Robert Mitchum - vo.rs

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

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 10:00:00 +0000

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.

The Night of the Hunter: Laughton's Only Film, and a Miracle

Tue, 27 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000

Charles Laughton directed one film in his life, The Night of the Hunter, it lost money and got mixed reviews, and he never directed another. This is one of the cruellest facts in film history, because the film he made is among the most beautiful and terrifying ever produced in America, a crime story told as a Grimm fairy tale, and the industry’s failure to see it in 1955 cost us every film Laughton might have gone on to make. He died eight years later having proven, once, that he was one of the great visual directors, and then having been talked out of ever doing it again.

Out of the Past: The Doom-Laden Peak of Film Noir

Fri, 20 Dec 2024 10:00:00 +0000

A man is running a petrol station in a small Californian mountain town, courting a nice local girl, keeping his head down. Then a car with the wrong licence plate rolls in, and a face from his old life climbs out, and you understand in an instant that this quiet is borrowed and the bill has come due. Out of the Past, made at RKO in 1947 by Jacques Tourneur, is the film that took every ingredient the noir cycle had been assembling and cooked them into their most concentrated form. If someone wanted a single title to explain what “fatalism” means in a crime film — the sense that the ending was written before the film began, that the characters are only discovering a doom already fixed — this is the one I would hand them.