Critics reviews

In his first scene Mitchum is explaining how he got the extra set of knuckles on each hand (a clear nod to the good and evil contest in Night of the Hunter) from the nuns' rulers and later from fellow thugs. In the last scene, he is shot point-blank in a drunken stupor by one of his "friends." With nary a close-up to register the moment, he slumps offscreen. Ever the pro, Mitchum plays it straight, replete with self-effacement and dumpy physique—not a plea for sympathy anywhere in sight.

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... Friends stands as one of the most unsparing movies ever made on the subject of honor among thieves.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is inescapably cold in its rigorous refusal to indulge in the sort of warmly lurid soap opera that pervaded The Godfather or the previous generation's gangster films that paved the way for Francis Ford Coppola's epic. But there's a subtle and tensely coiled element of suspense to Yates and Monash's work that's equally unnerving and enlivening.

Watch how Eddie Coyle puts the arrogant yet stupid gun-runner in his place. You can almost see (or at least I can imagine I can see), Keats the actor watching Mitchum the actor, thinking, "Holy shit, he is so good." Holy shit, indeed. The monologue I'm talking about starts at around the 1 minute mark. It is rare today to let a scene go that long without a million cuts. To let someone just talk in that way. Movies today are poorer for it. This is _acting_, pure and simple. No tricks.

It is a gray, grim, cold-snapped movie, all bare branches and shoulders hunched against the world. As in a number of other great movies of the era — especially the similarly cold-weather, blue-collar, stagflated Slap Shot — the world seems bled of possibility.

You have to admire the film and its elusive, elliptical set of nuts, and for Victor Kemper's classic early-'70s cinematography, all burned-out windows, endless shadows and chilled Boston aura, and the actors all bring their real deals to the table, Method or no Method. Still, Yates is no Cassavetes or Lumet, and his film suffers from a tentativeness and an occasional urge toward unnecessary jazziness.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an all-action experience. But 2 crisply executed bank heists and a logistically complex parking-lot arrest aside, the kinetic excitement here is sparked by the verbal and gestural rhythms between the actors as they plead for their lives. Yates's camera eye stays so casually observant and his cinematic syntax so spare throughout that when he finally retreats to a plaintive distance in the aftermath of the film's one inevitable tragedy, it packs a considerable punch.

After he was stuck in mid-career neutral doing standard war pictures and flat epics, The Friends of Eddie Coyle restored some juice to Mitchum's career by putting his famously subdued manner in the service of grittier New Hollywood fare and proving that he could play a defeated small man while retaining his compulsive watchability and gravity. As a loser, he fills scenes with stolid, semi-resigned desperation.

Seen today, the movie's supposed faults look like virtues. Admittedly, the standards of its moment were high: this was the era of Get Carter, The Getaway, The Godfather. But The Friends of Eddie Coyle has a rhythm and tonality of its own. The ingenuity of Higgins's narrative structure and the laconic bite of his language find their counterpart in a beautifully sustained visual scheme and an ensemble attuned, down to the smallest bit player, to the film's mood of evenly diffused unease.

Paul Monash's script, based on the novel by George V Higgins, emphasises character over plot, and in this it's well served by a solid supporting cast headed by Peter Boyle, Alex Rocco and Joe Santos. But it's is often so hard-boiled and economical it's tough working out exactly what's going on and why in this network of mistrust and deceit.

Robert Mitchum turns in an immaculate performance as the artful dodger and pathetic small-timer just barely in the know—with fine support from Peter Boyle as a man whose nastiness differs only in degree from the nastiness of his world.