The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

I don't recall when I heard about this movie or when I put it on my queue (probably the same time). All I knew when I moved it to the top was that it was a neo-noir and therefore unlike anything I'd watched in quite some time. Top billing to Robert Mitchum and Peter Boyle didn't hurt either, tho Boyle's role isn't the second most prominent.

In the Boston area, Eddie (Mitchum) and Jackie Brown (Steven Keats, whose character name supplied the title of a Quentin Tarantino flick) are newly acquainted gun traffickers. Eddie enlists Jackie's help to outfit bank robbers. What Jackie doesn't know is that Eddie, having been caught hijacking, sees little choice but to serve as an informant to FBI Agent Dave Foley (Richard Jordan). What Eddie doesn't know is that Foley has an informant on him as well: mobster Dillon (Boyle), who had arranged the hijacking.

As you might imagine, it's rather short on likable characters, with "Friends" being a bit ironic. I don't despise Eddie or Jackie, but I can't get behind much of what they do, and nobody else gets enough screen time for a lot of characterization. I think I relate best to the bank personnel who have to comply or risk someone getting shot. Hey, hostage situations always have my undivided attention.

If my short summary gives you the impression of not much happening, that's about right. The 103 minutes pass pretty slowly, and while the plot is for grown-ups, it's hardly complex. I suspect there's more to the George V. Higgins book on which the film is based, tho that's not clear from the Wikipedia summary. If I were adapting the story, I'd depict earlier events instead of having Eddie talk about them. Oh, there are momentous on-screen occasions besides robberies; you just need '70s patience to get to them.

Fortunately, I have that kind of patience. I can appreciate a number of things done right, such as everything being shot on location. It's often interesting to see how career criminals' minds might work. What details rightly worry them? What lines do they make a point not to cross?

I don't give TFoEC full marks like Roger Ebert did, but I grant that it's one of Peter Yates' better directorial efforts. It satisfies my desire for neo-noir for the time being.