THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE

Criterion's recent release of Stephen Frears' The Hit was nowhere near as gritty and interesting as this Criterion-phile was hoping, but it's with exceptional relief I say that Criterion's treatment of The Friends of Eddie Coyle makes for a killer disc, indeed. This is the kind of cult-violent picture that not only lives up to its underground status, but amazes on the plane of sheer filmmaking euphoria.

In the movie, we have Eddie Coyle (the legendary Robert Mitchum), an aging Boston gunrunner who's looking down the barrel of semi-retirement (read: He's ready to get out of the game). But as any crime film devotee knows, it never works out easily for guys when they're looking to hang up their pieces - when he gets fingered for a crime whose penalty would be a big stretch of time in the slammer, he finds himself torn between his desire to stay loyal to the fellow underworld hoodlums who have had his back for decades or rat them out in an attempt to keep his chance of a quiet retirement front and center.

What's liberating about The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that director Peter Yates utilizing such a subtle, clandestine storytelling style that the film never gets bogged down in its gangster-ish ethic. I mean to say that while The Friends of Eddie Coyle is indeed a unique film, and one that definitely counts as a gritty crime drama, it is somehow not as overt an actioner as it might have been under someone else's watch. It goes without saying that the explosive combination of Robert Mitchum's rubbery gravitas and Yates' wise direction allows the story to come across as both exciting and lived-in.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle may be too oblique or off-center for those who like their gun dramas cut-and-dry, but for those who like a good crime flick however it's constructed, this Criterion disc is a doozy. Its reputation is indeed merited: This is one of the most impressive and underrated crime dramas of the 1970s.