I picked up the Criterion DVD of The Friends of Eddie Coyle yesterday. There’s a little booklet inside that contains a reprint of a superb Rolling Stone set-visit piece by Grover Lewis (a great journalist who died in ’95 of lung cancer) called “The Last Celluloid Desperado.” It also contains an eloquent essay by Kent … Read more
Memo to Brad Grey #2: In case your memory of The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a little fuzzy, here’s an mp3 of the film’s great dialogue scene: Robert Mitchum and Stephen Keats (playing a character named “Jackie Brown”) talking about guns in a diner. Blunt Boston crime- culture dialogue doesn’t get any better than … Read more
Six years and three months ago, I begged Paramount Home Video to please think about issuing a DVD of Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Beloved by serious crime fans, one of greatest hard-boiled noirs of the ’70s, a classic of its kind and still absent from the shelves and the Netflix rent list … Read more
Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), still unavailable on DVD, is playing tonight and tomorrow at the Brattle theatre in Cambridge as part of a “Boston Filmed” series. I’ve heard about that bootleg version that’s been mastered from an old VHS tape, but who in their right mind would want to watch such … Read more
A reader pointed out yesterday that Peter Yates‘ The Friends of Eddie Coyle, one of the great ’70s crime films (and probably the best Boston crime movie ever made, no disrespect to The Departed), will play Friday, January 5, at the American Cinematheque’s Overlook/Underrated series at the Egyptian. This feels like fourteenth or fifteenth goad … Read more
I was in some kind of diminished state when I first read this 10.1 piece on the best Boston movies by Newsweek‘s bureau chief Mark Starr. Inspired by the Boston-y locales, accents and Irish machismo in Martin Scorsese‘s The Departed, Starr tapped out a laundry list of films shot in Boston, some of which (Between … Read more
By HE standards there were three stand-out James Tolkan performances. All supporting, of course. Tolkan wasn’t a charismatic lead-actor type. He always played clenched hardasses. The first that really connected was a rigid, button-down Boston mob guy hiring Peter Boyle to clip Robert Mitchum in The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’72). The second was George … Read more
Last night I finally caught Doug Liman, Matt Damon and Casey Affleck’s The Instigators (Apple+, 8.9), and during the first 20 minutes I knew for a fact that the Rotten Tomatoes naysayers (critics plus Joe Popcorn) had been mostly clueless and certainly small-minded in their pissy reactions. For this downbeat Boston noir comedy is a … Read more
The other day I equated Jon Watts‘ Wolfs with a warm plate of waffles, served in a friendly roadside diner. A thin slice or two of melted butter and a light pouring of Maple Syrup. Maybe a pinch or two of cinnamon. It may be pleasurable to eat or, heh-heh, wolf down — I would … Read more
A friend suggested a list of the Ten Best American Crime Flicks of the ‘70s. By which he meant films that spend more time on criminals than people trying to catch them, or no time with the catchers at all. No cop movies, he said, which eliminates Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Seven-Ups, etc. … Read more
I’ve posted a roster of the 35 best films of 1973 twice before — this is the third time. Here’s my rundown of the best of ’23 and it only comes to 24 films. A lot of them are excellent or highly commendable, but overall they simply can’t compare to Team ’73…different culture, different atmosphere. … Read more
Peter Yates The Friends of Eddie Coyle (’73), the Boston crime noir which HE has been praising for many years, will screen at Santa Monica’s Aero theatre on Sunday, June 4th. Pic opened a little less than 50 years ago — 6.26.73. Director-screenwriter Larry Karaszewski will deliver a few introductory remarks prior to showtime. My … Read more