THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE

In one of the best performances of his legendary career, Robert Mitchum plays small-time gunrunner Eddie “Fingers” Coyle in an adaptation by Peter Yates of George V. Higgins’s acclaimed novel THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. World-weary and living hand to mouth, Coyle works on the sidelines of the seedy Boston underworld just to make ends meet. But when he finds himself facing a second stretch of hard time, he’s forced to weigh loyalty to his criminal colleagues against snitching to stay free. Directed with a sharp eye for its gritty locales and an open heart for its less-than-heroic characters, this is one of the true treasures of 1970s Hollywood filmmaking—a suspenseful crime drama in stark, unforgiving daylight.

"A miserable, unglamorous street-level depiction of the dog-eat-dog economy of the Boston underworld, true to Higgins’ functional, realistic crime plotting and colorful, regionally specific dialogue born from his time as an assistant US attorney putting these kinds of men behind bars. Respect that BULLIT director Yates doesn't play any of this for tragic melodrama or explosive action despite how easy it would've been to do so, instead committing to a blunt, unadorned style that's equal parts mundane and melancholy because these are characters who (despite the friendly faces and desperate negotiations) feel it in their bones that there's no future. There is nothing for these gunrunners and bank robbers and hit men to do but just resign themselves to waiting around in shitty bars and anonymous parking lots (fantastically grubby Boston location work photographed by DOG DAY AFTERNOON’s Victor J. Kemper) until it's their turn to be traded in by a 'friend' for a few bucks and a favor. Mitchum gives one of the saddest, weariest performances I've ever seen played at a register this casual, in between some of the most tense and quiet logistical bank robbery sequences ever put on film." - Josh Lewis