The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a 1973 crime film starring Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle. Directed by Peter Yates, the screenplay was adapted from the novel by George V. Higgins. It was released on DVD for the first time from The Criterion Collection on May 19, 2009.
Plot
Eddie Coyle is an aging, low-level gunrunner for a crime organization in Boston, Massachusetts. He is facing several years in prison for a truck hijacking in New Hampshire set up by Dillon, who owns a local bar. Coyle's last chance is a sentencing recommendation from a cop, Dave Foley, who demands that Coyle become a confidential informant in return.
A gang led by Jimmy Scalise and Artie Van has been pulling a series of robberies in broad daylight at local banks, Coyle having supplied them with guns. Another gun runner, Jackie, is in popular demand. Coyle wants to buy more pistols from him while a younger couple is shopping for machine guns.
Jackie goes to great lengths to get Coyle what he needs. Coyle delivers the guns to Scalise, but then he offers to set up Jackie for the cop Foley to avoid jail. In a train station's parking lot, waiting to sell his machine guns, Jackie is apprehended by Foley's men.
Coyle feels he has fulfilled his end of the deal. Foley, though, claims it still isn't enough. He wants more or else it's prison for Coyle.
In desperation, Coyle agrees to inform on his friends Scalise and Van as they prepare to pull off their next bank job. But it turns out Foley already has inside information and has caught them in the act.
The mob thinks that Coyle was the snitch. They assign his friend, Dillon, to kill him. Before carrying out his orders, Dillon treats his friend to a night on the town, taking him to dinner and a Boston Bruins hockey game. He gets Coyle drunk and then shoots him inside a moving car.
In the final scene, Foley meets with his snitch, who turns out to be Dillon.
Cast
Production
Filming took place throughout the Boston area, including Dedham, Cambridge, Milton, Quincy, Sharon, Somerville, Malden, and Weymouth, Massachusetts. [1] A gun purchase scene was filmed at the stone crusher of the former Rowe Quarry on the Malden/Revere town line near Route 1.
Reception
The Friends of Eddie Coyle was well-reviewed on its initial release and continues to be among the most highly regarded crime films of the 1970s. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it four stars, his highest rating, while Vincent Canby of The New York Times also reviewed it favorably, calling it "a good, tough, unsentimental movie."[1] Both reviewers singled out Mitchum's lead performance as a key ingredient of the film's success. Ebert wrote: "Eddie Coyle is made for [Mitchum]: a weary middle-aged man, but tough and proud; a man who has been hurt too often in life not to respect pain; a man who will take chances to protect his own territory."[2]
Disputed Storyline Beginnings
The character Eddie Coyle bore an uncanny resemblance to ex-convict William (Billy) O'Brien, one of James J. Bulger's old bank-robbing associates who had been murdered in 1967 before the film's release. O'Brien, like Coyle, had just been arrested and the newspapers reported that O'Brien's associates were concerned that he might become a turncoat. O'Brien's slaying was never solved, nor was Coyle's.
The fictional murderer is an ex-con named Dillon, who set up the failed truck hijacking for which Coyle was to be sent back to prison. Dillon owned a bar and was a freelance contract killer. The fictional Dillon was also an informant, shown both protecting and promoting his own interests by funneling information about his underworld competition to the police. Columnist and reporter Howie Carr stated, "In other words, Dillon appeared to be a prototype of the gangster that James J. Bulger would become," although the novelist whose book the movie is based on, just before his death, denied that he had based Dillon on Bulger.
See also
References
External links
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