The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Director: Peter Yates

1973 / 103min / DCP

Bridgeport, Connecticut’s own Robert Mitchum returned to New England, shedding the strutting machismo of his younger years to play The Friends of Eddie Coyle’s wholly unglamorous title role, that of a hangdog lifelong small-timer in Boston’s Irish mob who, over the course of the film, is sacrificed to the ambitions of operators far savvier than himself. Based closely on the 1970 novel of the same name by George V. Higgins, a former deputy assistant attorney general for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the film follows Coyle through a series of wheedling negotiations in dumpy diners and pubs, and finally to the Cathedral of Beantown, the Boston Gardens, to get a glimpse of “Numbah fouah, Bobby Orr” en route to eternity.