Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) doesn’t want to serve a life sentence in prison, so he becomes an informant for both the police and the treasury department. The characters and dialogue are what drive this low key crime story. Eddie Coyle has no friends.
The life of a criminal is hard. Eddie Coyle is tough but wearing out. He doesn’t want to leave his wife and kids and see them go on welfare. It’s impossible to not feel for Eddie (because of Mitchum’s understated performance), who comes across as a mostly harmless man who got caught up in the wrong game and could never figure out how to unravel himself. The film’s other characters like Dilon, a hard-eyed bartender who acts as a liaison for those who are truly in power and thus don’t need to dirty their hands directly and Jackie Brown, a young gun dealer. Brown is cocky and in no way naive, but he also represents a generation that Coyle doesn’t understand. There is not a lot of physical violence in the film, with only a few gunshots being fired. Directed with a sharp eye for its gritty locales and an open heart for its less-than-heroic characters, this is one of the suspenseful crime drama of 1970s Hollywood.
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