Quick Hit:
Last year I wrote a Top 10 List of Burt Lancaster's best performances & his late career film Atlantic City ('80) made the list. He was 67 when it was released & the film shows how he had matured as a performer. He wasn't afraid to wear his age on screen & the performance is so much better because of it. Last week, I watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle & had similar feelings about the performance Robert Mitchum gave. While he was a decade younger than Lancaster's 67 when he made Eddie Coyle, it is the gravitas of his age (56) that enhanced the performance.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a sparse film about small time criminals, informants & cops in 1970's Boston. Director Peter Yates (Bullitt) & screenwriter Paul Monash (Big Trouble in Little China) adapt former Boston area prosecutor George V. Higgins' novel as a series of conversations, usually in bars or seedy restaurants, that are all about power, who has it & who needs it, desperately. The film is punctuated by 2, near silent, robberies that add an emphatic exclamation point to all the conversations & illustrate the consequences of crime & knowledge.
Mitchum plays a middleman, selling guns to bank robbers & information to the feds, all while trying to avoid prison time on a highjacking conviction. He reeks of desperation as he tries in vain to spare his family the hardship of his pending incarceration. He's pathetic, but he's played by Robert Mitchum! That may seem like an overwhelming incongruity, but the genius in the performance is that Mitchum inhabits the loser, complete with a spot on Boston accent, instead allowing some very tight dialogue to imbue the character with charm & the world weariness so reminiscent in Mitchum's classic roles. It's as if some of Mitchum early career tough guys had aged & fallen on hard times. Kent Jones, writing for The Criterion Collection DVD version of the film, nails it when he recounts this conversation with his gun supplier:
Coyle (Mitchum): "Look, one of the first things I learned is never to ask a man why he's in a hurry. All you got to know is that I told the man he can depend on me because you told me I could depend on you. Now one of us is going to have a big fat problem. Another thing I've learned: If anybody's gonna have a problem, you're gonna be the one."
Sounds like Mitchum, right? But here it's delivered in such a tired & rote way that you can feel the character's desperation. He's given this speech many times before & he may have once been able to fully back up the threat, but now he's just hanging on for dear life. Like Lancaster's aged former gangster hanger-on in Atlantic City, Coyle has to prove himself worthy of his past (imagined) glory. Sadly, as he snitches on his colleagues to save his skin, Coyle isn't allowed the chivalrous redemption. No matter, I would put Mitchum's portrayal of Eddie Coyle up among his very best. Different to be sure, but no less impactful & memorable. In fact, I would show Eddie Coyle to anyone who would dare to not consider Mitchum one of the greatest of the Hollywood leading men, regardless of era!
A side not: The film is filled with some of the best character actors working in film in the early 70's. This film is an absolute gem!
Last year I wrote a Top 10 List of Burt Lancaster's best performances & his late career film Atlantic City ('80) made the list. He was 67 when it was released & the film shows how he had matured as a performer. He wasn't afraid to wear his age on screen & the performance is so much better because of it. Last week, I watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle & had similar feelings about the performance Robert Mitchum gave. While he was a decade younger than Lancaster's 67 when he made Eddie Coyle, it is the gravitas of his age (56) that enhanced the performance.
The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a sparse film about small time criminals, informants & cops in 1970's Boston. Director Peter Yates (Bullitt) & screenwriter Paul Monash (Big Trouble in Little China) adapt former Boston area prosecutor George V. Higgins' novel as a series of conversations, usually in bars or seedy restaurants, that are all about power, who has it & who needs it, desperately. The film is punctuated by 2, near silent, robberies that add an emphatic exclamation point to all the conversations & illustrate the consequences of crime & knowledge.
Mitchum plays a middleman, selling guns to bank robbers & information to the feds, all while trying to avoid prison time on a highjacking conviction. He reeks of desperation as he tries in vain to spare his family the hardship of his pending incarceration. He's pathetic, but he's played by Robert Mitchum! That may seem like an overwhelming incongruity, but the genius in the performance is that Mitchum inhabits the loser, complete with a spot on Boston accent, instead allowing some very tight dialogue to imbue the character with charm & the world weariness so reminiscent in Mitchum's classic roles. It's as if some of Mitchum early career tough guys had aged & fallen on hard times. Kent Jones, writing for The Criterion Collection DVD version of the film, nails it when he recounts this conversation with his gun supplier:
Coyle (Mitchum): "Look, one of the first things I learned is never to ask a man why he's in a hurry. All you got to know is that I told the man he can depend on me because you told me I could depend on you. Now one of us is going to have a big fat problem. Another thing I've learned: If anybody's gonna have a problem, you're gonna be the one."
Sounds like Mitchum, right? But here it's delivered in such a tired & rote way that you can feel the character's desperation. He's given this speech many times before & he may have once been able to fully back up the threat, but now he's just hanging on for dear life. Like Lancaster's aged former gangster hanger-on in Atlantic City, Coyle has to prove himself worthy of his past (imagined) glory. Sadly, as he snitches on his colleagues to save his skin, Coyle isn't allowed the chivalrous redemption. No matter, I would put Mitchum's portrayal of Eddie Coyle up among his very best. Different to be sure, but no less impactful & memorable. In fact, I would show Eddie Coyle to anyone who would dare to not consider Mitchum one of the greatest of the Hollywood leading men, regardless of era!
A side not: The film is filled with some of the best character actors working in film in the early 70's. This film is an absolute gem!
