Colin Fleming at Salon offers
a look back at one of my favorite actors, Robert Mitchum, and one of my favorite crime films, The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
There are a lot of things I
do a lot of, but heading up that list are two things I would imagine I do more
than anyone: Every year I walk 3,000 miles inside of the city of Boston, and I
also watch great gobs of Robert Mitchum films.
The actor is marking his
centennial this Sunday, and it’s always confounded me that he never tends to
get discussed with the likes of Jimmy Stewart, James Cagney (Orson Welles’
personal favorite) and Cary Grant as the best of Hollywood’s golden age.
When he is discussed it is in
terms of his brawn, his tough guy persona, his status as a veritable noir god,
or his wisecracking offscreen attitudes, which may or may not include reference
to his pot bust in the late 1940s, when such matters were considered huge
crises of social justice.
… Mitchum was crazily
versatile, with turns in Charles Laughton’s beyond-creepy “Night of the Hunter”
(1955), Howard Hawks’ late career “Western El Dorado” (1967) and William
Wellman’s matchless war flick, “The Story of G.I. Joe” (1945). But for all of
the noir glories — hell, 1952’s “The Lusty Men” is not only rodeo-noir, but it
might be the best picture of Nicholas Ray’s career — there is nothing in the
Mitchum canon like 1973’s “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.”
It is based on George V.
Higgins’ book of the same name, which largely dispenses with traditional
novelistic exposition. That is, there’s essentially no first- or third-person
narrator setting scenes for us, as almost all of the book — or the parts that
really matter, anyway — originate from dialogue. And good Lordy, is that
dialogue a’cracklin’.
Higgins worked on the script
for the film, too, which involves Mitchum playing the titular character. He’s a
low-level, middle-aged Boston crook who simply wants to avoid doing another
stint of time in New Hampshire. To achieve this end, he has to work for the
cops to ply them with information on his fellows.
The “friends” of the title is
deliberately ironic — this dude doesn’t really have friends, as he inhabits a
world where connection matters less, and hunting people down matters more.
You can also read my Crime
Beat column on George V. Higgins (seen in the above photo), The Friends of
Eddie Coyle and Boston crime stories via the below link:
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