Even if you think Amy Ryan’s wicked pissah performance in Gone Baby Gone wuz robbed on Oscar night, there’s no denying we’re living in the golden age of Boston crime movies. Mystic River kicked it off, The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture last year, and now Martin Scorsese is set to direct an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island starring (who else?) Leonardo DiCaprio. But the granddaddy of all these films remains criminally unknown, rarely screened and never released on home video: The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
Adapted from the novel by Boston crime writer George V. Higgins, the precursor to Lehane and Spenser creator Robert Parker, Coyle is the story of a small-time gun dealer who turns informant when he learns he’s facing a stretch in prison. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Robert Mitchum as Coyle, the film isn’t big on plot twists or even much violence; its power comes from Higgins’ pungent dialogue, gritty locations and one of Mitchum’s finest performances. It has a devoted cult following, and the leader of that cult has to be Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Jeffrey Wells, who has been pursuing Coyle’s DVD release like Ahab pursued the white whale.
It began with this column from 2001, back when Wells still wrote for Reel.com. “Coyle was originally distributed by Paramount Pictures, which still owns the rights,” he wrote. “However, there are no current plans by Paramount to put it out on DVD, according to PHV spokesperson Martin Blythe. ‘But you're the second person to ask recently, so I'll mention it,’ he said earlier this week. ‘Sometimes this is how things start.’” Sometimes, perhaps, but not in this case. Wells has restated his demands periodically through the years, right up until earlier this month. Despite rumors that Criterion plans to release it (the same rumors surround virtually every rare or unreleased movie you can imagine), Coyle remains unavailable on DVD.
However, you can watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle any time you’d like, either on your computer or your TiVo, if you have such a thing. It is available as a digital download through Amazon’s Unbox service, and you can either rent it for $3.99 or buy it for $9.99. I have no information about the quality of the video – actually, I’m hoping one of our devoted readers will serve as the guinea pig and report back here. Here’s the trailer; if it interests you, why not take the plunge?