger, vanished
from Boston and environs. Nicknamed Bobo, Petricone was the catalyst for a war
that broke out between two Irish clans: his girlfriend had been hassled by a
member of a rival gang at a party which resulted in the man's beating by Bobo's
colleagues, and Bobo was subsequently implicated but never charged in the death
of the brother of the now-mangeled pick up artist. Apparently narrowly escaping
a stretch in the bucket, Bobo decided that life would be healthier in a sunnier
clime. Bobo ended up in Hollywood, where he worked as a bartender and took
acting classes from Leonard Nimoy, who advised him to lose the Boston accent.
Whitey and the mob never knew what
happened to Bobo until they went to see The Godfather in March, 1972,
where Bobo suddenly appeared on the screen in the form of Vegas kingpin Moe
Green. Bobo was now known as Alex Rocco,
with a valid career as a Hollywood character actor. Bobo made a return visit to
Boston shortly thereafter in the role of Jimmy Scalise, the crafty leader of a
bank robbery crew in The Friends of
Eddie Coyle, the Casablanca of underworld movies.
Eddie "Fingers" Coyle (Robert
Mitchum), of course, has no friends. These "friends" include Dillon
(Peter Boyle), ostensibly a bartender, Dave Foley (Richard Jordan), a Federal
agent, Jimmy Scalise (Rocco), a bank robber with a need for untraceable guns,
and Jackie Brown (Stephen Keats), the gun peddler Eddie contacts to fetch
Scalise's weapons, a wagon wheel of betrayers and schemers. It's like Casablanca
because it was directed efficiently by a competent studio hand from a good,
quotable script and with access to a wealth of character actors to colorize the
proceedings (and at least one with some criminal ties that lent authenticity),
and with a actor of stature at the center around whom a cult had developed. It
is also paradoxically like La Ronde, in that it is a series of charged
duologue encounters in which the participants don't know the full weight of
what the other is doing. Coyle meets Brown, the gun dealer, who in turn meets
his source, while Coyle in a bar meets bartender Dillon, who goes on to hook up
with Foley, and so on, until a horrible, unstated web of malice is woven. The
premise of the story is that Scalise holds a bank president's family hostage
while he helps the crew rob his bank (the criminal premise was later borrowed
Barry Levinson's heist film Bandits, though it too is ostensibly based
on a real case), but the raison d'etre is the underworld gift for gab,
and how talk is a fencing match between opponents with different agenda.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle was made at a time
when all crime films seemed to have Dave Grusin scores, when mainstream movies
embraced a real world of previously unseen cruminess (Fat City and The
Last Detail are other examples), a world of strip mall parking lots
polka-doted with oil stains, cramped tacky trailers, anonymous functional
official buildings, decrepit bars the size of a dirigible hanger, denuded train
stations, and sports arenas filled with drunken, hollering morons thirsting for
blood. It's not a noir really, more a film soleil, but it has the inexorable
doom that drenches most noir artifacts.
At the center is Mitchum, the ultimate
noir actor at the far tail end of the genre. Though he got great reviews for
his performance at the time, he's in less than half the movie, and frankly not
particularly good, though here it doesn't matter because the film is an
ensemble piece. Mitchum's delivery was always rather lackadaisical. Like other
famous screen presences such as Gary Cooper he couldn't talk all that
convincingly. Instead, Mitchum was a great physical presence, the perfect form
to be crafted by the great stylists, lighting men, cameramen, and makeup
artists of the era. His big doughy broad sensual face, part boxer and part
cartoon character, was a noir theme unto itself. Mitchum remains one of the
great noirteurs because his tragic dense narcissism tilted otherwise
conventional mystery stories (and the occasional western, such as Pursued)
toward noir in the shadow of his tragic sense of life. Noir is a genre with
great practitioners but no geniuses, outside of the odd loner genius such as an
Orson Welles who drops in on holiday from other forms of film to mark noir with
a new and enriching visual vocabulary. Noir is a true group effort where
everyone -- writer, director, DP, star, character actor, composer --
contributes equally. It's a genre that can't tolerate individual excellence,
but where mediocre or common talents can appear to be grander than they are in
an overall tableau of focused dedication.
Kent Jones's essay about The Friends
of Eddie Coyle, included in the booklet that comes in the box, captures
perfectly all the film's diverse yet cohesive elements: its look, its array of
character actors all so essential to '70s crime films (and consequently
essential to the population of subsequent films by Martin Scorsese and Sidney
Lumet), the lightly likable skills of director Peter Yates (the director of Breaking
Away, The Dresser, and Bullit, who was a disciple of J. Lee
Thompson, Guy Hamilton, and Tony Richardson), the iconic presence of Robert
Mitchum, the film's source in the novel by high profile lawyer George V.
Higgins, and the book and film's subsequent influence on Quentin Tarantino (the
only person whom Mr. Jones shorts is the controversial Paul Monash, the film's
producer and screenwriter, who was famous for the TV series Peyton Place
and for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and De Palma's Carrie
on the big screen).
It's difficult to imagine such a sedate
film being made for the big screen by a major studio today, a film that is both
quietly internal and all on the surface at the same time. When Foley arrests
some miscreants, they take the situation with serene equinimity. If the film
were made today, the scene would have been the gateway to a 15-minute chase
scene full of pyrotechnics, gunfire, imaginative camera angles, and incoherent
editing. In fact, there were a few more action scenes that were shot but cut,
bearing only a ghostly presence on the disc in a photo gallery. They include a
shoot out between robbers and Federal agents, and more details about Jackie
Brown's arrest, plus a scene of Scalise beating his airline stewardess
girlfriend and the aftermath when she is pulled over by police. For whatever
reason, Yates cut them out, reducing the "action" to one shooting in
a bank, a 30-second car chase, and the pitiless mob execution of a central
character, soon forgotten as life carries on.
Long out of circulation (the film wasn't
even on VHS), The Friends of Eddie Coyle finally comes to DVD thanks to
the Criterion Collection. The
single-sided, dual layered disc (No. 475, paired with another cult crime
melodrama, Stephen Frears's The Hit, to be reviewed here later), has
modest but effective supplements. Besides the photo gallery, there is a
congenial if occasionally repetitious audio commentary track by the aged Yates,
whose account of the film's happy and event-free making accords with those
found in various books and biographies. Jones's essay appears in a 46-page
booklet that also includes cast and crew, transfer information, chapter titles,
and excepts from a fabulous profile by Grover Lewis of Mitchum written for Rolling
Stone from the set of the film. Lewis is the great, unheralded New
Journalism practitioner and the profile is hilarious, capturing the loquacious
obscurities of Mitchum's quasi drunken monologues as well as the funny contrast
between the jauntily inventive Boyle and the intellectual Jordan. A "best
of" volume of Lewis's pieces is due out later this year.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle hits on the street on Tuesday, May 19, 2009,
retailing for $29.95, or soon thereafter available via NetFlix or at a video
store near you.