The Screengrab : george v. higgins

That Guy! Special "The Friends of Eddie Coyle" Edition

Phil Nugent — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:30:00 GMT

What is special about today, hardcore fans of '70s cinema? It is that today marks the long-awaited DVD release of The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), as part of the illustrious Criterion Collection. Directed by Peter Yates (Bullitt, The Hot Rock, Breaking Away), who supplies audio commentary on the disc, Coyle was faithfully adapted from the 1972 debut novel by George V. Higgins, a journalist and lawyer who was working as a United States Attorney in Boston when the book was published. Higgins was a master of dialogue, and Paul Monash, who did the screenplay, had the good sense to transfer most of it to the movie unaltered. It was picked up by the cast members, who ran with it. It's the inhabitants of this grungy, lived-in Boston Irish milieu--the movie looks as if it were shot while the city was enduring a shampoo embargo-- and the firecrackers that they set off whenever they open their mouths, who make Coyle a cult classic.

Robert Mitchum still had a few more leading roles in him after this one, but never again would he would so fully remain both a movie star and an actor living in this moment as he did here, morose but game, sunk deep in the character of Eddie Coyle, a small-time gangster facing the prospect of heavy time he's too old to do, summed up by the cop who wants to turn him into a stoolie as a career runt "about this high up in the bunch" but who knows everybody and everything. Mitchum had been offered the role of the bartender-hit man Dillon but decided he would prefer to die a loser's death after delivering a drunken tribute to the glittering future of Bobby Orr. Peter Boyle wound up playing Dillon instead; he and Mitchum wound up surrounded by a rogue's gallery of the strongest character types of their time, including Alex Rocco, who some of you will remember from our "That Guy!" tribute to the cast of The Godfather. Let no one say that just because the Eddie Coyle mob will always live in the shadow of the Corleones is no reason they shouldn't be paid tribute of their own:

RICHARD JORDAN: As Dave Foley, the puppy-eyed, honey-tongued, utterly unempathic detective who wants Coyle to "turn permanent snitch", Jordan walks off with the movie if anybody does. The fascinating disconnect between the show of thoughtful sensitivity in his face and his brutal indifference to what happens to people after he's used them holds the viewer's attention like a vise. Born in New York in 1937, to the daughter of Judge Learned Hand, Jordan graduated from Harvard in 1958 and spent the 1960s working in New York theater, on Broadway and with Joe Papp's Public Theatre. He made his movie debut in 1971 with the Western Lawman. He also appeared in the 1972 filmed play The Trial of the Catonsville Nine and the Canadian film Kamouraska, directed by Claude Jutra and co-starring Genevieve Bujold, before landing the role of Foley. Two years later, he re-teamed with Mitchum when he played the older actor's sidekick in the Sydney Pollack action film The Yakuza

Jordan's film career turned out to be erratic; he never became a star, and he gave some of his least distinguished performances when he was cast as a leading man in cardboard roles, such as in the 1976 TV miniseries Captains and the Kings and the 1978 TV version of Les Miserables, and the infamous 1980 Lou Grade production Raise the Titanic! He did better when allowed to break out the ham in such flashy supporting roles as his serial killer in the 1985 The Mean Season. He died of a heart attack in 1993, just a month before his 55th birthday, and months before the release of his final film, the Civil War restaging Gettysburg.

STEVEN KEATS: A Vietnam vet and son of the Bronx, Keats made his movie debut as Jackie Brown, the shifty young up-and-comer who has figured out that illegal guns sales are a growth industry. With his jagged-looking front teeth and eyes that take in the scene like a laser scan, he's like a bird of prey who's so intent on checking out the potential targets in front of him that he never notices the bigger bird that's above him with its claws extended. Keats later played Charles Bronson's son-in-law in Death Wish (1974), an immigrant to turn-of-the-century New York in Hester Street (1975), and Robert Shaw's sidekick in Black Sunday (1977), before turning mostly to TV for the balance of his career. He appeared in Kojack, The Rockford Files, The A-Team, Moonlighting, Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice, Law & Order, and, well, basically everything else; he also played a fictionalized version of the packager Lawrence Schiller in the 1982 TV film version of The Executioner's Song. He died in 1994.

JOE SANTOS: Slight-looking and toothy, with a Brooklyn-bred nasal lilt to his speech, Santos became a familiar figure in early '70s crime movies (The Panic in Needle Park, The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight, Shamus, The Don Is Dead, Shaft's Big Score), where his mere presence seemed to confer a dash of authenticity to the least convincing low-life atmosphere. His career breakthrough came when he was cast as Dennis Becker, James Garner's irritable buddy on the force, on The Rockford Files. He had played many a goon before that; he would play many a cop afterwards. The most memorable of many roles since then saw him backslide into criminality, notably his guest arcs on Hill Street Blues, as a perp who confused the undercover Belker (Bruce Weitz) by asking him if he'd ever kissed a man before, and more recently on The Sopranos.

JACK KEHOE: Kehoe has one brief scene here, sitting in a car and waiting for Steven Keats to arrive and denounce him for his unprofessional attitude. Though it was only his second movie appearance--his first was in The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight--he had already found his niche. Kehoe has two basic looks--clean-shaven on his usual days, and with a mustache when his character is putting on airs and trying to pass for respectable. In movie after movie--The Sting, Car Wash, Melvin and Howard, The Pope of Greenwich Village, The Untouchables--he's masterful as the guy who barely wants to make a strong enough impression that anyone will notice he's in the movie, but who, finally flushed out into the open, stoically sets his jaw and waits for the no good that he knows will come of having his existence recognized. He has a little more fun than usual in the 1988 remake of D.O.A., where he and Brion James, playing a couple of mouthy police detectives, perform the kind of duet that only a couple of first-rate character actors of wildly contrasting types can make of a pile of exposition. Though he hasn't appeared on screen in more than ten years, he is said to still be out there somewhere, as he always should be.

The Rep Report (November 16 - December 2)

Peter Smith — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 19:00:00 GMT

NEW YORK: Early in his foreshortened career as a film director, Albert Lamorisse made two of the most enduringly beautiful "children's movies" in the pantheon: the 1956 Oscar-winning, thirty-two-minute The Red Balloon, co-starring the title character and the director's six-year-old son Pascal, and the 1952, forty-minute White Mane. Film Forum is showing both as a single program for ten days from November 16-25. Lamorisse, who was born in Paris in 1922 and who was killed in a 1970 helicopter crash while shooting footage for a documentary, had developed a fine eye working as a photographer before making his first moving pictures. (He is fondly remembered in another department of geekdom as the creator of the board game "La Conquette Du Monde", which Parker Brothers would eventually market in the United States under the name "Risk".) His eye for beauty and fanciful poetic imagination proved to be perfectly scaled to these short works, which in their bittersweet way are basically perfect. Seen back-to-back, they're almost as ideal a start to the holiday season as getting crushed to death by a stampede of customers when the mall doors open the day after Thanksgiving.

There may also be an eye-popping children-of-all-ages feel to some of the pictures stocked in the Museum of the Moving Image program, Glorious Technicolor! (November 17 - December 2). The schedule includes a restored print of the gob-smackingly great-looking outdoor melodrama Trail of the Lonesome Pine, as well as The Adventues of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn strutting his stuff in leafy-green tights and classic musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Wizard of Oz, The Band Wagon, and one of Busby Berkeley's all-time "can you get me some of what the choreographer's been smoking?" eye-poppers, The Gang's All Here. Plus a little something called Gone with the Wind and, on December 2, that yuletide perennial Apocalypse Now Redux.

Before there was such a thing as "independent film", there was the mildly condescendingly named "regional-film movement," a system by which people who lacked the wherewithal or the desire to relocate to New York or Los Angeles made movies wherever they were whenever they could scrape the money together, tried to get them shown at festivals, sometimes succeeded, and then, as often as not, were never heard from again. The Texas-based writer-director Eagle Pennell had his moment right on the cusp of the new dawn of independent-film distribution. In fact, he's partly, if indirectly responsible for it, since it's been reported that it was Pennell's first feature, the 1978 The Whole Shootin' Match, that inspired Robert Redford to found the Sundance Film Festival, just to see if maybe there was anything else like that being made in the wide open spaces between the two coasts. Pennell's second feature, Last Night at the Alamo attracted even more attention in 1984, but by the time Sundance was turning "independent" directors into cult superstars on their way to being industry players, Pennell was yesterday's news, as well as an increasingly hopeless alcoholic on his way to being homeless. (He died in 2002, eight days before what would have been his fiftieth birthday.) From November 16-21, the Film Society of Lincoln Center is bringing back The Whole Shootin' Match in a restored print. It's a chance to pay tribute to a lost pioneer and also to see what the part of America that's outside Hollywood — specifically, the highly distinctive part that was Austin, Texas — looked like thirty years ago.

CHICAGO: From November 17 through December 4, the Gene Siskel Film Center pays tribute to the neo-Bresson stylings of Portuguese director Pedro Costa, an avant-garde narrative minimalist renowned for the painterly beauty of his compositional sense. The program begins with his early 1989 feature The Blood (O Sangue) and includes his recent, highly acclaimed Colossal Youth.

BOSTON: Now that Ben Affleck, of all people, seems to have gotten Boston better than half-right in the firmly rooted thriller Gone Baby Gone, it's as good a time as any to look back on how Hollywood has done by Beantown. Boston Filmed (November 16-22) at the Brattle devotes a week to such diverse on-location entertainments as the original The Thomas Crown Affair and Love Story, up to the more recent Mystic River and The Departed, as well as two indies from director Brad Anderson, the romantic comedy and ode-to-postponed-gratification Next Stop, Wonderland and the minimalist mind-fuck horror story Session 9. Buried deep in the mix, towards the middle of next week, are some obscure, modest, not-available-on-DVD gems: the 1977 Between the Lines, Joyce Micklin Silver's likable little comedy about the death of the counterculture as seen from the offices of an underground newspaper, and the 1973 crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle ,with a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco and Steven Keats all having the time of their lives rolling George V. Higgins's dialogue around on their tongues.

SAN FRANCISCO: This weekend, the Castro proudly presents a bunch of movies I've never heard of as part of the Fifth Annual Third I Film Festival, promoting South Asian cinema "art-house classics to experimental visions to next-level Bollywood." I'm going to be honest here. With everything else that's going on in the world, even just the world of film, it's not going to be possible for even an authority so utterly devoid of a life as The Rep Report to be up on all of it until my cloning experiments bear fruit, and though I never made anything like a conscious decision about it, it seems that experimental South Asian movies and next-level Bollywood are my major field of personal ignorance. If you're in the San Francisco area and don't have a wedding to attend, I encourage you to sneer at my boring provincialism and check this program out.

— Phil Nugent