By the early 1970s, filmmaker Peter Yates was likely best known for directing the Steve McQueen star vehicle (pun intended) Bullitt, which had been a huge box office hit in 1968. His subsequent few films, unfortunately, failed to capitalize much on that success. Returning to the crime genre, Yates made two heist thrillers back-to-back between 1972 to 1973. Despite similar subject matter, The Hot Rock and The Friends of Eddie Coyle were very different in tone and style from one another. Neither made much of a dent at the box office.
Whereas The Hot Rock had been a fairly lighthearted and breezy caper comedy, The Friends of Eddie Coyle was a decidedly heavier drama depicting the bleak and dangerous lives of small-time criminals. Critics of the day were split in their opinions of the movie, and audiences still dazzled by the operatic sweep of The Godfather the prior year had no interest in it at all. Over time, however, The Friends of Eddie Coyle came to be received better by both camps, and is often regarded today as one of the best crime films of the 1970s, a decade filled with many crime movie classics.
| Title: | The Friends of Eddie Coyle |
| Year of Release: | 1973 |
| Director: | Peter Yates |
| Watched On: | Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | DVD Pluto TV Various VOD rental and purchase platforms |
Screen legend Robert Mitchum stars as the title character, a longtime career criminal who’s suffered a hard life and, in his twilight years, has little to show for it. On the hook for armed robbery, Eddie has only a couple weeks of freedom left before he must turn himself in for sentencing, whereupon he’s expected to spend the next three to five years in prison. At his age and with his background, that could be a life sentence, and he has a wife and kids who’ll be left with nothing.
In his few remaining days, Eddie agrees to pull off at least one more bank heist, not for any romanticized notion of “One Last Job,” but because he has no other source of income and doesn’t want his family to be stuck on Welfare forever without him. A life of crime is the only life he’s ever known, and he’s very good at it.
Eddie is a meticulous planner. He’s very precise about everything he does, every detail of the job, and most importantly about whom he can trust and for what. Trust is a rare commodity in his business, not easily given or taken, even among people who’ve known each other closely for years.
These men have no code of honor to live by. Not even Eddie himself is fully trustworthy. When pressured into it, he informs on his accomplices to a Treasury agent in exchange for the possibility of a reduced sentence. In doing so, he’s careful about what information he offers and what he holds back. He needs to continue with the next bank job and not implicate himself, either to the law or to those he works with or for, some of whom may be doing the same thing behind his back.
Based on the debut novel by former Assistant U.S. Attorney George V. Higgins, the title The Friends of Eddie Coyle is meant to be ironic. Eddie has no true friends, no one he’d risk his life for or would do the same for him. While he laments becoming a “permanent goddamn fink,” he does what he has to do to survive. So does everyone else. They may hate each other for it, but the life is what the life is, and all of them knew that going in.
In addition to following in the wake of The Godfather, The Friends of Eddie Coyle had the misfortune of also being released the same year as The Sting. Compared to either of those, the film is a real bummer. It’s neither as grandiose as the former nor as playful and fun as the latter. Pretty much nobody wanted a movie like this at the time.
Nevertheless, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an excellent, very low key character drama with tons of local color in its early ’70s Boston setting, captured entirely on location. Mitchum delivers a terrific lead performance playing a man ground down by life and with nothing better coming in the future. The actor looks so weary and at the end of his line that I was actually shocked to hear him say that he’s, “almost 51-years-old.” Looking it up afterward, I found that Mitchum was indeed not much older than that, a depressing fact that makes me feel positively ancient right now.
Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, and Alex Rocco also turn in strong supporting roles. If not as entertaining or exciting as some of its direct competitors, the film offers a more grounded, convincing depiction of how criminals actually operate. The staging of its two bank heists, one successful and one not, are fascinating in their details and quite suspenseful. A plot twist near the end is revealed so subtly that many viewers may miss it entirely, but is devastating when you realize its implications.
As noted, The Friends of Eddie Coyle wasn’t much of a success during its release, but gained considerable admiration and respect in the years afterward. Quentin Tarantino was obviously a fan, in that he named one of his own movies after a gun-runner character here called Jackie Brown (played by Steven Keats).
Director Yates would bounce back from this box office failure a few years later with his 1977 aquatic adventure picture The Deep, which was a huge hit, followed by the Oscar nominated coming-of-age drama Breaking Away. Then he made the sci-fi flop Krull, proving that his filmmaking career was a bit all over the map.
The Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection brought The Friends of Eddie Coyle to DVD first, as spine #475. Even though that was almost half a year after Criterion joined the high-definition market, a proper Blu-ray release of the film didn’t follow until 2015. The delay may actually have been for the best, as some of those early Criterion Blu-rays don’t hold up all too well today.
A sticker on the outside of the Blu-ray packaging claims the disc was “Director Approved,” but transfer notes in the accompanying booklet mention nothing about whether Peter Yates supervised the video transfer or not. Yates was 80-years-old when he recorded the audio commentary for the 2009 DVD and sounds like he was quite frail at the time. That makes me think he probably didn’t have much direct involvement with the transfer beyond giving it a thumbs-up when it was done. Sadly, the director passed away in 2011 and never saw the Blu-ray.
In any case, the Blu-ray looks pretty good a decade later. The 1.85:1 image is impressively sharp and detailed, with a minimum of obvious digital artifacts. Although the beginning of the film is quite grainy, the grain tempers down after that to offer a generally mild texture that doesn’t appear artificially reduced. Colors seem accurate for the period – in other words, lots of drab browns, but well captured. Contrast is good.
Claimed to be scanned from a 35mm interpositive and a 35mm color reversal intermediate, parts of the movie have mild speckling, and one brief scene in particular has some very serious scratches despite Criterion’s usual boilerplate text about removing “thousands of instances of dirt, debris, scratches, splices,” etc. etc. Nevertheless, those issues are forgivable.
The PCM mono soundtrack is a little difficult to describe. From shot to shot, it sounds like the microphones were either too close to the actors or too far away, even within a scene. Given that the movie was shot entirely on location, that may well be the case. Other scenes have very obvious ADR re-dubbing that doesn’t quite match the actors’ mouth movements. Thankfully, all dialogue remains intelligible, which is critical for a movie that’s mostly talk. The sound design doesn’t try to get too fancy beyond that, and the track has negligible dynamic range.
In addition to the audio commentary mentioned above, the only other extra on the disc is a still gallery of behind-the-scenes photos, some of them from deleted scenes that didn’t make the final cut. The booklet in the case offers an essay by critic Kent Jones and excerpts from a lengthy 1973 Rolling Stone article by journalist Grover Lewis.
Related
- Peter Yates (director)
- Robert Mitchum
- Peter Boyle
- Richard Jordan
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