Film Review: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

On the list of the most noir films of the 1970s this one probably comes out on top. Starting with its bitterly ironic title, right through to the cold-blooded, inevitable finale, The Friends of Eddie Coyle doesn't give an inch in its ruthless depiction of the mercenary relationships between cops and snitches, and between criminals.

For a film about cops and bank robbers and gun runners, Friends is relatively bloodless, but that's not to say it's not violent. The violence comes from the way the characters use and betray each other. Robert Mitchum plays Eddie Coyle, a Boston crook who is on the lowest rung of the criminal ladder. He's middle-aged, has a family, and supplements his blue collar job with the odd liquor truck heist. As the film begins he's worried about facing sentencing in a robbery in New Hampshire. Eddie's also supplying guns to a gang of bank robbers who have drawn the attention of the cops. In turn, Eddie is acquiring the guns from a gun runner named Jackie, who in turn is getting them from contacts he has on a military base. Peter Boyle plays a bar owner who is yet another criminal middle man, and both he and Eddie, unknown to each other, are being used by the same police detective as snitches.

Peter Yates was the director, and the realism he brought to Bullitt (1968) pales in comparison to Friends. Boston has never looked so gritty or drab, and the look of the film perfectly matches the sombre, desperate mood of the major characters, but especially Eddie, who is looking at several years in jail. He's done time before, but now he's just too old for it, not to mention having a family to support. Eddie's horrified at the prospect of his wife going on welfare or taking a job. It's part of the tragedy of Eddie that he thinks his criminality is more honourable than having his family take social assistance or his wife get a job.

What anchors this film is Robert Mitchum. This is one of his great performances, right up there with his work in The Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear. Unlike those two films, Friends required a more subtle approach from Mitchum. Eddie is, to a certain degree, a self-pitying loser, but he tries to cling to a sense of honour, and he's certainly committed to his family. Mitchum's rumpled face and sleepy eyes perfectly capture a man whose criminal career is winding down into disillusion and disaster. What's also notable about Mitchum's performance is that he so easily bridges the gap between old Hollywood and new Hollywood. This was a guy whose contemporaries from the 1940s and '50s were either fully retired or were restricted to doing cameos in all-star disaster movies. Mitchum's acting is of the same quality that Method actors like Hoffman and Pacino were starting to find success with. And I think Friends sometimes doesn't get the attention and respect it deserves because people associate Mitchum with a much older kind of filmmaking. In truth, this film feels much less dated that many others from the '70s. For my take on '70s "cop noir" check out the link below.

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Film Review: The Seven-Ups

Film Review: The Seven-Ups (1973)

Philip D'Antoni isn't a name you hear mentioned often when the history of modern cinema is discussed, but he certainly deserves some credit for two notable contributions to film history. The first is the car chase. D'Antoni was the producer of Bullitt, The French Connection, and The Seven-Ups. Now there were certainly car chases before Bullitt, but they were usually done for comic effect as in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, or they were clumsily filmed scenes (lots of rear projection shots) of squad cars chasing bank robbers. In Bullitt and The French Connection the car chase became an action centrepiece, the equivalent of the cavalry charge in westerns and historical epics. D'Antoni's "modern" car chases looked and sounded real, and created a new kind of cinematic excitement. After The French Connection virtually no action film was complete unlesss it included one or more elaborately staged car chases.

D'Antoni's other addition to film history is the creation of a sub-genre I'd call cop noir. Cop noir begins with The French Connection. If film noir was all about doomed lovers, laconic private detectives, and moody cinematography, cop noir was about documenting the decline and fall of American cities and the institutions that make them function as seen through cop eyes. Cop noir looks raw, sounds raw, and shows big American cities torn apart by street crime, organized crime, drug addiction, poverty, and corruption. Hard on the heels of The French Connection came Dirty Harry, Across 110th Street, Busting, Serpico, The Taking of Pelham 123, Badge 373, and a score of similar films. Bullitt isn't cop noir if only because Steve McQueen looks great, acts cool, mostly keeps his temper, and has a supermodel girlfriend before there were supermodels. Compare and contrast with Gene Hackman in The French Connection and you'll see what I mean.

And that brings us to The Seven-Ups. The story has a pre-Jaws Roy Scheider leading a small team of N.Y.C. cops who go after villains wanted for crimes that earn sentences of seven years and up. Why seven years? Because it makes for a punny movie title. The film's title is a dud, but the film isn't. The Seven-Ups is essentially a sequel to Connection in everything but name. It has the same gritty look, Don Ellis scored both films, and it features possibly the best car chase of the three films D'Antoni produced.

The plot has Scheider's team investigating why some of the city's crime bosses are being kidnapped. It turns out Scheider's main snitch, played by Tony Lo Bianco, is using information he gets from an unwitting Scheider to target wealthy criminals for kidnapping and ransom. Things are further complicated by the fact that snitch and cop are childhood friends.Things don't end well for one of them. The story is original and engaging, and might have been even better if D'Antoni hadn't decided to direct this film himself. He had no experience at directing and it shows on occasion. A couple of sequences, notably a scene in a car wash, are clumsily handled and feature a variety of glaring continuity errors.

D'Antoni does redeem himself with the action sequences, which are quick, dirty and efficient, and the car chase, which is certainly as good as the one in Connection as well as being longer. D'Antoni the director also does a nice job with the actors, choosing an all-ugly cast of New York actors who bring a lot of verisimilitude to the film. And New York looks like, well, the New York you don't see in Woody Allen movies. This is Ratso Rizzo's N.Y.C.

If you like to remember New York as being mad, bad and dangerous to visit, check out The Seven-Ups. Spoiler alert: the trailer below shows way too much of the film's highlights.