Mike: Wait, wait, wait. What is this? What are you gonna do to me? What are you fronting off about? And if I'm this bad dude, why don't I just take out some gun, blow you to a billion parts? Dr. Margaret Ford: I'll tell you why. Cuz I think you're just a bully. Mike: [chuckles] Just a bully? What, you're not gonna let me carry your books? Aren't you a caution. Dr. Margaret Ford: Let's talk turkey, pal.
This movie was the first that playwright David Mamet directed ,an adaptation of his own screenplay. The story pits a psychiatrist with a best-selling book who butts up against a steely con man named Mike (Joe Mantegna) in a seedy bar and gaming club to help one of her patients, a desperate young man who appears on the verge of suicide.
The shrink Margaret Ford (Lindsey Crouse) becomes attracted to the world of con artists and how they conduct their con games,all the bluffs and "tells" and signals and elaborate schemes which set up "marks" to turn over large amounts of money with deceptions that are tightly coordinated and on the knife edge of danger. Margaret is intrigued by both this underworld of confidence men Mike has assembled to make his illicit living, and the obvious chemistry she and Mike have as a team in this dangerous demimonde world of dark streets and dangerous situations.
The film has a group of engaging characters and enough twists and turns to keep one guessing who will come out ahead (or at least alive) in this smart highly charged suspense film.
I found this oddball movie amusing and a nice tribute to the film noir genre of movie-making and detective stories of Hollywood in the post-war 40's and 50's.
Steve Martin plays Rigby Reardon, a private gumshoe who will do just about anything for money--even help a beautiful mysterious woman (Rachel Ward) who hires him to solve the murder of her father, a prominent cheese scientist, whose death was officially listed as an accident.
Film Critic Leonard Maltin called this one a "one joke" film, but that's not quite fair in my mind. The joke is that, using simulated old-style black and white cinematography, the detective can be seen playing opposite actors and actresses from 40 years back in Hollywood history. That's the main joke, but it's used in a way that succeeds more often than it falls flat. And Martin--even in an early role--is already the type of actor who can stretch his persona as a broad comedy performer out a bit.
This is the one of the best past/future scenes in the picture. Reardon comes calling at the dingy digs of Swede Anderson (Burt Lancaster from 1944's "The Killers") and decides the guy could use "a cup of my java".
Eddie 'Fingers' Coyle: "I shoulda known better than to trust a cop. My own goddamn mother coulda told me that."
Treasury Cop Dave Foley: "Everybody oughta listen to his mother."
"The Friends of Eddie Coyle" is an ultra-realistic crime drama from 1973 that recently was released on DVD by Criterion Video. It had been quite a while since I had seen Peter Yates' gritty R-rated "film noir" classic. I first saw it sneaking into a restricted movie theatre as a lad, and at the time I was somewhat confused by the way the story didn't allow for the "hero" to bust loose and take down all his enemies the way that 70's movies featuring Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen usually did. These actors also made gritty urban films, but in Robert Mitchum's case he was playing a character closer to reality, closer to the bone of what it was that goes into a real crime figure. I sensed that about the film but i still wasn't pleased on that first viewing. It was only later that I saw how Peter Yates had taken a realistic novel and shot it free of the romance and the daring and gratuitous action scenes that Hollywood movies usually served up then and now. I was pleased to see this little gem holds up well.
The film is truly a look at the seamy underbelly of urban American life. The films features Mitchum as a two-time loser Eddie Foyle, a small-time gun-runner who looking at a long stretch in prison in New Hampshire for smuggling untaxed whiskey across the border from Canada. He's too old to take prison lightly and is not happy with the idea of his wife and two teen-aged kids having to go on welfare. This leads him to try and bargain with the cocky young Federal cop Foley (Richard Jordan) to put in a good word with him with the District Attorney or the judge to get him off from going down for the whisky job.
The problem is that Eddie is small-time, essentially a middle-class criminal who lacks enough clout with the underworld to get information that would satisfy the Feds. Nor do his "friends" in the underworld cares one way or another about him personally--they want his untraceable guns, and he's reliable. But they also know he's about to be shipped off to a Federal cooler and he's in no position to bargain the way he once did.
Eddie's "friends" are not very friendly, and this prevailing sense of hope ebbing away for this "odd man out" is at the heart of the two threads of storyline that run through the film. The other thread are the three bank robberies depicted in the film---all done with a minimum of dialouge and shown in straight-forward detail. Yates work in the British film "Robbery" (1967) with Stanley Baker and Joanna Pettet and the classic "Bullitt" the next year with Steve McQueen all served to give him to assureance he shows in these scenes.
"Film Noir" movies have been a rich part of American popular cinema, and the Boston area--where all of this film was shot-- has sported some very good crime dramas of late. Ben Afflack's "The Town" and Clint Eastwood's "Mystic River" being the most recent examples. Each of these films I would say owe something to Yates' spare and minimalistic style of film-making. And to the excellent supporting performances by Jordan and Peter Boyle as a rat-fink hit-man who hints that guys like Coyle are "gentlemen" from the past whose time has run out.
The film is also a testament to how underrated Robert Mitchum was to American film critics and those of his peers who voted out awards to their favorites. Despite the fact that Mitchum is off the screen more than half the time in this movie he dominates the proceedings thanks to scenes like this one below. Director Yates (in the DVD commentary) describes show Mitchum inhabits the role of this middle-aged Boston hood, right down to the stillness and the economy of emotion he puts into this scene where he meets for the first time with fellow gun-runner Jackie Brown (Stephen Keats). Warning: this clip has strong language:
The classic film that was voted number one of the Top 100 films by the British Film Institute, "The Third Man" was based on a screenplay and novella by Graham Greene. (The latter was published a year after the film was released.) It was directed by Sir Carol Reed and produced by Alexander Korda.
The story is about a down-and-out American writer of pulp Westerns (Joseph Cotton as Holly Martins) who comes to the four-power occupied city of late 1940's Vienna to take his old friend Harry Lime up on a job offer. It turns out that Lime has faked his demise in order to throw the British police off on his doings as a black-marketeer of, among other things, secretly diluted (and lethal) penicillin to children's hospitals. Lime is both a callous murderer and a genuine "bon vi-ant", and Orson Welles plays both aspects of the character to perfection. (Ironically, despite all his work on film as a director/actor, this relatively minor role was the one he was most famous for during his heyday.)
The final part of the scene with Lime's recounting the Italian City-States and Swiss cuckoo clocks was Welles' inspiration.
When Martins finds out Lime is still alive, he tracks him down to the Russian Sector of the divided city to find out what has happened to his friend. Here the Machievellian philosophy of the fugitive Lime is brought out in crystal clarity above the city on a dizzying and potentially dangerous ferris wheel ride. The clip here is one of the best in a series of great scenes in this movie, a true must-see film.
