The Friends of Eddie Coyle: The Anti-Glamour Crime Film

Most crime films sell you a fantasy of competence — the perfect heist, the untouchable operator, the score that sets you up for life. The Friends of Eddie Coyle sells you a man buying guns out of car boots in freezing Boston car parks because he owes people money and is too old and too tired to have any better options left. There is no glamour here, no big score, no code, no honour among thieves. There is only a low-level criminal trying to stay out of prison and slowly discovering that everyone he knows would sell him for their own advantage, because that is exactly what he is trying to do to them. It is the great anti-glamour crime film, and half a century later it remains the corrective every romantic gangster picture needs.

It came and went quietly in 1973 and has been steadily reclaimed since as one of the finest American crime films of its decade, a period thick with masterpieces. Its power is that it refuses every pleasure the genre usually offers and gives you something harder and more valuable in their place.

A small man in a closing trap

Eddie Coyle is a middle-aged Boston criminal facing a prison sentence in New Hampshire for a truck hijacking. To avoid it, he needs to give the authorities something — information, someone bigger than himself — and the film follows him through a few grey weeks as he tries to trade his way out of jail while continuing to run guns to a crew of bank robbers to make the money he still owes. Everyone in Eddie’s world is doing some version of the same arithmetic. His contact buys the guns and might inform. His federal handler squeezes him for names and offers little in return. A slick bartender named Dillon runs errands for both the criminals and the police. The whole ecosystem is a web of small betrayals, each man weighing what he can get for selling out the next, and Eddie is somewhere in the middle of it, not clever enough to see the whole board.

The film is adapted from the first novel by George V. Higgins, a former Boston prosecutor whose books are built almost entirely out of dialogue — the endless, circling, profane talk of criminals and cops doing business. Higgins had listened to hundreds of wiretaps and understood that real criminals do not speak in movie one-liners; they repeat themselves, complain, threaten vaguely, and bury the actual deal inside twenty minutes of nothing. The screenplay by Paul Monash keeps that texture, and the film trusts it completely. Whole scenes are just two men in a car or a diner, talking around a transaction, and the tension comes from what neither will say directly.

Mitchum at the end of the road

Robert Mitchum was fifty-five when he played Eddie Coyle, and he brings the full weight of a long career and a lived-in face to a man who has run out of road. This is one of the great late performances by any American actor, precisely because Mitchum does so little. Eddie is not colourful. He is a tired man with a family he loves, a set of ruined hands he mentions once, and a dawning, unspoken understanding that he has no move left that will save him. Mitchum plays the exhaustion and the small dignity of it, the way Eddie keeps making his rounds and cracking his weak jokes even as the trap closes, and it is quietly devastating.

Set this beside the villain that made Mitchum a legend and the range is astonishing. His murderous preacher in The Night of the Hunter is all theatre and appetite, a monster who fills every frame; Eddie Coyle is the opposite pole of the same instrument, a man trying to take up as little space as possible so the world will not notice him and finish him off. The preacher wants to be seen. Eddie wants to disappear, and cannot. Together the two roles, eighteen years apart, define what Mitchum could do better than almost anyone: play men whose stillness hides everything.

Why it works: process, weather and refusal

Peter Yates directed, an Englishman who had made Bullitt and knew how to stage action, and the interesting thing is how much action he holds back. There are bank robberies in the film, and Yates films them as cold, efficient procedure — the crew takes a bank manager’s family hostage, executes the job with grim precision, and leaves — with none of the exhilaration the genre usually supplies. The robberies are frightening and businesslike, real work done by professionals, and the film’s refusal to make them exciting is a deliberate ethical choice. It will not let you enjoy the crime.

The whole picture is shot in a wintry, functional Boston of parking lots, bowling alleys, cheap bars and highway diners, the everyday geography of a working city rather than any noir dreamscape. Victor Kemper’s photography keeps the light flat and grey, and the cold is almost a character; you can feel the misery of standing in an open-air car park doing a gun deal in a New England February. This documentary plainness is the film’s method and its argument. Crime here is a grubby, poorly paid job carried out by unglamorous people in unlovely places, and the plainness makes the eventual violence land with a weight that stylisation would rob it of.

That commitment to process over glamour places Eddie Coyle at the head of a whole tradition. Its closest ancestor is the British hardness of Get Carter, which two years earlier had stripped the gangster film of its romance in a rainy Newcastle, and its descendants are everywhere modern crime cinema chooses realism over cool. When Michael Mann built a whole style around professional criminals as working men in Thief, he was extending this film’s premise into a more romantic register; when the low-rent Australian crooks of Animal Kingdom betray one another for survival, they are living in Eddie Coyle’s moral universe. The film also stands as the plain, sad answer to the beautiful evasions of a picture like The Big Sleep: where Bogart’s Marlowe glides through crime as a witty adventure, Eddie trudges through it as a dead-end job.

Where to watch

The Criterion Collection edition is the one to seek, and it treats the film with the seriousness it earned slowly over decades. Come to it after the flashier crime classics and let it correct them. It is a short film, tight and unhurried, and it leaves a bruise.

Spoilers below

The tragedy of The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that Eddie’s careful calculations were always beside the point, because the man selling him out was never the one he was watching. Eddie spends the film agonising over whether to inform on the gun supplier, Jackie Brown, to buy leniency on his New Hampshire charge, and he does eventually give the young dealer up, an act of self-preservation that costs him whatever remained of his self-respect. But the federal agent Foley has already got the arrest he needed from another source and gives Eddie nothing meaningful in return; the betrayal buys the old man no rescue at all.

Meanwhile the bank-robbery crew Eddie sold guns to has been caught, and the crew’s employers conclude — wrongly — that Eddie was the informer who exposed them. The real informer, the one feeding the police throughout, is Dillon, the friendly bartender who moves easily between the criminals and the law and betrays everyone with a smile. It is Dillon who is quietly told to arrange Eddie’s death to protect the operation, and Dillon who carries it out. The film’s final movement is unbearable in its ordinariness: Dillon takes Eddie, who trusts him as a friend, to a Boston Bruins hockey game, buys him beers, lets him get pleasantly drunk and sentimental about the players on the ice, then drives him out, shoots him in the head while he sleeps off the drink in the passenger seat, and dumps the body. Eddie dies happy, warm and unaware, betrayed by the one man he thought was on his side, killed for a crime he did not even commit.

The last scene is Dillon, having murdered his friend the night before, sitting down to breakfast with the untroubled federal agent, the two of them chatting easily, the machine rolling on as though nothing had happened. That final image is the whole thesis of the film. The system of mutual betrayal that Eddie tried and failed to work simply absorbs his death and continues, and the men who survive are the ones with no loyalty at all. There is no justice in it, no lesson, no arc — only a tired man who wanted to stay out of prison and see his kids, ground up by an economy of treachery he was never ruthless enough to master.

For the film’s British cousin in cold-blooded realism, Get Carter is essential; for the version where Mitchum plays the monster instead of the prey, The Night of the Hunter shows the other end of his range.