Word: mitchums
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EDDIE COYLE (Robert Mitchum) is a small figure in the underworld who wants to have a good time, but he makes too many deals to get it. To escape a charge of receiving stolen goods, he informs the police that Jackie Brown is selling machine guns, a crime which carries a maximum penalty of life. To get money to go to Florida, he buys handguns from Jackie and sells them to acquaintances who are robbing banks. The bank robbers get caught (the movie doesn't make it clear that it is one of their irlfriends who informs the police), they...
...right for the part. The slope of the belly has grown more acute with the passage of years; the face is puffy and well-worn; even the complexion looks gray, with just a hint of green around the gills. But there is more than mere looks to Robert Mitchum's performance as Eddie Coyle, the aging, small-time hood with a big-time survival problem. The weariness, the hooded cynicism, the underlying toughness that seems to consist more of an ability to survive beatings rather than administer them-all have always been there, unspoken factors in a career that...
Coyle could easily have been played as a simple victim, a soft spot at the heart of this picture. But supplied with hard blue language by Writer Monash, and played by Mitchum as a man trying to walk-not run-to the nearest exit, he is an infinitely more appealing figure. Coyle is still hard enough to intimidate a reckless apprentice punk, canny enough to fight a good delaying action against the cop who keeps pressing for more and more information and strangely trusting of an old friend who is a much more clever ex-stoolie (and who finally undoes...
...tough it out in a line of work he is not really mature enough to handle. Richard Jordan exudes the dank and oily atmosphere of a basement where one cannot tell the cops from the crooks they suborn; and Peter Boyle menacingly underplays the man who finally betrays Mitchum...
...result is probably the most concentrated attack on this brand of religious Americana that has ever been filmed. Robert Mitchum may have been sinister as the "love-hate" preacher in The Night of the Hunter, but he was at least demented. Burt Lancaster may have been a tainted exploiter in Elmer Gantry, but that was at least fiction. Marjoe is very real and very chilling, an unholy innocent who seems to see himself as nothing more than a Peck's Bad Boy, a flimflam man of God who gives good service in return for his dollar. Marjoe believes...