What is special about today, hardcore fans of '70s cinema? It is that today marks the long-awaited DVD release of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), as part of the illustrious Criterion Collection. Directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt, The Hot Rock, Breaking Away), who supplies audio commentary on the disc, Coyle was faithfully adapted from the 1972 debut novel by George V. Higgins, a journalist and lawyer who was working as a United States Attorney in Boston when the book was published. Higgins was a master of dialogue, and Paul Monash, who did the screenplay, had the good sense to transfer most of it to the movie unaltered. It was picked up by the cast members, who ran with it. It's the inhabitants of this grungy, lived-in Boston Irish milieu--the movie looks as if it were shot while the city was enduring a shampoo embargo-- and the firecrackers that they set off whenever they open their mouths, who make Coyle a cult classic.
Robert Mitchum still had a few more leading roles in him after this one, but never again would he would so fully remain both a movie star and an actor living in this moment as he did here, morose but game, sunk deep in the character of Eddie Coyle, a small-time gangster facing the prospect of heavy time he's too old to do, summed up by the cop who wants to turn him into a stoolie as a career runt "about this high up in the bunch" but who knows everybody and everything. Mitchum had been offered the role of the bartender-hit man Dillon but decided he would prefer to die a loser's death after delivering a drunken tribute to the glittering future of Bobby Orr. Peter Boyle wound up playing Dillon instead; he and Mitchum wound up surrounded by a rogue's gallery of the strongest character types of their time, including Alex Rocco, who some of you will remember from our "That Guy!" tribute to the cast of The Godfather. Let no one say that just because the Eddie Coyle mob will always live in the shadow of the Corleones is no reason they shouldn't be paid tribute of their own:
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