Robert Mitchum always had a sluggish, loping gait, but in his prime, it suggested laconic virility and unsettling patience. However, when he enters The Friends of Eddie Coyle in a gray frame, wearing a gray suit and sporting gray hair and gray skin, the actor’s slow shuffle looks arthritic and stiff. Even the actor’s iconic voice, that tossed-off, naturalistic drawl, here sounds like a machine whirring down as its battery dies, the mumble of a man going out with a whimper. An aged, weary gun-runner, Eddie Coyle is a man who looks as if he’s dreamed of getting out while he could for decades, but only now, as the noose slowly tightens around his neck, does he actually make the effort to save himself.
Eddie carries the battle scars of a life of crime. He brandishes “an extra set of knuckles,” gained when employers placed his hand into a drawer and kicked it shut when he lost a shipment one time. His business talk is curt and utile, using only enough words to conduct a transaction, though this communicates fear as much as hardness. Tasked with informing for the ATF, Eddie must continue to broker deals to gather evidence against his peers, but it’s clear that Eddie, for all his experience, is small potatoes, and nothing he could ever glean would be enough to escape the jail sentence dangling over his head like the Sword of Damocles.
Eddie’s ATF contact, Foley (Richard Jordan), wants his rat to help stop a string of bank robberies conducted by Eddie’s old pals, and Peter Yates’ direction of these heists is a high point of ‘70s action cinema. Never fussy or showy, the heist sequences are first and foremost showcases of patient editing, reflecting the professionalism of the crew. POV shots of the robbers casing each joint give way to the gang suddenly appearing in the home of a bank president to take his family hostage, then move to the bank where the victim adopts the same eerie calm as his captors in urging his co-workers to cooperate for his wife and children’s sakes. No shots are wasted, imparting sufficient information or deer-in-the-headlights emotional freeze to say everything. It’s action as entropy, ducking the usual pandemonium of heist movies in favor of a sober account of how successful career criminals operate. Their competence is such that Eddie struggles to set a trap for them, and all the while his comrades grow more and more suspicious of him.
It soon becomes evident that the title is a bitter joke. Friends stands as one of the most unsparing movies ever made on the subject of honor among thieves. The gun-runners, robbers, and gangsters at the heart of the film all operate on a paradoxical code of conduct that permits no one to be a snitch even as everyone refuses to take the fall for anyone else. When the group starts to smell a rat, no one responds more ruthlessly than Dillon (a chilling Peter Boyle), only for Dillon to be revealed as an informant himself, throwing heat onto Eddie to deflect attention and out of a lingering loathing for his own kind. Eddie’s own snitching is the logical conclusion of an ethos founded upon ruthless self-preservation, and that’s something that the cops freely exploit.
Foley comes off the worst of anyone, pressuring Eddie to “help Uncle” in exchange for leniency but always judging the smuggler’s efforts to be just short of pardon-worthy. The most devastating scene in the film comes when Eddie helps the ATF nab Jackie and giddily asks Foley about clemency, only for Foley to spin a manipulative fib to goad Eddie into yet more service, even though by now it will be obvious to every mobster in town that the man needs to be eliminated. Foley never offered freedom, merely the choice of dying in prison or getting a bullet to the head to save time. For all the dread of the robbery sequences, nothing in the film haunts so much as a shot of Foley walking out of a bar after deeming Eddie’s assisted arrest and subsequent exposure as nothing more than a promising start, receding into deep background with the man’s future as Eddie can only blankly stare forward, suddenly aware of the only possible outcome of his actions.
A/V
Sourced from the same transfer as the 2009 DVD, Criterion’s Blu-ray doesn’t exactly offer any revelations. A few image artifacts dot the frame here and there, mainly in the form of some banding that shows inconsistent contrast in the darker scenes. For the most part, however, the film’s oaken color palette looks great, and black levels mostly look fine outside of the aforementioned instances of fluctuation. The mono track is also solid, consistently clear and free of any pops or hiss.
Extras
An audio commentary by Peter Yates marks the only significant extra on the disc. In it, an old Yates reminisces about the shoot, and his shaky voice and weariness belie his maintained enthusiasm for the project. It’s not that captivating a track, but the director’s affection for the actors is charming, and he imparts all the information you need for a movie whose strengths are so self-evident. There’s also a stills gallery, and a booklet with an old Rolling Stone profile on Mitchum and an essay by Kent Jones.
Overall
One of Robert Mitchum’s finest showcases, The Friends of Eddie Coyle gets a Criterion upgrade every bit as humble and functional as the film itself.
