Robbery According to 'Coyle,' Part One

Down but Not Quite Out: Robert Mitchum as the world-weary title character in Peter Yates's 1970s gem The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

If Peter Yates's The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) isn't a cult item among neo-noir aficionados, it should be. It features a host of fine performances—by Robert Mitchum (in the title role), Peter Boyle, Richard Jordan, Alex Rocco, Steven Keats, and Joe Santos—and its gritty portrayal of Boston's criminal ecosystem, a world rife with shady deals and double crosses, feels solidly authentic. Paul Monash's script hews fairly closely to the debut novel of the late George V. Higgins, the doyen of Boston crime writers and a deputy U.S. attorney who knew what of he wrote. The novel consists mostly of dialogue, and Monash, to his credit, leaves much of Higgins's meaty language untouched. There's nothing flamboyant about Yates's direction—"understated" is perhaps the best descriptor—and that's a definite plus, especially when compared to the amped-up "style" of so many current films in the genre. Moreover, while the movie contains no direct references to Vietnam or the Watergate scandal, it has a chilly mood and decidedly downbeat ending that prefigure the tone of later films often singled out as exemplars of post-Sixties American disillusionment.[1]

Mitchum's Coyle is a seen-it-all, low-level hood struggling for survival: he's been to prison once and now faces another stretch for transporting stolen liquor. His current gig is supplying guns to a Mob-connected crew that specializes in knocking over suburban branch banks. Hoping to avoid jail time, Eddie offers snitch services to a slippery federal agent named Dave Foley (Jordan) even as he continues acquiring guns for the bank robbers. He's only too aware that the dangerous path he's chosen could easily lead to the morgue. It becomes clear pretty quickly that the word "friends" in the title is soaked in irony. Eddie will sell out his associates if he has to, and to the Mob higher-ups, he's entirely expendable.

Although the film faded from the collective memory in subsequent years, the reviews upon its release were mostly positive. Typical notices included those by Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times and Vincent Canby of the New York Times. Observing that most of Michum's previous roles had been in "conventional action melodramas," Ebert wrote that Eddie Coyle offered the veteran actor a rare opportunity: "Give [Mitchum] a character and the room to develop it, and what he does is wonderful. Eddie Coyle is made for him: a weary middle-aged man, but tough and proud; a man who has been hurt too often in life not to respect pain; a man who will take chances to protect his own territory."[2] Canby, meanwhile, praised the film as "beautifully acted" and pointed out in particular its fine ear "for the way people talk."[3]

On such points I agree with Ebert and Canby, but I take issue with their appraisals of the movie's action/suspense scenes—that is, the bank heists that punctuate a narrative otherwise dominated by two-person conversations in working-class bars, greasy-spoon cafeterias, public parks, bowling alleys, and the like. Both reviewers suggested that dropping the heist scenes would have made it a better film. "If the movie has a flaw," Ebert opined, "it’s that we don’t really care that much about the bank robberies that are counterpointed with Eddie’s situation. We’re interested in him. We can get the bank robberies in any summer’s caper picture. It’s strange that a movie’s interest should fall off during its action scenes." Canby had much the same complaint: "The film splits its attention between Eddie, as he slowly evolves into a stool pigeon in an effort to stay free, and the more or less conventional caper movie sequences that show us how to rob a bank. Mr. Yates ('Bullitt') is so good at this sort of thing that it's probably difficult to resist putting it in. There's nothing wrong with it, but it does diminish the impact of Eddie's story, which could have been quite special."

Au contraire, I say. What is a crime movie that doesn't depict crimes? Without the holdup scenes, there would be little sense of the underlying danger in this milieu, of the life-and-death stakes involved in Eddie's actions and of those around him. And, as Canby admitted, Yates handled the scenes well. In fact, they are to my mind models of their kind, and they warrant a closer analysis and evaluation, especially of their outstanding formal qualities and suspense techniques.

*  *  *

I've selected two sequences to examine. The first does not actually depict a robbery, but rather the preparation for one. This is, in fact, the movie's opening scene, which doubles as the credits sequence. That's the best place to begin, since so much of what we see in this scene will figure in the later sequence that I've chosen to analyze.

Here's what unfolds: Two criminals, later identified as Jimmy Scalise and Arthur Valantropo (or, as he's usually referred to, "Artie Van"), shadow a banker named Partridge at his home and workplace. While surveilling the bank, the two hoods witness the arrival and departure of an armored car making a cash delivery. Then, after disguising himself with a hat and a pair of glasses, Scalise enters the bank, eyes the vault, and asks a teller for change while noting the presence of two security cameras. He leaves the bank. And that's it—on to the next scene.

Thus summarized, the four-and-a-half-minute opener may not sound like much, but Yates's handling of it, relying almost entirely on visual means, is admirably precise, generating an air of tension and intrigue that will be sustained until the initial robbery occurs. It's one of the film's few scenes that doesn't originate with Higgins's novel, and its inclusion illustrates some of the important differences between cinematic and literary storytelling. But more on that later.

As befits the situation—two men spying on another man—a key structuring device of the scene is what the Master of Suspense himself, Alfred Hitchcock, called the "subjective treatment"—that is, intercutting shots of a "looker" with point-of-view (POV) shots of what the looker sees.[4] (While he didn't invent the technique, Hitchcock, more than any other director, implanted it into the basic vocabulary of mainstream moviemaking.) The Friends of Eddie Coyle actually begins with a POV shot, although it's not immediately apparent that that's what we're seeing.

In this first shot, the out-of-focus, bare tree branches in the foreground that partially obscure Partridge as he leaves his house and opens his garage door make the image seem a little "arty" at first (figs. 1 and 2). The next shot, however, clarifies the choice of angle. Here we see Partridge backing out of his driveway, and the camera pans with his Mercedes for a short distance. But then the camera movement stops, allowing Partridge's sedan to exit the frame; this reveals another car parked nearby, itself partially obscured by branches (figs. 3 and 4).[5] Cut to a closeup of the man behind the wheel, Jimmy Scalise (fig. 5). It thus becomes clear that the initial shot is from Scalise's point of view as he shadows the Partridge home. This is unusual. Typically in movies the POV shot comes after we've seen the character who's doing the looking. Here, however, the presence of the tree branches—obscuring Partridge in the first shot, then obscuring Scalise's car in the second—links the two shots and, quite cleverly, ties the first shot to Scalise's perspective. Notable, too, is the use of a telephoto lens, which subtly suggests that Partridge is being spied upon, as if through binoculars. Although Scalise doesn't appear to be using binoculars, the first shot nevertheless exploits our natural tendency to associate long-lens images with surveillance.

Fig. 1: In the film's opening shot, Mr. Partridge (Peter MacLean) exits his home, partially obscured by tree branches in a seemingly "arty" effect.

Fig. 2: With the camera following him, Partridge circles around to the garage door and opens it.

Fig. 3: In a cut to a different angle, we see Partridge's car backing out of the driveway. The camera pans with it for a short distance.

Fig. 4: As the camera pans to the right, Partridge's car leaves the frame and the camera stops, revealing another car parked nearby.

Fig. 5: A cut to a closeup reveals the second car's driver, Jimmy Scalise (Alex Rocco), who's watching Partridge's movements. As the shot continues, he takes a small pad from the dashboard and makes a note.

As Partridge drives away, Scalise writes something down in a small notepad, presumably the time of the man's departure. The action then shifts to the small-business district where Partridge's bank is located (fig. 6). Here a nice echo of the opening shots occurs. When Partridge arrives (pulling into a parking space with his name on it), leaves his car, and approaches the bank entrance, we notice a second man watching him from a parked car across the street (fig. 7). As with Scalise earlier, there's a cut to a closeup of the man behind the wheel, in this case Artie Van (fig. 8). In a shot from Artie's POV, Partridge presses the doorbell, waiting to be let in (fig. 9). (Various visual clues—the upscale neighborhood in which Partridge lives, the Mercedes he drives, his smart business attire, and the fact that he has the parking spot closest to the front door—all signal that he's the branch manager.)

Fig. 6: Partridge's bank. His Mercedes, which the camera has been following throughout this shot, is visible at the far left, about to pull into a parking space.

Fig. 7: As Partridge leaves his car, Artie Van watches from across the street.

Fig. 8: A closeup of Artie (Joe Santos) spying on Partridge. The editing is similar to that depicted in figs. 4 and 5.

Fig. 9: Partridge at the bank entrance as seen from Artie's perspective.

We might expect the next shot to cut back to Artie Van, but instead it's a closeup of Jimmy Scalise, watching from his own car (fig. 10). (He's apparently on a nearby parking lot, given that his car is sandwiched between two others.) As he watches, he dons a fedora and a pair of horn-rimmed glasses; he's also got on an overcoat and tie that he wasn't wearing earlier. His reappearance here is slightly surprising in that we didn't actually see him following Partridge to work. We have to fill in that blank ourselves, though this sort of elliptical storytelling is commonplace in movies and easy to grasp. Interestingly, it's never made clear exactly where Scalise is parked in relation to the bank and to Artie's car. He also seems to share the same sight line as Artie—a physical impossibility and, one could argue, a dubious choice on the part of Yates and the film's editor, Patricia Lewis Jaffe. However, this conflation of the two hoods' viewpoints does reinforce the idea that they are united in a common—and obviously nefarious—purpose.[6]

Fig. 10: Scalise, also spying on Partridge. His exact position within the overall geography of the setting is unclear.

The following shot returns us to Partridge as he enters his workplace (the angle is the same as in figure 9). Then, a new element is introduced: from a different, previously unseen angle (the cut accentuated by a funky shift in Dave Grusin's jazz fusion score), we watch an armored car rounding a curve (fig. 11). As the camera pans with it, it crosses an intersection and pulls up in front of the bank (fig. 12), where the building is shown much as we saw it when Partridge arrived a moment before (see fig. 6).

Fig. 11: With a cut to a new angle, an armored car appears.

Fig. 12: The camera follows the vehicle as it comes to a halt in front of the bank. Compare this composition to fig. 6.

Once the armored car stops, a closer shot shows a guard, armed with a shotgun, getting out and positioning himself at the entrance (fig. 13). He gives an "all clear" signal with a nod of his head. In the even closer shot that follows, the armored car driver, who carries a revolver in his right hand, steps to the curb and uses the firearm to tap a small door on the side of the vehicle. The door opens. With only his hands visible, another guard (also holding a revolver) gives the driver three bags stuffed with cash (fig. 14). The driver and shotgun-toting guard enter the bank together.

Fig. 13: An armed guard positions himself at the front door.

Fig. 14: In a closer shot that returns us to the armored car, the driver brings out the cash bags. (Note the revolver in the hand of the man handing over the cash.)

At this point, we return to Artie Van as we saw him before in closeup (see fig. 8); he jots down a note of what's just occurred, probably recording the time—an echo of the earlier shot of Scalise when he was spying on Partridge's home. I should point out that the cash delivery is not depicted from Artie's perspective but rather from an opposite angle (see figure 9 for the view he would actually have had). So, strictly speaking, Yates and Jaffe have again fudged the POV—though it all happens so quickly that no real confusion results. That's a benefit of Jaffe's crisp editing: a shot is never held longer than it needs to be.

The introduction of guns into the scene adds a note of danger and, along with the surveillance intrigue, reminds us that we're watching a crime thriller. At this point, though, we may wonder exactly what sort of crime is in store. Are Scalise and Artie targeting the bank or the armored car? Their careful spying and note-taking indicate that they're only preparing for a crime that will take place later, but we're not sure yet what that will entail. The shadowing of Partridge suggests that it will be a bank robbery, but the scene gives enough attention to the armored car and the bags of money it carries to make us consider the alternate possibility.

The armored car employees then depart the bank, shown from roughly the same angle depicted in figure 11, and with the sounds of the vehicle's doors closing and the engine starting, there's a cut to Jimmy Scalise getting out of his car (fig. 15).[7] The bank is open for business.

Fig. 15: Scalise leaves his car.

The action now shifts to the interior of the bank, where we see Partridge and one of his employees inside the open vault (fig. 16). They've likely been dealing with the cash delivery. Cut to Scalise, looking very respectable, as he enters the small building (fig. 17) and crosses to the other side of the main room, where, encountering Partridge, he politely allows the banker to pass in front of him (fig. 18). As this happens, the dark-haired female employee who was with Partridge in the vault is "buzzed" into the tellers' area. Scalise approaches her window and, still polite, asks her to change a ten-dollar bill for him (fig. 19).[8] This is the first audible exchange of dialogue in the film. While waiting, Scalise gazes upward (fig. 20), and a POV shot reveals a security camera (fig. 21). A cut to a wide shot, with the camera positioned behind Scalise, shows the row of teller windows, and a turn of Scalise's head directs our attention to a second security camera in the opposite corner (fig. 22). Then there's another polite dialogue exchange between Scalise and the teller as he takes his change and counts it. So, we're now thinking, the bank is the likely target, not the armored car. "Bye, bye," Scalise says, smiling, and heads for the door, stealing one last look at Partridge, visible through the interior window of his office (fig. 23). Thus the scene ends with an echo of its opening: Scalise exits the bank just as Partridge exited his house at the beginning.

Fig. 16: Partridge and a bank employee inside the vault.

Fig. 17: Cut to Scalise entering the bank.

Fig. 18: The camera follows Scalise to the other side of the room where he encounters Partridge near the vault.

Fig. 19: At the teller window, Scalise asks the bank employee to change a ten-dollar bill.

Fig. 20: In a reverse-angle shot, Scalise waits for his change and glances up toward screen left.

Fig. 21: A mounted security camera as seen from Scalise's POV.

Fig. 22: In a wide shot, the turn of Scalise's head directs the viewer's attention to the second security camera.

Fig. 23: Leaving the bank, Scalise steals one last look at Partridge.

In addition to creating suspense—how and when will the crime be carried out?—the scene introduces us to three key characters—Scalise, Artie Van, and Partridge—as well as to two important locales: Partridge's home and the bank where he works. It gives special emphasis to the bank interior and the location of the vault and security cameras, which, as we'll see, figure prominently in the actual robbery scene to come—especially (and not surprisingly) the vault.

Since, as it turns out, a bank robbery is in the offing, we may wonder, retrospectively, why the bit of business with the armored car is included. I've noted one reason—the presence of guns suggests danger—and another is that it calls attention to what the criminals are after: the bags filled with cash. We all know, of course, that banks contain money, but the shot of those bags actually being carried into the building vividly reinforces that knowledge.

In fact, guns and money are dominant motifs threaded throughout the film. Well, one may reasonably ask, what do you expect in a crime story? But The Friends of Eddie Coyle gives these elements more than the usual prominence. Firearms, after all, are the goods in which Eddie deals, and he's only one of several gunrunners in the movie. As for money, that's a subject the characters talk about constantly—whether they're bargaining over the price of guns, complaining about their financial problems, or negotiating the manner of payment for a targeted murder (carried out, of course, with a gun). Thus, the visual emphasis these motifs receive in the opener helps lay the groundwork for much of what will follow.

*  *  *

About fifteen minutes elapse between the opening scene and the first bank heist. In the interim, we meet Eddie and several of his "friends": another illicit gun dealer named Jackie Brown (Keats), the aforementioned federal agent Foley, and a bartender and ex-con named Dillon (Boyle). We learn about Eddie's dilemma—his upcoming sentencing—and that Dillon regularly feeds information to Foley (for a fee, naturally) about any criminal activities of which he's aware. Most important, we see Artie Van contacting Eddie about the guns he's procuring and then see Eddie delivering those goods to Artie.

Unlike the opener, these scenes mostly draw on the early chapters from Higgins's novel—but with an important difference. In the book, there's a chapter (not dramatized in the film) in which Scalisi—for some reason, the filmmakers changed the name to "Scalise"—meets Eddie to discuss the guns Eddie is acquiring for him. This chapter, the book's third, serves a purpose similar to that of the movie's first scene: to indicate that some big criminal activity lies ahead. But it does so mostly in indirect fashion, with Higgins deliberately obscuring certain key details amid the dialogue. We learn that a lot of guns will be needed and that a gang is being assembled. The only reference to the possible nature of the crime appears in Eddie's description of one particular firearm: "That fucking mag looks like a cannon, so help me. Got a mouth on her like the Sumner Tunnel. You could hold up a bank all by yourself with that thing."[9] Higgins builds suspense by revealing information in small bits and pieces. In this chapter, we aren't even told the names of the characters. Eddie is "the stocky man"—the same minimal description used in the previous two chapters—and Scalisi is simply "the second man." The revelation of their identities only comes in later chapters, as do a few more hints about a looming heist. When that heist finally does occur (in chapter 7), it's a bit of surprise. While we may have vaguely suspected that a bank robbery is coming, we've no idea what sort of bank has been targeted or that the crime will somehow involve the bank manager and his home.

In contrast, since the film shows us at the outset that a bank holdup is being planned, the suspense, as I mentioned, centers on the question of how and when it will occur. More particularly, we wonder just how Partridge will fit into the scheme. The vivid cinematic devices that Yates employs in the initial scene register so strongly in our minds that the memory of it carries over into the subsequent scenes in which the deal-making for firearms and the process of their delivery are shown. In the novel, it's Higgins's remarkable gift for dialogue that does the heavy lifting of capturing the reader's interest. In the movie, the dialogue in these scenes is no less compelling, but the nearly wordless action that precedes them adds an extra layer of intrigue. I can't imagine the film working quite as well without that opener, especially in cinematic terms.

The difference between the novel's opening narrative strategy and that of the film boils down to this: Higgins's approach is a slow, incremental buildup in which he drops little clues about the imminent robbery—mostly oblique ones—into his rich exchanges of dialogue, which have as much to do with character revelation and defining the novel's seedy milieu as they do with advancing the plot. The movie takes more of a "windup-and-follow-through" approach. The opening scene gives us the big windup in preparation for the even bigger follow-through—the heist—that will come later. And luckily for us viewers, the scenes that fill the space in between retain enough of Higgins's language to fulfill the character-revelation and milieu-defining functions that give the story its texture. The best of both worlds, you might say.

The task now is to examine exactly how (and how well) Yates followed through after the strong windup I've described here.

NOTES
[1] Such films include Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974), Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and The Godfather, Part II (both 1974), Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975), and Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976).
[2] Ebert's Sun-Times review was originally published on June 27, 1973. It can now be found online at the late critic's website: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-friends-of-eddie-coyle-1973.
[3] Vincent Canby, "'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' Is a Good, Tough Movie," New York Times, June 27, 1973.
[4] Alfred Hitchcock, interview by Charles Thomas Samuels,  Encountering Directors (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1972), 233.
[5] Yates did something a little tricky here: he "crossed the axis." That is, the cut from the first shot to the second "jumps over" the imaginary line defining the plane of action. It would have been visually confusing had we seen Partridge's car backing out of the garage in the initial shot, moving from right to left, and then, in the second shot, which reverses the angle, moving from left to right. Instead, the cut occurs just as Partridge enters the garage, leaving the frame, and we hear him opening the car door. With the cut to the second shot showing the rear of the car, we hear the sound of the engine starting, and this acoustic bridge helps disguise what might otherwise have been a disorienting edit. Yates needed to reverse the angle, of course, in order to reveal Scalise's car as the camera begins panning to the right.
[6] It wouldn't surprise me if, during the editing process, some footage clarifying Scalise's position and exact point of view was omitted in order to tighten the scene.
[7] The acoustic bridge between the shots—vehicle door opening and closing, engine starting—is almost exactly like the one described in note 5 above. It's a subtle repetition that helps tie the scene together stylistically. Most viewers won't notice, but it attests to the care with which the scene is crafted.
[8] When Scalise crosses the room and before encountering Partridge, he takes a pamphlet from a display stand next to the area where the vault is located. His real purpose, of course, is to get a good look at the vault.
[9] George V. Higgins, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1972; reprint, New York: Picador, 2010), 21.

For Part Two, click here