cult film freak: PETER YATES' NEO NOIR THRILLER 'THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE'

Title: THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE Year: 1973 Rating: ****1/2

The miracle of Peter Yates's Crime Thriller THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE is how interesting a movie full of long conversations can be: Especially when the title character's played by an (while playing an) aged and experienced Robert Mitchum in a low-key yet still tightly-wound performance as a Boston career-criminal, who knows more last names than it's usual to get lost in within any Noir-style flick where a bunch of them are spouted left and right, and it takes several viewings to know exactly who's who...

And while Eddie tries getting manipulative cop Richard Jordan to squash an approaching sentence, there's a trio of dispersed bank robberies led by a masked, business-like Alex Rocco (kidnapping vault-key-holding bank managers while their families wait home at gunpoint)...

Steven Keats and Robert Mitchum in THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE

And there's scene-stealing, bright yellow rod-rod driving Steven Keats as Jackie Brown, cautiously running guns throughout the surrounding rural landscape... his story seems like a movie all its own, with a beginning, middle and end while the only weak spot is Peter Boyle as a bartender ex-con who gets around too easily, making Mitchum's plight as useless as he himself had made all of Keats's busy-work via double-cross...

Then again this is the purpose of a group of eclectic crooks pushing each other out of a losing game (hence the titular irony of FRIENDS) in Peter Yates's return to the cerebral/existential heist template of ROBBERY but with a modern, groovier soundtrack (via Dave Grusin).