by Brendan Foley
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a film from 1973 that I will be discussing in its entirety. That includes the ending.
With Black Mass hitting theaters and sparking at least a month of Boston accent jokes, it put me in mind of one of the great, underrated American crime films. The Friends of Eddie Coyle came out in 1973, directed by Peter Bullitt Yates, to unimpressive box office results. But the film, and the novel upon which it is based, have lingered on in the culture, inspiring decades of crime fiction writers and filmmakers. Y’know how they say of the Velvet Underground ‘they inspired more bands than fans’? That’s Eddie Coyle.
The Criterion Collection people recognized this, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle is now yours to own, and you should own it, if you can. But I’d like to take a little time to talk about maybe my favorite aspect of the film, and why it plays as such a gut punch even after several viewings.
And if you don’t like that, well, go write your own fucking essay. Jeez, can you believe that guy? What a prick. Anywho…
“You’re too late Eddie. It all happened without you.”
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is the story of a dead man. Most films are, technically, if you want to factor in the whole ‘mortality’ thing. As Neil Gaiman has said, the only difference between a happy story and a sad story is where you choose to stop telling it.
But Eddie Coyle makes it clear from the opening minutes of the film that Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) is a man in twilight. A low-level, middle-aged crook, Coyle is staring down a long prison sentence. While Coyle frets about what another prison bid will do to him and his family, the underworld network of Boston turns around him. There’s a young gun dealer named Jackie Brown (yes, this is where Tarantino got the name), there’s a crew of bank robbers raising all kinds of mayhem, there’s a shifty bartender played by the great Peter Boyle, and around the edges are the feds, seeking out the right angle to bring everything down. Everyone’s wheeling, everyone’s dealing, and low-level, middle-aged Eddie Coyle finds himself at the epicenter of the storm, an unwitting axis around which all the other parties spin.
But for all his connections, for all his ‘friends’, there’s no one who can save Eddie Coyle.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle makes no bones about where it’s going, but it takes its sweet time arriving at that destination. This might be the single most relaxed crime drama ever made, focusing as it does on the day-in and day-out interactions within the criminal network. There are no big gun fights or car chases or anything of that sort, just people talking, plotting, and, occasionally, murdering each other.
It’s an approach taken largely from the seminal novel upon which the film is adapted, often word for word. George V. Higgins’ book contains probably less than a hundred words of description, and the rest of it is formed entirely of some of the best dialogue that anyone has ever written. In the hands of actors like Mitchum and Boyle, that dialogue takes on even grander heights. Mitchum’s face by 1973 was a carved roadmap of life, and when he delivers a soliloquy about what he has endured to survive to this point, you feel his woe and desperation down to your bones. You pity this man, Eddie Coyle, even as you understand that the noose around his neck is one he tied himself. You want to see him slip out of it and start anew.
He can’t, and the book and the film both make it very clear very early that he can’t. The setting helps too, since Massachusetts in late fall and early winter is beset by death no matter where you look. Grey skies reign overhead, and the roads are constantly slick with rain. Even when the sun does shine, the warmth never seems to reach the ground. That’s the landscape where Eddie and his ‘friends’ operate, and there’s no redemption waiting for any of them.
Throughout, director Peter Yates frames Mitchum, by no one’s estimation a small or unimpressive man, as a huddled, lonely weakling. Mitchum’s dead man’s eyes, so incredibly imposing in films like Night of the Hunter, taken on a haunted pallor at he looks out at a world that has no refuge for him anymore. He knows that his only options are to either go to jail, or to rat out on his co-criminals and friends. Coyle spends the whole film weighing that choice in his mind, only to finally make up his mind and learn that someone else beat him to the punch.
And here’s where the film deviates from the book, and where the novel’s cynicism is elevated to the straight-up nihilistic. See, in the book, it’s a completely unrelated character that rats out to the feds, and poor Eddie just has the bad fucking luck to be blamed for it. It’s a pitiful end to a character we’ve come to sympathize with, but there’s also an element of justice to it. Eddie Coyle lived by his connections to the criminal underworld, and those same connections did him in.
But in the movie, Eddie Coyle is straight-up set-up. He’s framed as the rat by Peter Boyle’s Dillon, and Dillon completes the frame-up by taking the mob-mandated assignment to kill Eddie Coyle.
It’s a streamlined ending, and one that changes the entire tenor of the story. To tell crime stories in Boston is to deal with the Catholic culture that runs so dominantly in the Irish neighborhoods that form Boston’s underbelly. You get guys who make a living killing and robbing, and they still go to church every Sunday and don’t see any hypocrisy with expecting God to preserve their souls. Catholic guilt belies every Boston crime film (and it’s part of why Scorsese nailed The Departed, even if the accents are nails-on-chalkboards at times) and Higgins defined it beautifully in Eddie Coyle. Eddie may have been innocent of the crime that finally got his number punched, but he was still pretty damn guilty of many other things.
But the film works overtime to sell you on how sympathetic Eddie Coyle is, and how underserving he is of what he gets. Not only do they make him the specific victim of a much crueler man’s plotting, but the film also adds in new scenes showing the run-down but loving home that Eddie Coyle has, and the happy relationship he has with his wife. Sure, he’s a crook, but he’s a crook that we can empathize with and even love.
That can’t save him. Nothing can save him. Eddie Coyle marches unwittingly to his own end, in a climax that’s as despairing in its own way as The Conversation or The Parallax View. The ’70s were a great time for hopeless, evil-triumphant conclusions, and The Friends of Eddie Coyle is up there with the best of them. Eddie Coyle didn’t deserve what he got. Does anyone?