The first ten minutes or so of director Peter Yates' low-key, rich crime drama, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, is what finally made me a Robert Mitchum fan. I had seen him in films like Cape Fear (the original (1962) and the Scorsese remake (1991)), Night of the Hunter (1955) and Dead Man (1995). He was great in all of those, and yet nothing about his work ever really stuck for me. I could understand why some saw him as one of the most underrated movie stars of his day, but I didn’t really see in Mr. Mitchum, the similar force of nature I saw in his contemporaries.



The Friends of Eddie Coyle changed that for me. It was a change of heart that occurred in the fantastic first ten minutes of the film. When Mitchum strolls into a late-night diner to meet someone about buying guns, there isn’t anything especially remarkable about his presence. Eddie is overweight, bleary-eyed from age and exhaustion, and moves with the shuffle of a man who doesn’t need to tell you that he would rather be somewhere else.



Mitchum never lacked character in his sleepy eyes or slight smirk. As he got older the lines in his face only added to that.



He sits at the table to discuss a deal with a gunrunner, Jackie Brown (Steven Keats), and the look on his face is quiet resignation to the job he’s been assigned. We learn later that Eddie is looking at a steep prison sentence for an earlier crime, and is trying to get out of it by informing on his bosses to an ATF agent (Richard Jordan). We also find out that Eddie, naturally, has a family and a mortgage, and that going to prison for any length of time is going to leave everything that matters to him in ruins. It’s easy to see that Eddie is too old for prison; for that matter, he’s too old to be running guns. When other men his age, in his line work, are either dead, or further up the mob ladder, Eddie is still mired in the same old bullshit.



There’s talk of retiring and going to Florida. This is the kind of thing Eddie has probably muttered a few thousand times before. It’s not a question of whether or not he’s earned it. It’s a matter of whether or not the odds favor his retirement plan. The career Coyle has carved out for himself as a criminal is well-established, worn-out and unremarkable. Early on in the film, his odds of that retirement plan happening are established as being not very good. His best bet is likely to either die in prison or in bed. That’s the only promise land he can hope to look towards.



Mitchum plays Eddie Coyle with that reality firmly in thought at all times. Reviewers have described Mitchum’s performances through the decades, in a career that spanned over fifty years in film, television and theater, as laid-back to the extreme. This assessment has been given to Mitchum as both a positive and a negative. Mitchum agreed with the negative.



The career Coyle has carved out for himself as a criminal is well-established, worn-out and unremarkable.



“I have two types of acting styles”, he once said, “With and without a horse.” A typically self-deprecating statement from Mitchum, and it’s true that he played many of his characters as though he was only semi- attentive, but a closer look at any of his best performances reveals so much more than that. The secret to enjoying Robert Mitchum’s work is to pay close attention. What some people would call underachieving, others would call subtlety. Paying closer attention to Mitchum reveals the second possibility. He would play scores of gangster, detective and other shady parts in those fifty years, but The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of his best.



What he does over the course of his "relatively short" time on-screen is make it all look incredibly easy. It’s not. Eddie Coyle, in the hands of another actor, may have been just another haggard, aging thug- purely one-dimensional. In the hands of Mitchum, Eddie’s story is there in everything he says, in the way he walks and in the way his eyes regard each moment of his rapidly- disintegrating circumstances.



That Eddie has to stay alive in order to reach his pitiful retirement is only part of Yate’s grainy look at Boston’s crime world. Large portions of the film focus on Jackie Brown, who goes to great lengths to get Coyle the weapons he needs. Richard Jordan is there as the ATF agent trying to bring the whole operation down. Peter Boyle (one of the great, underappreciated character actors) runs a bar and acts as a mid-level guy for the same organization as Coyle.



Joe Santos and Alex Rocco (best known as Mo Green in The Godfather (1972)) round out the ensemble as bank-robbers performing a series of dangerous, broad-daylight bank robberies.



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Adapted from a George V. Higgins novel (1970) by Paul Monash, The Friends of Eddie Coyle spins a good underworld story, a nice variation (especially for its time) on the cops and criminals. It gives us strong, believable characters all the way around. All of whom are fleshed out and given personality by a good cast. It’s not a sprawling crime drama or a bloodbath. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is just a tightly-wound, well-paced film that garnered good reviews for its time. Since then, it’s come to be regarded as something of a mini-classic. Enough of one at least that The Criterion Collection saw fit to add it to their library in 2009.



Everything about the film plays a part in its continued appeal, but the biggest part of that appeal belongs to Mitchum. The 70’s would be the last truly impressive decade of his career. He would continue to turn in good performances through the 80’s and 90’s, right up to his death in 1997, but The Friends of Eddie Coyle would be one of his last truly great turns. He should have received an Oscar nomination for it, but he only managed one of those in his lifetime(Best Supporting Actor for The Story of G.I. Joe (1945)). It doesn’t really matter, and it’s likely Mitchum wouldn’t have given a damn either way. The Friends of Eddie Coyle was a gig in a long line of gigs. Some of them are some of the best movies of all time. Some of them are just there for anyone who wants to dig a little deeper into Mitchum’s filmography. Others should be left forgotten with enough binge-drinking to kill the brain cells that remember them. The Friends of Eddie Coyle goes near the top of the first category.



Thanks to his talents, Eddie Coyle might be a loser and a burnout, but when he meets Jackie Brown he’s the most powerful, wisest man in Boston, Massachusetts. He lays it on the line, runs down the details of what he needs with casual precision and even (whether he means to or not is irrelevant) leaves the much younger associate with some insight. Eddie might be at the bottom of the food-chain, but you wouldn’t think it if all you had to go on were those first ten minutes I mentioned at the beginning.



You can extend that thought to Mitchum, too. He doesn’t look like someone who’s going to knock the walls down when he walks into that diner, but he does, and he makes it look like he could take the work or leave it. He comes off as sincere, because he is sincere. The Friends of Eddie Coyle owes a lot to him. He only gets a limited number of minutes in the film, and he casually makes the most out of every single one. It is indeed a mini-classic, but Mitchum himself is a classic of larger proportion, period.









