- As the film's title suggests, Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) has some friends. One of his good pals, Jackie Brown (Steven Keats), is a nervous arms dealer who sells machine guns out of his trunk. Another buddy, Dave Foley (Richard Jordan), is a sleazy ATF agent who strings Eddie along as an informant. Eddie's compatriot Scalise (Alex Rocco) buys guns by the half-dozen that he and his accomplices (Joe Santos) employ in a string of armed robberies. Eddie's best friend, however, is surely Dillon (Peter Boyle) who frames Eddie for ratting on Scalise shortly before getting him drunk and shooting him in the head. With friends like these, right?
- On the other hand, maybe these are the only sorts of friends that Eddie has ever known. Early on in the film, he casually asks Jackie Brown to look at his hand before relating a truly harrowing tale of how Eddie himself earned "an extra set of knuckles" by making a mistake a long time ago. As he explains, "There's nothing personal in it, you understand, but it just has to be done." Presumably that's how Eddie thinks of his double life as both a stand-up guy and secret informant. Normally he'd accept his upcoming prison sentence, but he and his wife (Helena Carroll) are getting older and their kids are almost grown. All he needs is for Foley to whisper a few words of encouragement into a certain person's ear in the hopes that he can keep out of jail completely. And who can you count on, if not your friends?
- The Friends of Eddie Coyle is easily one of the great 70's gritty crime dramas and may very well represent the apex of ugly actors engaging in oblique conversations about "these guys," "some stuff," and, of course, "the man." It is also one of the most tragic crime stories I've ever seen, largely because Eddie is deprived of the opportunity to transform his final life lesson into the sort of bitter ex-con advice that he loves to dispense. I haven't seen that much of Robert Mitchum's late-career work, but his performance here is so good that I am compelled to take a closer look. The direction, by Peter Yates, is very effective, particularly when building up tension in the film's multiple heist scenes and the brief-but-memorable car chase. Victor J. Kemper's cinematography does a great job capturing the grime of what the film's tagline accurately labels "a grubby, violent, dangerous world."
- Based on a novel by George V. Higgins.
- Also featuring a young (?) James Tolkan.
