With Friends Like These
by JACOB SUGARMAN
If Tony Soprano was a fan of Gary Cooper he must have loved Robert Mitchum. Cat sliced off his own finger in Sydney Pollock’s The Yakuza and didn’t make a peep. Just sweated a little and wrapped that bitch up in a napkin.
When he wasn’t sucking on cigarettes in fedoras and trench coats, he even found the time to cut a calypso record and the sensationally titled country album, That Man, Robert Mitchum, Sings.
Really, who knew? With the May release of The Friends of Eddie Coyle on Criterion DVD, Gen-Y audiences have their first crack at Eddie “Knuckles” in this classic, 70’s crime saga and quintessential Mitchum vehicle.
The movie centers on Eddie “Knuckles” Coyle, a low-grade hoodlum and gunrunner famous for the extra set of knuckles he acquired from the wrong side of a dresser drawer. Such is the price for selling traceable arms to the Mafia. When he’s pinched for hijacking a truck, Coyle turns snitch for Detective David Foley in the hopes that he’ll have his sentence reduced. Because what would his charming, Irish hobbit of a wife do without him?
Meanwhile Jimmy Scalise (Alex Rocco, best known as Moe Green from The Godfather) and his crew are traipsing about the greater Boston area with guns and elaborate masks, robbing banks and taking names. Why? Because he’s Alex Rocco! He made his bones when you were going out with cheerleaders!
When Scalise’s crew is captured by the police, the mob fingers Coyle for setting them up. I won’t spoil the ending but a baby-faced Peter Boyle and a Boston Garden-era Bruins game are involved.
Made in 1973, The Friends of Eddie Coyle enjoys the same funk-infused score and gritty, urban texture as The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3. But while Joseph Sargeant’s caper caught the nostalgic eye of Tony Scott (who’s-gulp-slated to remake The Warriors in 2010), Coyle is the infinitely more stylish of the two films.
Scalise’s crew robs its first bank in translucent masks that look like a cross between John Waters and Ricardo Montalban. Take my word that this hybrid is as chilling as it is hideous. In their follow-up heist, they’re sporting rubber disguises that bear an awful resemblance to the president masks from the 1991 idiot-genius film, Point Break. I see you, Kathryn Bigelow! Your sexy DILF act is fooling no one.
With all the double-crossing, snitching and hammy Boston accents, it’s also hard to think that Martin Scorsese didn’t at least take a peak at Coyle before he started shooting The Depahted.
Yet for all of director Peter Yates’ artistry, this movie really belongs to Mitchum. Watching him stagger about like a man marked for death in the Frankenstein-like company of Peter Boyle, you can’t help but recall his appearance twenty years earlier in the classic film noir, Out of the Past.
Fatalism just agrees with him. But what makes Mitchum so compelling is that he never lets the doom and gloom of his characters drag him too far down. When asked about his approach to acting, he once famously responded: “I have two acting styles: with and without a horse.”
You can see from the still photographs of the movie shoot included on the DVD that Mitchum never took himself too seriously. And really, that’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle—a throwback, crime story long on verve and short on pretension. Arm your netflix queues accordingly.
Jacob Sugarman is the senior contributor to This Recording.
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