Alaska Employment Law

I’ve seen Sean Penn struggle manfully in Mystic River, and I read Dennis Lehane’s book of the same name.  I’ve seen Jack Nicholson, a man who, let’s be honest, can only play himself, pretend to be Whitey Bulger in The Departed.  I’ve seen bad imitations of Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro in Gone Baby Gone, another Lehane adaptation; and I read that book, too.  Now I’m telling you, forget about all those.

If the subject is Boston crime film and fiction, nothing, absolutely nothing, comes close to Robert Mitchum’s movie portrayal of a small-time Boston bad guy in The Friends of Eddie Coyle, based on George V. Higgins’ little book about that bad guy.  Get them both.  When a book is adapted to film, I think one almost invariably does better to start with the book, and then see the film, because the book is usually the better expression.  Not so here; this is a flat-footed tie.  Indeed, Higgins is so good with dialog that almost every word in the movie is taken from the book (a little bit is left out).  The movie, which came out in 1973, has finally, finally, been issued on DVD.

This is Greater Boston a long time ago, when New City Hall was still pretty new, when the Bruins still played at the old Garden, where you could smoke in the seats and Bobby Orr, the fair-haired hero, didn’t wear no stinkin’ helmet.  It’s a grubby, unglamorous Boston, featuring Peter Boyle as a bartender in a tired bar somewhere in Dorchester with 40 cent beers and a pay phone that all the hoodlums use.  The plot?  Well, Eddie faces a jail sentence in New Hampshire because he got caught driving a truck full of stolen Canadian Club whisky.  He won’t rat out the guy who paid him to do the job because that’s just not what you do if you are a stand-up guy; you take the fall.  But Eddie has done time before, he’d like to avoid it, so he talks to detective Dave Foley to see what each can offer the other.  Meanwhile, he makes a few bucks selling guns that he gets from a nasty kid named Jackie Brown.  It all comes together, and then it all falls apart.  There are some compelling suburban bank robbery scenes in this film.  And lowlifes!  You can almost smell the beer scum on the floor.  I think: this was Mitchum’s greatest role.  Understated, grimy, effective, sad, believable.