Weekend Viewing: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Peter Yates, the British-born director with a long and successful Hollywood career, was always considered more of a journeyman director than an autuer, but his highlights (Bullit, Breaking Away, The Dresser, The Hot Rock and especially The Friends of Eddie Coyle) suggest a more interesting career than he is generally credited with. He died earlier this week at the age of 81 (see Bruce Weber at The New York Times and MSN's own Kim Morgan at The Hitlist), prompting the usual career reassessment (many of them collected by David Hudson at MUBI). Like my colleague Kim, I like to remember Yates with his best movie, which was released in a superb Criterion edition in 2009.


The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion), adapted from the terrific novel by George V. Higgins and produced in the wake of The French Connection, is probably the least heralded crime movie classic of the seventies. Robert Mitchum is Eddie ‘Fingers’ Coyle, a middleman working the fringes of the Boston underworld while waiting sentencing, which prompts him into a little side-action turning informer for a real wheeler-dealer of a detective (Richard Jordan in a pitch perfect performance). Director Peter Yates finds the perfect pace for the film, never pushing the action, never forcing the tension, letting it all play out – and finally unravel – at the same pace that his characters live off the job.

The characters are vivid without being eccentric, Peter Boyle is as forthright as he is impenetrable as a bartender with his fingers in plenty of schemes and Mitchum is at his best as a tired professional still hustling because it’s all he knows. Shot in that distinctive mix of location naturalism and matter-of-fact criminal activity that defined so many such films of the early seventies, Eddie Coyle lays bare the food chain of the criminal underworld, from the robbers to the gun suppliers and all the middlemen in between, including the stool pigeons. This is the first film I can think of since Pickup on South Street that portrays the informer not just in a sympathetic light but as a natural, inevitable part of the social order.

Yates sat down for the commentary track in 2009, dawdling through the film with affectionate remembrances (it's still one his favorite of his films) and observations. Also features a booklet with a new essay by critic Kent Jones and a 1973 profile of Mitchum originally written for Rolling Stone magazine.