The Screengrab : peter yates

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.

DVD Digest for May 19, 2009

Paul Clark — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:00:00 GMT

This week, the same old stuff you always get from DVD Digest. Also, a new Steven Seagal movie!

For some people reading this column, the news that the recent releases Valkyrie (MGM, also Blu-Ray), Paul Blart: Mall Cop (Sony, also Blu-Ray), and My Bloody Valentine 3D (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray) will be more important than anything else. But we’re looking out for the rest of you as well. And if none of these titles quicken your pulse- and I perfectly understand if they don’t- there’s always the latest from movie-star-turned-musician-turned-energy-drink-magnate (take that, Billy Bob Thornton!) Steven Seagal, Driven to Kill (Fox, also Blu-Ray). On the other side of things, the artsy and fartsy out there should be salivating over the release of John Gianvito’s excellent Profit Motive and the Whispering Wind (E1 Entertainment). In other words, something for everybody!

And what would a DVD Digest be without the classics section, for those of you who aren’t all uptight about black-and-white, subtitles, Academy ratio, and long-dead movie stars. Devotees of the Criterion Collection no doubt already know about the dynamic duo of DVDs hitting streets today. First, Peter Yates' great Boston crime drama The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Criterion) makes its long-awaited DVD debut. Or if you’re in the mood for something more, uh, Eastern, check out Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura (Criterion)- includes The Insect Woman, Pigs and Battleships, Intentions of Murder. Fans of old Hollywood would be advised to pick up two John Wayne favorites, El Dorado Centennial Edition (Paramount) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Centennial Edition (Paramount). And by some happy coincidence, today’s release of Fritz Lang’s Nazi-hunting thriller Man Hunt (Fox) is timed perfectly with the release of the aforementioned Valkyrie. Funny how that worked out, dontcha find?

Fans of TV on DVD should find something to enjoy among this week’s releases, which include the ever-popular 24 Season 7 (Fox, also Blu-Ray), Alan Ball’s vampire saga True Blood (HBO, also Blu-Ray), and the no-longer-surprising-in-its-awesomeness Friday Night Lights Season 3 (Universal).

Finally, if you’ve a Blu-Ray player, you’re in luck! Today’s a big one for Blu-Ray only releases, highlighted by the Batman 20th Anniversary Blu-Ray Book (Warner), which includes a Batmobile full of extras, documentaries, and other cool stuff. For the kids, A Bug’s Life (Disney) hits stores to capitalize on the upcoming Pixar release Up, while those who are looking forward to the latest Terminator blockbuster will no doubt pick up Terminator 2 Skynet Edition (Lionsgate). The political drama Lions for Lambs (Fox) is coming out for fans of political speechifying. Finally, Paramount’s got a whole slew of new Blu-Ray only releases hitting stores today, including Three Days of the Condor, Changing Lanes, Enemy at the Gates, Paycheck, and The Machinist.

Reviews By Request: The Hot Rock (1972, Peter Yates)

Paul Clark — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Thanks to reader “Uncle Crizzle” (a.k.a. Craig Lindsey) for requesting this week’s review. As always, for instructions on how to request the next review for this feature (to run in two weeks), see the bottom of this post.

The more heist movies I see, the more I realize that the secret to a good one lies in three factors. First, the characters have to be engaging. There are only a limited number of heists one can pull onscreen, but if we enjoy the people onscreen it scarcely matters. Second, the script shouldn’t run out of ideas before the ending, so that the audience won’t be too sure where everything stands until all the pieces finally fall into place. Third- and perhaps most importantly- the movie has to be light on its feet. If the style or the storytelling becomes overbearing, the movie will turn into a slog, which is pretty much the last thing you want from a heist movie.

Peter Yates’ The Hot Rock succeeds on all three counts, with the added bonus of getting better as it goes along. In the opening scenes, I was expecting a fairly standard issue heist movie, albeit one with an impressive, quintessential seventies-era cast. But The Hot Rock has plenty of surprises up its sleeve, not least that the story’s central heist scene happens even before the midpoint of the film. Best of all, it takes itself just seriously enough that it doesn’t feel like a lark, but never too seriously. It’s a lot of fun.

But back to that central heist, which involves the titular rock, a massive diamond that’s long been a point of contention between the ruling factions of an obscure (and apocryphal) African nation. The country’s ambassador to the U.N., played by Moses Gunn, hires the recently-released-from-prison John Dortmunder (Robert Redford) to mastermind a plan to steal the stone for him. Dortmunder’s team- comprised of safecracker George Segal, driver Ron Liebman, and explosives expert Paul Sand- exhaustively plan the job which, while quaint by modern-day standards, is a pretty good one. Of course, it doesn’t quite go according to plan, and it’s the aftermath of the heist that makes the movie so enjoyable.

The Hot Rock was based on a novel by Donald E. Westlake, who I was familiar with primarily for his hard-hitting crime novels written as Richard Stark and his nihilistic screenplay for The Grifters. However, this film is based on one of Westlake’s lighter Dortmunder books, which gave me some pause since my only previous exposure to a Dortmunder story was the godawful 2001 Martin Lawrence vehicle What’s the Worst That Can Happen? That film took Westlake’s story and buried it in shticky storytelling and hammy performances until it became all but unwatchable, and I feared the worst from The Hot Rock as well.

However, the difference between the two movies is telling. Whereas the broadly comic style of What’s the Worst That Can Happen? didn’t suite Westlake’s terse prose one bit, Yates wisely plays the story straight. Primarily known up to that time as an action director (his biggest hit had been 1968’s Bullitt), Yates never leans too hard on the film’s comedy. Instead, he directs the story like a straight thriller, matter-of-factly following his band of crooks from one complication to the next. This only makes the movie that much funnier. Due to unforeseen difficulties, the original heist ends up leading to another job, then another, then yet another, each more unlikely than the last. And the team, which seemed so well-chosen at the beginning, becomes less so with each successive job. Consider that Liebman is perfect behind the wheel of damn near any car, but fairly out of sort when he finds himself in an entirely different sort of vehicle.

As I said before, the cast is a lot of fun. I’ve never been a big Robert Redford fan, but he’s a natural here as the master thief who has to keep his cool in order to think himself out of the messes in which he keeps finding himself. Segal is his usual reliable self as Dortmunder’s trusty lieutenant, all business to the outside world but always kvetching to the boss. Liebman and Sand have some good moments as the other team members. Gunn gets lots of laughs as the seemingly imperturbable diplomat, at first amused by his involvement in the crime (observe his wry smile when he states, “I am a criminal”), only to become increasingly frustrated with every new development in the case. And there’s a choice supporting role for the one and only Zero Mostel, as Sand’s shifty father. Given his over-the-top signature performance in The Producers, I sort of expected Mostel to clash with the others, but instead his outsize personality is in service of an outsize character, which allows him to fit in perfectly with the ensemble. It’s an indelible character turn, with the unfortunate side effect of making me wonder how many priceless Mostel performances we lost to the blacklist.

The Hot Rock is yet another reminder of the kind of action movies Hollywood was great at making during the seventies, but not nearly as good at today. The cast is enjoyable, the storytelling efficient, and most of all, the direction never calls attention to itself. As fun as Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s films sometimes are, there’s always a layer of self-consciousness to them, as though Soderbergh deliberately means to evoke a bygone filmmaking style. By contrast, Yates trusts in his story enough to stay out of the way, and the result is a highly enjoyable example of its genre, and a darn good entertainment in general.

So, what movie would you like me to review for the next installment of Reviews by Request? Let me know in the comments section below. To refresh your memory, here are the rules for requesting a movie to be reviewed: (1) it has to be a movie I haven’t seen, (2) it has to be available through Netflix, and (3) please only request one film. Other than that, anything is fair game. First to suggest a movie that qualifies gets their requested review. See you in two weeks!

Famous Last Words, Round 1 Tiebreaker: Once More, With Feeling

Paul Clark — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Well, I had hoped that last week's tiebreaker round might have decided the winners of this round of Famous Last Words, but alas, it wasn't to be. None of the contenders are backing down, so I'm forced to try again. But first, here are the answers to last week's quotes:

1. “That was a lot of running. I’m out of breath.” ~ This was the gimme, coming as it did from a recent film, Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding.

2. “Come on, chums! Snap out of it!” ~ This final-scene rallying cry was taken from documentary master Humphrey Jennings' sole feature, Fires Were Started….

3. “We’ve been friends a long time now. I never asked a friend to do something he really couldn’t do if I knew he couldn’t do it. Have a nice day.” ~ This one was the stumper, as the film, Peter Yates' Boston noir The Friends of Eddie Coyle, has yet to be released in any video format.

And now, here are the quotes for this week's tiebreaker. Hopefully, these will do the trick:

1. “You with your visions and your dreams.”

2. “You’re the only guy I know who would borrow money to repay a debt that you took to repay a debt.”
“And that’s why you love me.”
“That’s why I love you."

3. “Real life awaits us.”

Once again, I'll be notifying those who are still in contention via e-Mail, but everyone is welcome to play along for fun. Remember, submit your guesses to famouslastwords@nerve.com no later than 11:59 PM Eastern next Wednesday. Good luck, and here's hoping that I'll be able to post the winners at this time next week.

Watch It (But Not For Free): “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Even if you think Amy Ryan’s wicked pissah performance in Gone Baby Gone wuz robbed on Oscar night, there’s no denying we’re living in the golden age of Boston crime movies. Mystic River kicked it off, The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture last year, and now Martin Scorsese is set to direct an adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island starring (who else?) Leonardo DiCaprio. But the granddaddy of all these films remains criminally unknown, rarely screened and never released on home video: The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

Adapted from the novel by Boston crime writer George V. Higgins, the precursor to Lehane and Spenser creator Robert Parker, Coyle is the story of a small-time gun dealer who turns informant when he learns he’s facing a stretch in prison. Directed by Peter Yates and starring Robert Mitchum as Coyle, the film isn’t big on plot twists or even much violence; its power comes from Higgins’ pungent dialogue, gritty locations and one of Mitchum’s finest performances. It has a devoted cult following, and the leader of that cult has to be Hollywood Elsewhere columnist Jeffrey Wells, who has been pursuing Coyle’s DVD release like Ahab pursued the white whale.

It began with this column from 2001, back when Wells still wrote for Reel.com. “Coyle was originally distributed by Paramount Pictures, which still owns the rights,” he wrote. “However, there are no current plans by Paramount to put it out on DVD, according to PHV spokesperson Martin Blythe. ‘But you're the second person to ask recently, so I'll mention it,’ he said earlier this week. ‘Sometimes this is how things start.’” Sometimes, perhaps, but not in this case. Wells has restated his demands periodically through the years, right up until earlier this month. Despite rumors that Criterion plans to release it (the same rumors surround virtually every rare or unreleased movie you can imagine), Coyle remains unavailable on DVD.

However, you can watch The Friends of Eddie Coyle any time you’d like, either on your computer or your TiVo, if you have such a thing. It is available as a digital download through Amazon’s Unbox service, and you can either rent it for $3.99 or buy it for $9.99. I have no information about the quality of the video – actually, I’m hoping one of our devoted readers will serve as the guinea pig and report back here. Here’s the trailer; if it interests you, why not take the plunge?

Video of the Day: Peter Yates Interview

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 19:30:00 GMT

From the vast "TV Days" archives of amateur television historian Ira H. Gallen comes this 1968 interview with British director Peter Yates, fresh from completing his work on Bullitt.

The interview is interesting enough on its own merits -- Yates, who was then considered quite a maverick among English filmmakers and has now been largely forgotten, discusses the changing role of the car chase and his own desire not to become a Hollywood director. But it's also lots of fun just as a television period piece, given the now-unthinkable thick accent of the host and the panel of film students acting as Yates' questioners, who seem to have wandered in off the set of The Mod Squad.