Word: underworlders
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...inside the New York City police force. They are brutally efficient, although they could hardly be called an elite corps; their tactics owe as much to football fields and medieval dungeons as the precinct house. The movie, coarse and hammer hard, follows the cops as they bust up an underworld kidnaping ring and avenge the death of a squad member. Director Philip d'Antoni, who produced Bullitt and The French Connection, has cut The Seven-Ups to pattern. The chase scene measures up just fine against its predecessors, and may go them a little better in the department...
...Sting was not made to be taken seriously, but many people may find it difficult even to enjoy the movie casually. It lacks the elements that could have given it true drive: a sense of an urban underworld, or of the Depression that sucked so many people into it; an understanding of the con man's pathology that goes beyond surface style and patter; a story that depends not on plot twists but on characters. The movie ends up with a lot of expensive sets and a screenful of blue eyes...
...Friends of Eddie Coyle. With Robert Mitchum. This is the best movie of the season. It's a story of the low level gangster's underworld of Boston -- of petty crooks beating out colleagues for petty cash, of 'friends' betraying 'friends' for survival in this dog-eat-dog gangster's game. It's an honest movie, true throughout to the crooked tale it tells. Paramount. 9:30-9:30 every 2 hours. --E.A.F...
...these lapses are insignificant next to Peter Yates' overall handling of the mise en scene. He uses the Boston setting with a realistic understatement that subtly characterizes the life of its underworld. The camera follows the actors to alienate them in Boston City Plaza, or attune them to the low-life sleaziness inside Hayes Bickford; and at a Bruins game, Dillon, the man who murders Coyle, says to Eddie, "there's fifteen thousand people rooting for the Bruins out there, and nobody gives a fuck about...
...FRIENDS of Eddie Coyle belongs to the genre of underworld dramas like The Godfather and The French Connection, but it goes a step beyond them. In the other two films, the cops and robbers are clearly separated. One roots for the cops or the robbers according to which side is the most romantic, or daring, or righteous. And there is a certain amount of cheating involved when one is asked to care for false heroes. In The Friends of Eddie Coyle, there are no heroes, just as there is no clear separation between cops and robbers--they speak the same...