ICE-Vision: The Friends of Eddie Coyle (Peter Yates, 1973)
Thursday, February 10 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
Film Studies major Will Stephenson continues ICE’s informal weekly series, selecting a variety of world cinema classics and subcultural curiosities.
“Yates’ film, based on a virtually-all-dialogue novel by George V. Higgins, is hardly a thrillathon in the car-chase days of “Bullitt,” “The French Connection,” “The Parallax View” or “The Seven-Ups.” But its elusive stasis is what makes it remarkable. The story is structured almost completely as a series of secret, mano-a-mano backroom discussions, each unfailingly placed in a grungy urban locale of exactly the sort in which no one ever shot movies even five years earlier. Robert Mitchum, lugging himself around like an old bulldog, is Coyle, a petty Boston crook with an extra set of broken-finger knuckles, trying to at least appear to go straight even as he contemplates ratting on one of his associates to get out of a felony stint he has to face in New Hampshire.” -IFC