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Home , Bullitt, His Kind of Woman, Joe Santos, Paul Monash, Peter Yates, The Lonely Guy

March 16, 2010 (XX:9) , THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973, 102 min)

Directed by Peter Yates Based on the novel by George V. Higgins Screenplay by Paul Monash Original Music by Cinematography by Victor J. Kemper

Robert Mitchum...Eddie 'Fingers' Coyle ...Dillon Richard Jordan...Dave Foley Steven Keats...Jackie Brown Alex Rocco...Jimmy Scalise Joe Santos...Artie Van

PETER YATES (24 July 1929, Aldershot, Hampshire, England) directed 28 films and tv shows, some of which were A Separate Peace (2004) (TV), Don Quixote (2000) (TV), Curtain Call (1999), An Innocent Man (1989), Suspect (1987), Eleni (1985), The Dresser (1983), Krull (1983), Eyewitness (1981), (1979), The Deep (1977), Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), For Pete's Sake (1974), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), The Hot Rock (1972), John and Mary (1969), (1968), "Danger Man" (7 episodes, 1965-1967), "The Saint" (7 episodes, 1963-1965), and Summer "" (4 episodes, 1956-1958), "Schlitz Playhouse of Holiday (1963). Stars" (2 episodes, 1957-1958), "Studio One" (2 episodes, 1952- 1955), "Suspense" (2 episodes, 1953-1954)and "Foreign Intrigue" GEORGE V. HIGGINS (13 November 1939 – 6 November 1999) (5 episodes, 1952). Monash also produced 16 films and tv series, who also wrote The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972), The Digger's some of which were The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999), Carrie (1976), The Game (1973), Cogan's Trade (1974), A City on a Hill (1975), Front Page (1974), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Kennedy for the Defense (1980) (Jerry Kennedy series), The Rat on Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid Fire (1981), The Patriot Game (1982), A Choice of Enemies (1984), (1969), "Peyton Place" (514 episodes, 1964-1969) and “Judd for the Penance for Jerry Kennedy (1985) (Jerry Kennedy series), The Sins Defense" (50 episodes, 1967-1969). of the Fathers (1988), Bomber's Law (1993), Swan Boats at Four (1995) and At End of Day (2000). DAVE GRUSIN (26 June 1934, Littleton, Colorado ) composed tracks for 117 films and tv series, come of which were The PAUL MONASH (14 June 1917, New York City, New York - 14 Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), "St. Elsewhere" (composer: theme January 2003, Los Angeles, California, of pancreatic cancer) wrote music) (137 episodes, 1982-1988), Reds (1981), One Trick Pony for 43 films and tv series, some of which were George Wallace (1980), The Wiz (1978), "Good Times" (48 episodes, 1974-1978), (1997) (TV), Kingfish: A Story of Huey P. Long (1995) (TV), Stalin "" (82 episodes, 1975-1978), (1977), "The (1992) (TV), Salem's Lot (1979) (TV), The Friends of Eddie Coyle Bold Ones: The Lawyers" (10 episodes, 1970-1972), "It Takes a (1973),"Peyton Place" (514 episodes, 1964-1969), "Judd for the Thief" (66 episodes, 1968-1970), The Graduate (1967) Recount Defense" (50 episodes, 1967-1969), Braddock (1968) (TV), "12 (2008), Even Money (2006/I), Hope Floats (1998), Selena (1997), O'Clock High" (1 episode, 1964), "Cain's Hundred" (30 episodes, Mulholland Falls (1996), The Firm (1993),The Bonfire of the 1961-1962), "The Asphalt Jungle" (3 episodes, 1961), The Vanities (1990), Havana (1990/I), A Dry White Season (1989), Crimebusters (1961), The Scarface Mob (1959) (TV), "Goodyear Tequila Sunrise (1988), Clara's Heart (1988), The Milagro Theatre" (2 episodes, 1958-1959), The Gun Runners (1958), Beanfield War (1988), Ishtar (1987), Lucas (1986), The Little Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—2

Drummer Girl (1984), The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984), Comrades (1943), Leather Burners (1943), Action in the North Racing with the Moon (1984), Tootsie (1982), Author! Author! Atlantic (1943), Hoppy Serves a Writ (1943), and Saboteur (1942). (1982), On Golden Pond (1981), Absence of Malice (1981), The Electric Horseman (1979), ...And Justice for All. (1979), The PETER BOYLE (18 October 1935, Norristown, Pennsylvania - 12 Champ (1979), Heaven Can Wait (1978), The Goodbye Girl (1977), December 2006, New York City, New York, of multiple myeloma Bobby Deerfield (1977), The Front (1976), and heart disease) appeared in 93 films and tv series, some of which (1976), Three Days of the Condor (1975), W.W. and the Dixie were "Everybody Loves Raymond" (204 episodes, 1996-2005), Dancekings (1975), The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Fuzz Monster's Ball (2001), "The King of Queens" (1 episode, 1998), (1972), The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid (1972), The Gang Doctor Dolittle (1998), "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971), Shoot Out (1971), Generation " (2 episodes, 1994-1995), While You Were Sleeping (1969), Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Winning (1969), (1995), "NYPD Blue" (5 episodes, 1994-1995), Killer (1994), The Candy (1968), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), and Divorce Shadow (1994), Malcolm X (1992), Walker (1987), Conspiracy: American Style (1967). The Trial of the 8 (1987) (TV), Turk 182! (1985), Johnny Dangerously (1984), Yellowbeard (1983), Hammett (1982), VICTOR J. KEMPER (14 April 1927, Newark, New Jersey) was the Outland (1981), Where the Buffalo Roam (1980), Beyond the cinematographer for 59 films and tv series, some of which were Poseidon Adventure (1979), The Brink's Job (1978), F.I.S.T (1978), Bring It On: All or Nothing (2006), See No Evil, Hear No Evil Tail Gunner Joe (1977) (TV), Taxi Driver (1976), Young (1989), Walk Like a Man (1987), : The Price of Justice (1987) Frankenstein (1974), Crazy Joe (1974), The Man Who Could Talk (TV), Pee-wee's Big Adventure (1985) ,"The Atlanta Child to Kids (1973) (TV),The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), Slither Murders" (1985) (TV), Cloak & Dagger (1984), The Lonely Guy (1973), Steelyard Blues (1973), The Candidate (1972), T.R. Baskin (1984), Mr. Mom (1983), Author! Author! (1982), The Four (1971), Joe (1970), and Medium Cool (1969). Seasons (1981), Xanadu (1980), The Final Countdown (1980), The Jerk (1979), ...And Justice for All. (1979), Eyes of Laura Mars RICHARD JORDAN (19 July 1937, New York City, New York - 30 (1978), Coma (1978), Oh, God! (1977), Slap Shot (1977), Mikey August 1993, Los Angeles, California, USA of a brain tumor), and Nicky (1976), The Last Tycoon (1976), Stay Hungry (1976), appeared in 56 films and tv series, some of which were Gettysburg Dog Day Afternoon (1975), The Gambler (1974), The Friends of (1993) Shout (1991), The Hunt for Red October (1990), "The Eddie Coyle (1973), Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1972), The Equalizer" (10 episodes, 1987-1988), The Murder of Mary Phagan Candidate (1972), (1971), Who Is Harry Kellerman (1988) (TV), Solarbabies (1986), The Men's Club (1986), Dune and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me? (1971), (1984), Raise the Titanic (1980), Interiors (1978), Logan's Run They Might Be Giants (1971), Husbands (1970), and The Magic (1976), Rooster Cogburn (1975), The Yakuza (1974), The Friends Garden of Stanley Sweetheart (1970). of Eddie Coyle (1973), Chato's Land (1972), The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (1972), Valdez Is Coming (1971), "Ben Casey" (1 (August 6, 1917, Bridgeport, Connecticut - episode, 1962), "The Wide Country" (1 episode, 1962), and "Naked July 1, 1997, Santa Barbara, California, of lung cancer and City" (1 episode, 1962). emphysema) appeared in 136 films and tv series, some of which were James Dean: Race with Destiny (1997) (TV), Pakten (1995), JOE SANTOS (9 June 1931, Brooklyn, New York) appeared in 92 Dead Man (1995), Les sept péchés capitaux (1992), "African Skies" films and tv series, some of which were "F2: Forensic Factor" (1 (17 episodes, 1992), Cape Fear (1991), Waiting for the Wind episode, 2009), "" (7 episodes, 2004), Auggie Rose (1990), "War and Remembrance" (12 episodes, 1988-1989), (2000), : If It Bleeds... It Leads (1999) (TV), Scrooged (1988), Thompson's Last Run (1986) (TV), "North and “NYPD Blue" (2 episodes, 1993), "Hunter" (2 episodes, 1984- South" (6 episodes, 1985), Promises to Keep (1985) (TV), The 1990), "Murder, She Wrote" (2 episodes, 1987-1988), "Magnum, Hearst and Davies Affair (1985) (TV), "The Winds of War" (7 P.I." (5 episodes, 1986-1988), "" (1 episode, episodes, 1983), That Championship Season (1982), The Big Sleep 1984), "" (3 episodes, 1984), Blue Thunder (1983) (1978), The Last Tycoon (1976), Midway (1976), Farewell, My "Me and Maxx" (10 episodes, 1980), "The Rockford Files" (109 Lovely (1975), The Yakuza (1974) , The Friends of Eddie Coyle episodes, 1974-1980), "Police Story" (8 episodes, 1974-1978), (1973), Ryan's Daughter (1970), Secret Ceremony (1968), Villa "Kung Fu" (1 episode, 1975), (1973),The Friends Rides (1968) Man in the Middle (1963) The List of Adrian of Eddie Coyle (1973), Shamus (1973), Shaft's Big Score! (1972), Messenger (1963), Two for the Seesaw (1962), The Longest Day The Legend of Nigger Charley (1972), The Gang That Couldn't (1962), Cape Fear (1962), The Sundowners (1960), The Wonderful Shoot Straight (1971), The Panic in Needle Park (1971), Country (1959), Thunder Road (1958), The Enemy Below (1957), Moonlighting Wives (1966), and Warm Nights and Hot Pleasures Fire Down Below (1957), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), (1964). Foreign Intrigue (1956), The Night of the Hunter (1955), Track of the Cat (1954), River of No Return (1954), White Witch Doctor Peter Yates from World Film Directors V. II. Ed. John (1953), Angel Face (1952), The Lusty Men (1952), One Minute to Wakeman. H.W. Wilson Co. NY 1988 Zero (1952), Macao (1952), His Kind of Woman (1951), Holiday Affair (1949), The Red Pony (1949), Blood on the Moon (1948), British director and producer born at Aldershot, Surrey, He Rachel and the Stranger (1948), Out of the Past (1947), Crossfire was educated at Charterhouse, a famous British “public school” (1947), Pursued (1947), Till the End of Time (1946), Story of G.I. [what in the US is a private school], where his involvement in Joe (1945), Nevada (1944), Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944), school plays as an actor and director aroused his interest in theatre. Johnny Doesn't Live Here Any More (1944), 'Gung Ho!': The Story He went on to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and afterwards of Carlson's Makin Island Raiders (1943), Cry 'Havoc' (1943), Beyond the Last Frontier (1943), The Lone Star Trail (1943), Colt Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—3 worked for about two years as an actor, stage manager, and director claimed). A fictionalized reconstruction of Britain’s Great Train with a succession of repertory companies in England and Scotland. Robbery of 1963, it has an excellent cast (, Frank However, the theatre was not Yates’ first love: he told one Finlay, James Booth, Barry Foster) to whom the script gives little interviewer that he had spent his childhood “tinkering about with scope for detailed characterization. The action scenes were engines or going to the cinema.” When the reviewers convinced generally admired, however—especially a that, as Peter him that his talent as an actor was limited, he returned to these Cowrie writes “was shot with a verve and brutality quite foreign to earlier interests, initially as a car salesman. The company he joined, the British cinema of the sixties.” Yates explains, “was also interested in motor racing, so I was able The car chase impressed another racing driver, Steve to try my hand at that as well.” He drove in club races and for some McQueen, who invited Yates to Hollywood to direct his next years was involved in the sport as an administrator and manager, picture, Bullitt (1968). Adapted from Robert L. Pike’s novel Mute working with such champions as Stirling Moss and Peter Collins. Witness and splendidly photographed on location in At the same time, his interest in was stimulated by the by William A. Fraker, it was the first of many Yates films edited by coincidence that the company he worked for adjoined the Walton Frank P. Keller. McQueen plays Frank Bullitt, a maverick police film studios. Filmmakers sometimes hired him as a stunt driver and, lieutenant who is entrusted with the safekeeping of a vital state’s according to John Preston ( Times, October 8, 1981), Yates witness. The witness is murdered, other deaths follow, and Bullitt found himself becoming more involved with what was happening finds himself fighting the good fight alone, obstructed by his time- on the other side of the fence.” serving superiors, while the ruthlessly ambitious district attorney He began his third career in a language studio, dubbing () demands his professional castration, and his girl foreign-language films into English, and progressed to the editing () opposes his devotion to so squalid a career. of documentaries, in due course becoming a third, second, and first David Robinson said that the eleven-minute hair-raising assistant director. By 1960 he was working with such luminaries as car chase through roller-coaster San Francisco streets revived “a (The Entertainer, A Taste of Honey), kind of physical excitement one had forgotten the cinema could (Sons and Lovers), and José Quintero (The Roman Spring of Mrs. achieve,” and John Russell Taylor thought it “just about the best Stone). Yates received the Directors Guild of America award as best car-chase ever filmed,” an achievement the director attributes to the assistant director for his work on Sons and Lovers (1960). The same fact that he and McQueen (who did his own driving) “care about year, as assistant to J. Lee Thompson cars and drivers.” It launched a decade on The Guns of Navarone, he met and or more of car-chase movies, ranging married Virginia Pope, A New from Smokey and the Bandit to The Zealander then working as a film French Connection. publicist. Richard Roud described In 1961, on the Bullitt as “the best thriller since [John recommendation of Tony Richardson, Boorman’s] Point Blank”—another Yates directed two short plays by American film by a British director— at the Royal Court adding that it gave “a picture of San Theatre, The Death of Bessie Smith Francisco that no American eye has and An American Dream. By then, he managed since [Delmer Daves’] Dark says, he had the directing “bug,” and Passage....Yates seems to have pressed his first movie followed in 1962, the into service the whole city....The early musical Summer Holiday. It stars the morning scenes have just the right feel, pop singer as a London and when McQueen slouches into a Transport mechanic who, with three grocery to pick up six TV dinners, it friends, converts a double-decker bus tells us more about a policeman’s life into a mobile hotel and sets off across than all the dialogue in [Don Siegel’s] Europe to Athens. Along the way a Madigan.” Tom Milne praised the number of girls are collected, candid-camera realism of the crowd including an American singer (Lauri Peters) on the run from her scenes and an “extraordinary feeling of immediacy, which is more agent and her and her avaricious mother. Summer Holiday was soon responsible for the almost tangible sense of violence than any to be upstaged by the Beatles and Richard Lester, but in 1962 it lingering on gory details.” (Yates has said that he dislikes putting seemed to Penelope Gilliatt “the most cheerful and skillful British violence on the screen: “One suggests violence rather than showing musical of our generation” and “a real breakthrough,” thanks to the it. That’s where the art lies.”) pace of Yates’ direction and the inventive production numbers The public liked the movie as much as the critics did, and devised by Herbert Ross. more American assignments followed for Yates, beginning with After a stint in television, working on The Saint and John and Mary (1969), a film far removed from the mayhem of Danger Man, Yates directed his second feature, One Way Pendulum Bullitt. ... (1964), produced by for Tony Richardson’s Resuming his partnership with the producer Michael Woodfall Productions. ... Patrick Gibbs called it a “robust Deeley, Yates went off to Venezuela to shoot Murphy’s War contribution to minority cinema,” [absurdist] but most critics (1971), starring Peter O’Toole as an Irish mechanic out to revenge thought that Yates had failed to turn the play into a movie. himself on the German submarine that had sunk his ship. There are Yates had Michael Deeley as his producer again when he strong echoes of The African Queen. made Robbery (1967), scripted by Edward Boyd, George An expensive array of talent was assembled for Yates’ Markstein, and Yates himself (the only writing credit he has next movie, The Hot Rock, released by 20th Century-Fox in 1972. A Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—4 jokey “caper” movie, it has and Georges Segal shared that opinion, making it Yates’ greatest commercial success leading a virtuoso quartet of thieves in stealing from the Brooklyn to date: it grossed $31 million. Museum a diamond wanted back by its country of origin. Moses By that times Yates had been working in the United States Gunn plays the black diplomat who commissions the heist, and for more than a decade and, as John Preston says, had established a Zero Mostel, a consummately crooked lawyer. There is a witty reputation as “a big-budget director who could handle script by , adapted from a novel by Donald E. temperamental stars and was especially good at action sequences.” Westlake, and some glossy New York photography by Ed Brown. But he was anxious not to be typed. “I decided I wanted to make a Another much more somber thriller followed, The Friends comedy about class distinctions in America....I also wanted to of Eddie Coyle (1973), described by one critic as a variation on the present an entertaining view of American life without being theme of “disenchantment with the old romantic myths of cops and sentimental or cynical.”...Breaking Away went into production for robbers.” Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) is a small-time Boston 20th Century-Fox, with Yates as both producer and director.... crook and two-time loser. He is pressured by the police into By following a string of big-budget movies with a cheapie supplying a little information, then set up for the mob by the real project without a single star name, John Preston wrote, Yates broke Judas of the piece. “one of the great unwritten laws Adapted by its of Hollywood.” But Breaking producer, Paul Monash, from the Away justified the gamble. It was novel by George V. Higgins, the a great critical success and the movie was shot by Victor J. box-office sleeper of the year, Kemper on location in an grossing over $20 million. autumnal Boston. Yates says that According to Preston, it Robert Mitchum “taught me revitalized “a career that was in more about directing actors than danger of bogging down in a anyone else,” but it was surfeit of grandiose productions Mitchum’s casting that was most and second-rate scripts....Steve criticized in this often Tesich won an Oscar for his “compulsive” film—as David script and went on to write Yates’ Robinson says, there is an next film, Eyewitness (1981). “inevitable imbalance when a Eyewitness was star player of Mitchum’s weight followed by Krull, a negligible, if and authority is cast in the expensively budgeted ($27 unlikely role of a small-time million), sci-fi film capitalizing victim.” on the success of Star Wars. Stanley Shapiro and Maurice Richlin, who wrote Pillow Yates had been looking for years for a story that would Talk, were responsible for “the same sort of antique situation take him back to Britain, and finally found one in Ronald comedy” in Yates’ next script, For Pete’s Sake (1974). Barbra Harwood’s play The Dresser, which deals with the repertory theatre Streisand stars as a hard-up Brooklyn housewife who falls into the world of Yates’ youth....David Denby called it “the most exciting clutches of a loanshark and as a result finds herself involved filmed play in years.” ...Stanley Kauffmann found Yates’ direction successively with the call-girl racket, the Mafia, and urban cattle “a pleasant surprise.” “Most of what I’ve seen of his, he rustling. ... commented, “from Bullitt to Eyewitness, has been consecrated to Having filmed in San Francisco, Boston, and two of the the ideal of flash, of dazzle. Here he simply places his film...at the boroughs of New York, Yates next added Los Angeles to his service of actors. There’s no trickery, no egotistical director’s gallery of urban portraits. Mother, Jugs and Speed (1976) was attention-grabbing.... If a director hasn’t developed a style through written by , who also coproduced with Yates which a film can move to its truth, and Yates hasn’t, his best course himself. A frenetic farce about two rival ambulance services and is to be invisible, which is what Yates does effectively here.” starring , , and , it was Eleni (1985), adapted by from Nicholas widely and unfavorably compared with Robert Altman’s Gage’s 1983 internationally bestselling memoir, deals with a New M*A*S*H. York Times reporter’s search for the man who sentenced his mother , the son and grandson of writers, made to death during Greece’s bloody civil war of 1946-1949. The film more money with his first book, Jaws, than his distinguished was thought by many reviewers to have a compelling documentary forebears saw in their combined careers. It was his second power, and the performance of Kate Nelligan as the martyred bloodcurdler, The Deep—a laborious potboiler set in Barbados— mother was praised. But for some, Yates’ decision to doubletrack which Yates tackled as his next assignment. Jacqueline Bisset and the story, crosscutting between the present-day detective work of Nick Nolte are vacationing skin divers who discover not only Gage and the war-time ordeal of his mother created a jerky, stop- Spanish treasure but a hoard of morphine, thus attracting the and-go movement, aborting dramatic scenes before they were fully attention of the island’s historian () and a gang of underway. Lawrence O’Toole complained that the two time frames voodoo-working villains, not to mention sharks and a giant moray are “never dynamically integrated. Indeed, they almost seem to be eel. “It may have jaws,” John Coleman said of the movie, “but it two separate movies.” To David Denby, “Yates, and enjoyable and lacks teeth,” This was the commonest critical view, though the film talented craftsman wen working on the right kind of (about 40 percent of which takes place under water) was recognized subject...doesn’t have the gravity of style for this kind of epic, as a technical tour de force and had its champions. One of the latter political subject.”... called it “a glorious piece of hokum,” and the public obviously Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—5

In 1981 Yates said that as he gets older, “I find it very Beantown tabletops. Yates’s camera eye stays so casually observant important to have a hero that one can identify with and not be and his cinematic syntax so spare throughout that when he finally ashamed of doing so. I tend now to look for stories that have hope.” retreats to a plaintive distance in the aftermath of the film’s one inevitable tragedy, it packs a considerable punch. At which point, Dave Grusin’s score, the busiest thing in the movie apart form the gunrunner’s patterned shirts and canary yellow muscle car, finally settles into a plangent farewell. Offhanded fatalism is embedded in every word of every exchange, each of which alternates between hide-and-seek games and verbal tugs-of-war. TheFriends of Eddie Coyle is an extremely faithful adaptation [in structure, spirit, and flavor] of the first published novel by the Brockton, Massachusetts-born-Higgins, whose career as a United States prosecutor and then big-time criminal defense lawyer [his clients included Eldridge Cleaver and G. Gordon Liddy] coincided with his ascendancy as a novelist, and whose dialogue is one of the glories of American literature. “I’m not doing dialogue because I like doing dialogue,” Higgins once “They Were Expendable” Kent Jones from The Friends of said. “The characters are telling you the story. I’m not telling you Eddie Coyle dvd the story, they’re going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.” What is remarkable about the film is the extreme I think that work like his is necessary for people to degree to which Yates and the producer and writer Paul Monash, understand something about the humors of the criminal mentality,” adhere to Higgin’s aesthetic, banking on the contention that if you said Robert Mitchum of the novel The Friends of Eddie Coyle and render the action among the characters as faithfully as possible, its author, George V. Higgins. Yet he could have been describing their entire moral universe will be revealed. the film itself, a melancholy succession of clandestine encounters And so it is. “Look, one of the first things I learned is conducted in the least picturesque parts of the Greater Boston area never to ask a man why he’s in a hurry,” says Robert Mitchum’s during late fall, going into winter. A middleman bargains with a Eddie to Steven Keat’s inappropriately relaxed arms salesman, gunrunner, the gunrunner bargains with with a pair of wanabe bank Jackie Brown [guess who’s a fan of this movie], in what might be robbers, a cop bargains with his stoolie, and the stoolie bargains the film’s most emblematic bit of table talk. “All you got to know is with the man who works for the Man. The chips on the table may be that I told the man he could depend on me because you told me I machine guns or information or money, but the “humor” looming could depend on you. Now one of us is gonna have a big fat over every encounter is survival. Politeness and bonhomie are problem. Another thing I learned: if anybody’s gonna have a strictly provisional, and everybody knows it, which is what gives problem, you’re gonna be the one.” As in every good dialogue- this film its terrible sadness. In the miserable economy of power in driven film, talk in The Friends of Eddie Coyle equals action. In this Boston’s rumpled gray underworld. Eddie and his “friends” are all case, maneuvering for leverage and self-preservation. expendable, and the ones left standing play every side against the Nothing could be further from Higgins’s full-immersion middle, their white-knuckle terror carefully concealed under several approach to fiction than a collection of prima donna thespians vying layers of nonchalance and resignation. There’s not a punch thrown, for attention, thankfully. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a true and only two fatal shots are fired, but this seemingly artless film ensemble piece if there ever was one. It’s amazing that a star of leaves a deeper impression of dog-eat-dog brutality than many of Robert Mitchum’s caliber even considered this movie (he was the blood-soaked extravanganzas that preceded it and came in its originally offered the role of the bartender); that he integrated wake. himself so fully into the ensemble and the working-class Boston The Friends of Eddie Coyle is, in many ways, an inside atmosphere is some kind of miracle. Mitchum is on-screen for job. Meaning that there’s not a minute spent orienting the viewer. roughly half of the movie, and never for a moment does he or the The tale of a low-level mobster who gives up one of his contacts in filmmakers play the movie star card—no special isolated a failed effort to bargain his way out of a New Hampshire prison “moments,” no hammy overplaying or sneaky underplaying. stint is imparted to us a little bit at a time, through a series of Golden-age Hollywood’s most notorious bad boy arrived in Boston seemingly affable but quietly desperate sit-downs between ready for action on every front, as amply chronicled by Grover criminals and cops, or other criminals. in crummy coffee shops, Lewis in his Rolling Stone profile “The Last Celluloid Desperado.” underpopulated bars, and public spaces that give new meaning to Apart from the usual shenanigans (think blondes and booze), the word ordinary. The filmmakers never do anything in the way of Mitchum went right to work, getting an “Eddie Coyle haircut” rhetorical underlining. (which might have been executed with a lawn trimmer) and Director Peter Yates, born and trained in England and allegedly hanging out with the notorious Whitey Bulger, the mostly known at this relatively early point in his career for his 1968 prototype for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, and his film Bullitt [and, to those fortunate enough to have seen it in the Winter Hill Gang. Higgins was worried, Mitchum was unfazed. States, for the excellent Robbery] was an interesting choice for this “It’s a two-way street,” he told Lewis, “because the guys Higgins material. Like that Steve McQueen classic, The Friends of Eddie means are associating with a known criminal in talking to me.” Coyle is an all-action experience. But two crisply executed bank Apart from a few slippages here and there, Mitchum mastered the heists and a logistically complex parking-lot arrest aside, the kinetic exceptionally difficult Boston accent. More importantly, he found excitement here is sparked by the verbal and gestural rhythms the right loping rhythm, the right level of spiritual exhaustion, the between the actors as they plead for their lives across dingy right amount of cloaked malevolence. If Mitchum betrays anything Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—6 of himself as Eddie, it’s his sense of poetry, which for roughly Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore. The truth is that they never did. three-fourths of his career as an actor, seems to have manifested There’s only this one. itself off- and not on-screen. But when he rose to the occasion, he was one of the best actors in movies. Thinks like a poet, acts like a [Kent Jones is the author of Physical Evidence: Selected Film jazz musician, hitting on the perfect melancholy chord progression Criticism, a volume of his writings, and the director of the 2007 from his initial appearance and playing quietly dolorous variations documentary Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows. A film he right to the end. directed and wrote with Martin Scorsese about Elia Kazan is Of course, he’s surrounded by a beautiful array of forthcoming.] character actors, many of whom have faded from memory over the years. Richard Jordan as Agent Dave Foley, decked out in leather “The Last Celluloid Desperado” Grover Lewis [excerpted, first and a hip haircut, with his usual pungent combination of sweet and appeared in Rolling Stone, March 1973] sour. Peter Boyle’s bartender, a swaybacked, bald-headed giant in jacket, V-neck sweater and open-collared shirt. cultivating an air of “After twenty years of playing a comic-strip character called relaxed barroom stoicism as he mentally angles his way through Superstud, Mitchum at last is being recognized as the gifted actor every difficulty. The unhealthy looking Steven Keats as Jackie and he has always been. He is a master of silliness. Other actors act. the unhealthier looking Jack Kehoe as his connection, decorating Mitchum is. He has true delicacy and expressiveness, but his forte is the film with their peculiar brands of hopped-up intensity (well- his indelible identity. Simply by being there, Mitchum can make oiled and dry as dust, respectively). The smooth-skinned and bullet- almost any other actor look like a hole in the screen” —Director headed James Tolkan, a Lumet favorite, as the messenger boy for David Lean the Man (“The Man wants him ...Perching on a tiny edge hit...tonight!”). Iron-haired and of the couch, the writer relays the square-jawed Mitchell Ryam. Great Writer Tom Wolfe’s one among an army of admiration and curiosity about unhinged authority figures in Thunder Road, filmed and released early seventies cinema, doing a in 1958 but still a perennial favorite walk-on as police brass. Joe with the hot-rodding drive-in Santos of the sunshine smile, audiences of the South. who later made a name for Mitchum nods gravely. himself on The Rockford Files, “Yeah, it was received for true, for as a member of the bank heist real. Still is. That was my original crew. His partner is played by design, and I figured it that way. I Alex Rocco, and if Rocco wrote the story—the original appears to live and breathe his role as a low-level criminal, that’s story—and the title song. The screenplay I felt neither ambitious because he came into this world as Alexander Petricone, Boston enough nor qualified to do, because those dissolve cuts and all that born and bred, and otherwise known as Bobo. Petricone worked on kind of shit are largely technical. Beyond me, and boring too. the fringes of the Winter Hill Gang and then skipped town for Los “How come I haven’t done more of that sort of thing? How Angeles, where he took off weight, changed his name, converted to come I’m not out diggin’ a ditch between takes, you know? I the Baha’i faith, and started a career in acting. The legend goes that choose not to work. I’ve got a gig goin’ that’s probably not the most Bulger and his crew never knew what had happened to Petricone satisfactory expression in the world—nor is anyone’s—but it’s the util the night they went to see , in which their old course of least resistance. It does me well, and everyone else well, friend made a splash as Moe Green, the Las Vegas kingpin who so why should I belabor myself? I mean, I do my good works takes a bullet in the eye. These actors, then in their prime, now quietly and elsewhere, and I can’t make a profession of it. Its denied signify a lost era. Many are dead—Boyle after a brilliant and me. I can’t make a profession out of doing better because I learned successful career, the Harvard-educated Jordan far too early from a early on that if you do better, you do well, you don’t get to do brain tumor, Keats by suicide before he turned fifty. All of them better—you just get to do more. You know—‘While you’re resting worked hard at their craft and put flesh and muscle on an entire would you mind carryin’ this anvil upstairs?’ Like that shot. So, for era’s worth of movies. With the notable exception of Boyle, few me, it’s no strain—just the course of least resistance. Do it until it ever found roles as good as the ones they played here. poops out, you know, and then maybe wheel in once a year like ...The conditions that allowed for movies as spare and Lionel Barrymore and play Scrooge—wrap it up and go back to the melancholy as this one are long gone—very few American Bahamas or whatever happens. Cure my arthritis and spike myself moviemakers find it possible, or even desirable, to leave their action out—whatever. so unadorned. It’s strange to remember that the seemingly loose, “Yeah, it’s true, I work a lot of pictures. I guess I do but actually rigorous, style of naturalism practiced by Yates and because we’ve gone through a period of some flux and change in Monash and their brilliant cast was as tied to the modernity of its our industry, and the effect has become somewhat boring. The own moment in tie as the CGI-driven epics of today are tied to effect per se—just that, you know. The innovative or innovative their. On another level, for those of us who grew up in effect has become boring because it’s so obviously designed as Massachusetts, the film now functions as a time machine. With a effect. Those anal shots up through somebody’s wisdom teeth and few exceptions (Starting Over, The Verdict, The Departed), the city all that whirling-light jazz, you know, is not too much fun. The of Boston has rarely been as well served in movies. main thing we lack now is writers. We’ve developed some really Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look serious current speakers as actors, mainly because of the import of back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The British slum morality into this country and the reawakening of the Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—7 children to the fact of what goes on beneath the Victorian collar and concerned, They;d come back from long search or battle stretches bosom. Not so with writers, though. They’re mostly still hung up on and immediately check into the village to see how the school was the tickity-pop-poop kick. progressing. No, sir, definitely wasn’t set up for my benefit. No “Sure, I like George Higgins as a reportorial writer— way. No way for my benefit. I came in hot. They didn’t know who actually as a novelist too. I was impressed by his book largely was comin’ in. I ended up thinking, Well, they still make good because I think that work like his is necessary for people to people. Good, honest people who give of themselves for other understand something about the humors of the criminal mentality. I people. Like somebody’s grandmother, like that. think I comprehend the freakers, too, and very well. I know enough “Sure, they were over there to fight a war, which is wrong about the criminal mentality to know that it is so designed only by in principle maybe, but that wasn’t their doing, was it? Not their the stricture of the statutes. I mean, if a certain act wasn’t illegal, doing at all. There are always the advantagists, the opportunists those guys wouldn’t be criminals, dig? Like that. But they get away who make a lot of money out of other people’s misery. Then, of with it, or don’t, right? Or they bargain for it or don’t. Now, Mr. course, there’s that French combine which controls the rights to the Higgins is a very ambitious fellow, a man of very strong opinions, rice supply which feeds five-eighths of the whole world, which is and he’s on the staff of public protection. He warns Peter Yates that the main reason for the whole caper anyway, why everybody’s I’m associating with known criminals, warns him that I’m going to hassling. And there are all the individual people who wake up in the get busted or tainted or something. Well, fuck, there’s hardly morning and say, ‘Hey, a war’s on—let’s go get a piece of the anyone you can talk to in Boston without—you know. Anyway, it’s action.’ Same way on both sides. Little slant-eyed people wake up a two-way street, because the guys Higgins means are associating and say, ‘Let’s grab something. Why not, as long as it’s happening.’ with a known criminal in talking to me. A point is a point. If Get a bicycle or something. And ultimately, of course, there’re all somebody wants to cock his finger and rap on the table in a court of the manufacturers who build battleships and airplanes and stuff like law, the point remains. So if they want to bust you for a faulty that. All of which is not wasteful, because it employs people—it’s taillight, daddy, you’re busted.” just a different form of commerce. It’s a form that I don’t endorse, but there it is. “The single thing that I’m grateful for that’s come out of the whole war mess has been some recognition of the need for communication. I’ve gone sometimes on dangerous waters in the interests of communication because I believe in it. I believe that everyone in the world should at least have the privilege of knowing what’s happening all at the same time. One thing that I’ve learned is that the greatest fuckin’ slavery is ignorance, and the biggest commodity is ignorance—the dissemination of ignorance, the sale and burgeoning market of ignorance. “Nah, I didn’t bother to vote yesterday. I’m an anarchist, anyway. I haven’t really been interested in voting since they took Norman Thomas off the ticket. I don’t think it makes any difference who has his duke in the till, really. I mean, you can bring Liberace or somebody simpering about the idealism of the hardworking miners, and ‘My brother George who plays the violin is a Jew,’ and Mitchum laughs, this time with genuine amusement, and so forth and so on. Well, the idea is marvelous—really marvelous. rises to fetch two more cans of beer. Sprawling back on the couch, And as I sat, people go out and fight and die for it. But life is life, he rumples a hand through his already tousled hair and lights one you know, so the new leader of Bangladesh goes to London to have Pall Mall from the butt of another. his gallbladder removed, and takes over a whole floor at Claridge’s, “I don’t know, I’ve known a lot of cops. When I was in and has a private entourage of two hundred people—two private Vietnam, I met a lot of cops—fighting cops. They were jets he flies on. His attitude is, fuck those starvers. Fuck those humanists—actually humanists. And they died for it, didn’t they? A starvers. Wise up, cranapple—right? Take your best shot. Well, lot of them died for it. They felt that people really deserved a what you do about it is do something about it.You put one brick on chance, that everyone deserves to live, and they were going to fight top of another—make it better. If you come to get it, get it. Like the for that. But then they died, a lot of them. Incas did to the conquistadores. When the Spaniards came for the “I went to Nam in ’67, I guess it was. To find out what was Incas’ gold, the Incas pried open the Spaniards’ mouths and poured happening. Some people in the Defense Department kept nudgin’ ‘em full of the shit—all the molten god they could fuckin’ hold.” me—‘Why don’t you go find out?’ Next thing I knew I was fallin’ Mitchum drains his beer and gets another. He makes a off an airplane at Tan Don Nhut—February 3, and it’s 117 degrees. wincing face when the writer asks about the writing he’s rumored to I went, ‘Waughhh,’ and they said, ‘Wait’ll summertime, man, it have done over the years. gets hot.’ It was hot all the time, and I was very impressed. I was “I don’t write. Nah. Yeah, there was a play at one point. very encouraged, enormously encouraged by what I saw. You get Yeah, it was called Fellow Traveler, and yeah, it was optioned by semi-sophisticated or cynical, you know, and it’s quite humbling to the Theater Guild. How’d you know about that? I thought you find that there are still people of high purpose and straight direction. looked like a persistent motherfucker. Whatever happened to the “I dealt mostly with Special Forces—the Green Beanie. I play? Nothin’. I put it back in a drawer. There were so many critical saw people teaching people—trying to teach them, of the legend notes on it...Eugene O’Neill read it, and his notes were longer than about the chicken and the egg, and not to drink out of toilets, all the play. I’d done it hastily when I was about eighteen or nineteen kinds of very basic things. They were truly concerned, totally years old... Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—8

“It was about Harry Bridges bein’ deported. He’s shipped be drunk for another four weeks. I first met him when he came to out of the country because of his union activities, and he organizes California to write movies. He said he as there to write a treatment the ship in transit. When there’s a fire in the hold, Bridges is of something, We went all through it. I was a movie expert, see, a suspected of sabotage, so they put him ashore on a cannibal island starlet. What, Bill finally asked me, was a treatment? in the south Pacific. There’s nobody there but a little toothless Jack Adrian: Obiturary: Barry Fitzgerald Englishman George V. Higgins (The who’s married to a giant Negress Independent, 10 November native. Umn...then the next visitor 1999) is a sort of Peter Ustinov bearded member of the OGPO. Finally, It is unquestionably unfair to there’s a wedding ceremony, and dub any writer a one-book man, Bridges is given the biggest— especially when he's published always the biggest—the biggest, well over 20. Nevertheless in the fattest broad on the island. And case of George V. Higgins the he’s also awarded a trophy—the fact has to be faced. He wrote shrunken head of the OGPO guy. superbly dialogued, complexly The play winds up with a minstrel plotted, richly characterised song. It was nothin’, really. It was novels - yet all just a slight written before the war, and it did prognosticate the forthcoming variation on the same basic riff. And, as the years went by and the Japanese situation. Those honchos at the Theater Guild thought it books stacked up, the similarities began to stand out, hardly helped was somethin’ remarkable, though. by their author's reliance, more and more, on pure dialogue, to the I really don’t remember how O’Neill got involved. point where narrative - scene descriptions, back-story, the intricate Somebody sent the manuscript to him, I guess. And I got social hinterland against which the novels' events were played out - summoned into the sacrosanct inner sanctum of the esoteric Theater virtually disappeared. Until, in essence, all that remained was "two Guild, and I thought, Oh, shit. The whole time I was there, I was guys gabbing at each other" - or even one guy soliloquising for tryin’ to suppress an erection. paragraph after paragraph, page after interminable page. “The play was a piece of shit. Looked like it was written by a left-handed retarded child in crayon. Maybe there were one or That of course is somewhat of an exaggeration; but it is not a two good sections in it. What I should do, really, is sit down and travesty. Higgins, in his later books, was perfectly capable of write it right, just for the hell of it. Or burn it up. What’s what I having a character monopolise conversations, events, the plot, should do—burn it up. I don’t know—it all tied together. I suppose everything. He was not a difficult writer to parody. I could’ve pursued it. The choice came down to workin’ with little theater groups in Ontario or bein’ a movie queen here in Boston. His "one book" was - in a sense sadly - his very first, The Friends of Which was the best way to go? Eddie Coyle (1972), a thriller of surpassing brilliance in which “Writing—I don’t know. When I first got to Hollywood, I Higgins dug deep into the political, social and criminal midden that wrote nightclub routines and song lyrics, which paid very well. The was Boston, Massachusetts. Coyle is a provider of hardware for a only thing is, I got married, and workin’ at home you have to spend bunch of bank heisters, who, to protect himself against being sent all your time around this one broad, and I said fuck it, no way. I was up for a second stretch, talks to the cops. His friends are his fellow a fuckin’ ferret-faced twenty-one-year-old, fuckin’ broken nosed— hoods - gunmen, bagmen, bank-rollers - who trust him about as ”… much as he trusts them ("not a whole hell of a lot"). All are more or “I ran into Dylan Thomas one time, and I told him, ‘You less in thrall to the "wise guys", the syndicate wheels who call the lost me with this and that.’ And Dylan said”—Mitchum mimics shots, take the profits, order (though never ever mete out: that's for Thomas’s rich Welsh basso-”‘Christ, I lost me fuckin’ self. I’ll have the footsoldiers) the punishments, the death-warrants for stupidity to get Caitlin to explain to me what I was talkin’ about.’ And that and treachery. happens, you know. You become so fuckin’ secret and abstract that you can’t interpret your own stuff. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is compulsively readable, driven as it is “I haven’t done anything, really. I wasn’t doin’ anything, by the Higgins trademark of low-life dialogue that is as hard and really. It was all very private and personal, and I really wasn’t doin’ glittery as a velvet-plush trayful of diamonds - dialogue that almost anything. Fuckin’ horrible junk. But I guess it was the only way I takes the breath away, it is so rock-solid real. The book garnered could speak. And I found myself either desperately inarticulate, extraordinary tributes not only from the usual suspects - "the most seeking scan and rhythm, or hopelessly, esoterically powerful and frightening crime novel . . . I have read this year", overarticulate—and either way. it was hopeless. I guess I thought I raved the crime-writer Ross Macdonald - but from literary New would become the darling of the ladies’ literary society and they’d York too. Norman Mailer homed straight in on the dialogue and pat me on the ass and endow me with profound meanings that I made a telling, and critically very sharp, comparison: "Higgins may never really had and knew nothing about. be the American writer who is closest to Henry Green" (the British “I used to spend some time with William Faulkner, and experimentalist whose novels were virtually all colloquy) - before Bill told me about his total bewilderment and frustration on that descending into excitable blurbwriter-speak: "What I can't get over score. They always credit you for the wrong thing, for the wrong is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz." reasons. I remember when Bill got the Pulitzer Prize or whatever the hell it was. and he said, no, he couldn’t make it, he was gonna Yet perhaps only the fuzz - or at any rate a working US District Attorney who never minded getting his hands dirty on a case, and Yates—THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE—9 who for nearly half a decade was a federal prosecutor in the a time when the Boston Irish and the Mafia "wise guys" were Organised Crime Section and the Criminal Division of the killing each other in all-out war) as "the last officially sponsored Massachusetts Attorney General's office - could have written a first blood sport". His books faithfully depicted the violence, the novel that so perfectly mirrored his own hard experience hewing betrayals, the loquacious invective (after a page or so, in a Higgins out a kind of justice at the legal coal-face. novel, as in a David Mamet play, the word "fuck" ceases to have any sensible meaning), the gallows- humour situations of this Apart from a useful couple of years in newspapers at the start of his milieu. career, George Vincent Higgins lived and had his being in the world of the law. He rarely even strayed Oddly, despite the rich dialogue, Higgins's books did from his home state of Massachusetts. not effortlessly translate into the cinematic medium. The Friends of Eddie Coyle made an excellent He was born in 1939 in Brockton, Massachusetts, movie, thanks partly to a riveting, and almost poetic, educated at Rockland High and Boston College, then performance by Robert Mitchum as Coyle, but its Stanford University in California, where he gained an success was really one for its director Peter Yates. MA in English. He obtained a law degree from the Boston College Law School, and was admitted to the Higgins always acknowledged John O'Hara as a Massachusetts Bar in 1967. Thereafter be rose steadily primary influence, especially O'Hara's short stories. through the establishment ranks - Deputy Assistant Even so there were a good many superior pulp Attorney General (1967-69) and Assistant Attorney writers of the 1950s and whose methods and General (1969-70) in the Commonwealth of attitudes clearly rubbed off on him. Elmore Leonard, Massachusetts; Assistant US Attorney for the District for instance (certainly not the other way round), and of Massachusetts (1970-73); Special Assistant US Attorney (1973- particularly Donald Westlake wearing his "Richard Stark" persona. 74) - before branching out into the private sector. George V. Their fictional worlds, where the bad guys can be the good guys, Higgins Inc lasted from 1973 through to 1978; a partnership, Griffin the cops come from the outermost circle of hell, and betrayal is the and Higgins, from 1978 through to 1982. norm, Higgins combined with his own reality. And like them Higgins gave his no-account low-lives an inner landscape, a certain He didn't desperately need the work. His books, even at the end, sensibility, so that while discussing how to kill someone they could could still command high initial print-runs (over 30,000 copies in also grumble about girlfriends, the weather, what kind of oil to use hardback, which most writers would murder for, even in the United in your car, and enthuse about mayonnaise in a cheese sandwich. States). But in a sense he was addicted to the law, certainly relishing that period during which he was a prosecuting attorney in Alas for Higgins - and all those busy churners-out of hardboiled the Organised Crime Section of the Massachusetts Attorney paperback originals a generation ago - most critics think Quentin General's office, and gleefully describing the pursuit of criminals (at Tarantino dreamed that angle up.

COMING UP IN THE SPRING 2010 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS XX:

Mar 23 John Cassavetes, A Woman Under the Influence 1974 Mar 30 Stanley Kubrick, The Shining 1980 Apr 6 Wolfgang Petersen, Das Boot 1981 Apr 13 Federico Fellini, Ginger & Fred, 1985 Apr 20 Michael Mann, Collateral 2004

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The Buffalo Film Seminars are presented by the Market Arcade Film & Arts Center and State University of New York at Buffalo with support from the Robert and Patricia Colby Foundation and the Buffalo News