Grime and Punishment

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE with Lit Hub + CrimeReads Editor OLIVIA RUTIGLIANO

“My big weakness is I’m a nice guy,” a low-level gunrunner says to his machine gun supplier. There are no nice guys in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Peter Yates’s 1973 crime drama, but they’re not all bad, either. Just cursed.

Welcome to the greasy, threadbare underbelly of Whitey Bulger’s Boston, where “friendship” is a precious currency and most of what’s traded turns out to be counterfeit. Eddie Coyle, a world-weary, middle-aged crook, has no real friends. Angling to avoid hard time for a truck hijacking in New Hampshire, Coyle feeds dirt on his associates to ATF agent David Foley. He’s playing a dangerous game, one where all the players have been dealt a crap hand, and everyone’s bluffing.

Based on the debut novel by former Assistant U.S. Attorney George V. Higgins - often hailed as one of the greatest crime novels ever written - The Friends of Eddie Coyle stars Robert Mitchum in a late-career stunner that aches with quiet desperation. He is supported by Peter Boyle as the doughy, deceitful Dillon, Richard Jordan in full sleaze-dick mode as Agent Foley, and show-stealer Steven Keats, breaking out as gunrunner (and mouth-runner) Jackie Brown. Yep, Quentin’s a fan.

“The first thing I learned is never to ask a man why he’s in a hurry.”

In addition to nailing the novel’s legendary dialogue, Mitchum, his co-stars, and director Yates perfectly capture its sad, treacherous atmosphere on celluloid - from the gold-speckled formica diners to the shadowy Beantown underpasses.

The sexy flair of Bullitt (1968) and the jaunty charm of The Hot Rock (1972), two of Yates’s earlier crime films, are nowhere to be found in Coyle. Instead we get a slow, smoldering sense of doom. Kidnappings and bank robberies are almost mundane, while casual conversations crackle with menace. Cinematographer Victor J. Kemper’s use of long shadows, muted mustard yellow and dreary brown liminal spaces, and the late autumn setting serve to haunt each frame with a chilling beauty, like an Edward Hopper painting.

“This life's hard, but it's harder if you're stupid.”

It’s hard to explain why I love this film so much. There’s something poignant about the desperation and exhaustion in Mitchum’s eyes, the bittersweet roar of the crowd at the climactic Bruins game, the fatalistic finale. It’s a tone at times that cues another favorite crime film of mine, Fargo (1996). “The conditions that allowed for movies as spare and melancholy as this one are long gone - very few current American moviemakers find it possible, or even desirable, to leave their action so unadorned,” observed Kent Jones in his 2015 essay on the film. “Young film fans raised in the multiplex era may look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore. The truth is that they never did. There's only this one.”

There is only one. Just like there’s only one Olivia Rutigliano, editor of Lit Hub and CrimeReads, who returns to Underexposed for a discussion of…

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

Where To Watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle

• Currently streaming for free on Pluto.

• For the real ones, get the Criterion special edition Blu-ray.

  ---

News Reel

• Is this the salvation of indie film? Damien Chazelle, Steven Soderbergh, Sean Baker, Patty Jenkins and others have endorsed “Attend,” a new data-driven online marketplace that cuts out film-distribution middlemen and allows filmmakers to connect directly with relevant exhibitors, while retaining ownership of their films. It will launch in the US in early 2025.

• “Algorithms might make for comfortable consumers, but they cannot produce thoughtful creators, and they are slowly taking your ability to choose from you. You might think you’re choosing, but you never really are. When your ideas, interests, and even daily meals are largely inspired by whatever was already approved, already done, already voted on and liked, you’re only experiencing life as an echo of the masses (or the machines, if personalized based on historic preference). And in this echo chamber, genuine discovery is rare, even radical.”

  Stephen Moore
  of Trend Mill warns in his essay “Don't Let Machines or the Crowd Decide Your World.”

Beyond the paywall, we have GRIME CITY CINEMA, highlighting some seedy New York City crime flicks you absolutely need to see, and peculiar FOREIGN MOVIE POSTERS for Hollywood films that I am obsessed with. Today is the LAST DAY of our Halloween sale - don’t miss your chance to save 50 percent on annual subscriptions. Thank you for reading Underexposed, see you next Friday!

Grime City Cinema