George V. Higgins' novel flowed along filled with atmosphere, intrigue, and ironic dialogue. Even Normal Mailer praised it, however reluctantly -- "And to think that this came from the fuzz!" Well, practically no movie is as good as the book. How can you squash a book-length story into an hour and a half, unless you're Bondarchuk or Gance or von Stroheim or somebody? You'd need a budget and an ego to match. Actually, this attempt, by Peter Yates, is quite good. It's not an imitation of The Godfather or Bullit or any other movie; it's sui generis, or almost, since after all we've had a few other gangster/squealer/caper movies before. The location shooting was, I thought, well done. Late fall in New England: chilly mists alternating with pale sunlight on startlingly green fir branches; stretches of tawny dried winter grass fronting on ice blue bays. I suppose it could have been set in Sarasota but if it doesn't matter -- and I think in this case it does, if you intend to establish an Irish-American milieu -- then Boston and environs is as good a place as any. Poor Eddie. Desperate to keep his wife and two kids off welfare and to stay out of the slams, he brings himself finally to blow the whistle on a cocky young gun dealer, hoping that the Feds will put in a good word for him with the DA in New Hampshire. Unfortunately, the Feds, represented by the cynical and smoothly manipulative young Richard Jordan, are as tricky to pin down as eels and they press him for yet more. After a long battle with his conscience the weary Eddie decides to turn over some bank robbers that he knows well and who trust him. But it's too late! Peter Boyle's bartender/snitch has also been working with the Feds and has turned them in first. Boyle manages to shift the blame onto Eddie and manouvers him into a drunken stupor from which Eddie will never have to suffer any hangovers. Eddie is in the peculiar position of actually wanting to snitch on his friends but finding no opportunity to do so and winds up the victim of a kind of metabetrayal. Boyle shows no remorse whatever, and the cops ignore Eddie's demise since he is no longer of any use. Yates is a straightforward and unpretentious director. You might think that after the sensation caused by the car chase in Bullit he would try to outdo himself here, but not so. (He wisely left that up to other, more imitative directors.) The indoor settings are appropriate: sleazy bowling alleys, sterile and overlighted cafeterias, and the kind of lowlife barroom where it might be fun to sit down on a stool and shoot the breeze with the thug sitting next to you. Of course a great deal of the original dazzling understated dialogue doesn't survive, but some of it does, and it lifts the film out of the realm of those that sound as if they'd been written by a committee of recent English Lit majors. Some of the cutting, though, us unaccountable. When Eddie and the gun dealer are doing business in a supermarket parking lot, the dealer asks him why his wife doesn't do all the shopping. Eddie's reply in the novel concludes, "I didn't understand it when they told me; and you wouldn't understand it if I told you." It doesn't appear on screen, and it helps establish Eddy's sense of resignation, and it's cool, and would only add a few seconds to the picture. The performances are all good, especially Mitchum's. He hit his stride at around this age, beat and tired, as in "Farewell My Lovely." His Boston accent is impeccable and, well, he didn't get it growing up in Bridgeport. His wife is believably middle-aged and a bit dumpy, and the scene in which the two grapple naughtily for a few seconds is endearing. We come to like Eddie, just a good guy trying to keep his nose above water and, alas, as so often, good guys get it in the neck while the evil flourish as the green bay tree.
Review of The Friends of Eddie Coyle
