One Revealing Moment: Something that Happens in “The Night of the Hunter” Made Me Rethink My First Impression of the Film and See It in an Entirely New Light

Robert Mitchum, "The Night of the Hunter" (1955).

By Paul Parcellin

I first saw “The Night of the Hunter” (1955) around 20 or so years ago and walked away impressed but not particularly in love with the movie, and having said that I know what many of you are thinking: Heresy! 

I have no real excuse for my initial reaction. I’ll blame it on a lack of sleep, fatigue after sitting through too many double features in a row, or some other convenient but less than honest alibi. 

Whatever. 

Sometimes the point of a film, that is, the thing that distinguishes it from others, can fly right past you. At least in my case it did. But, I’m glad that I recently rewatched it because I’d missed one salient point. Perhaps that is the reason why the popularity of this Charles Laughton directed drama, the only film he ever helmed, which has been an audience and critics’ favorite for decades, puzzled me a bit.

The story goes like this:

Itinerant preacher and psychopath Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) scours the American countryside during the Great Depression, preaching the word of the Lord as he searches for rich widows to romance, marry and bump off, after which he absconds with their dough. To say the least, Harry’s theological credentials are questionable. He’s the picture of evil, and if that isn’t obvious enough he has the words “LOVE” and “HATE” tattooed on the fingers of both hands. 

Sally Jane Bruce, Billy Chapin,
Shelley Winters, Robert Mitchum.

Before long he finds Willa Harper (Shelley Winters), widow of Ben Harper, who was executed for a couple of murders he committed during a bank robbery. Harry was Ben’s prison cellmate, and the evil preacher suspects that Ben stashed a pile of the loot from the robbery in his homestead. Once he locates his prey, Harry expertly worms his way into the Harper family, which includes 9-year-old John (Billy Chapin) and 4-year old Pearl (Sally Jane Bruce). 

A supreme conman, Harry earns Willa’s trust and dazzles her friends and neighbors with dramatic sermons. A look of serene satisfaction washes over the townsfolk’s faces whenever Harry waxes poetic about the struggle of good over evil. While his LOVE/HATE tattoos ought to be ample warning that something’s rotten in Denmark, a gaggle of believers, including Willa, remains deeply under his spell.

Before long, young John finds himself in the increasingly treacherous position of resisting his gullible mother, who marries the evil man and wants John to embrace Harry as his stepdad. The youngster already has Harry’s number, and tries to make his mother see the truth, but she’s smitten and unable to accept the obvious. It seems that nearly every adults in town has fallen down on the job of protecting the little ones.

Another Serial Killer Comes to Mind

Teresa Wright, Joseph Cotten,
"Shadow of a Doubt" (1943).

“The Night of the Hunter”’s plot resembles Alfred Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943), in which Joseph Cotten plays Uncle Charlie, a mentally disturbed rake who hides from the law with his sister and her family, and has a habit of knocking off rich widows for profit. But Hitchcock’s film is anchored in a more natural and realistic view of small town American than is Laughton’s. “The Night of the Hunter” has a surreal edge that at times makes it seem like a storybook legend of horrific proportions come to life. 

Unlike Cotten’s seething but restrained Uncle Charlie, Mitchum’s bad guy is a thundering force of nature whose mere presence can charm an entire community whilst putting the lives of the vulnerable in danger. Like most villains, Harry is the hero of his own story and is only doing the Lord’s work, he reasons. He talks to God, seeking direction, and the Almighty furnishes the phony preacher with victims to murder and rob so that Harry can continue to spread the good word. Or at least that’s what Harry believes. 

So, is Harry delusional and psychotic or crystal clear about the ethics of his deeds and purely remorseless? Hard to say, exactly, but most likely it’s a bit of each of the above. But there’s no doubt that he’s a monster and what is most disturbing is that no one is suspicious of him when they ought to be — no one except John, that is, who seems to have inherited all of the common sense in his family. 

Mitchum, glowering at the Burlesque show.

Early on, we see the psychological conflicts behind Harry’s anti-social behavior. When we first meet him he’s tooling around in stolen car. The cops eventually catch up with him and haul him out of a burlesque show where he’s been seething and glowering at a dancer. It’s distinctly possible that the highly repressed preacher is window shopping for victim on whom he could murderously vent his psycho-sexual rage. Later, on his and Willa’s wedding night, she nervously prepares for her first erotic encounter with her new spouse, but Harry is enraged and disgusted by her conjugal expectations. Clearly, Willa is not in for a memorable honeymoon.

So, What’s the Problem?

From the above plot summary you’d rightly conclude that this film has a lot of the elements that a noir ought to have, and you may be wondering why I hadn’t revisited it over the years.

As I relate this to you I can almost hear the crowd gathering on my doorstep, pitchforks, torchlights and axes in hand, so I’ll have to make this somewhat brief. This isn’t going to be a hatchet job, so please lay down your weapons for a moment as I make my case.

Part of the reason why I allowed this film to lie dormant in my memory for so long might be because it’s just plain hard to pin down exactly what kind of movie it is. Depending on who you talk to you might call it a noir, which I do, but it skirts other genres and styles, too. 

For instance:

An escape on the river.

If you think of it as a noir, you’ll probably notice that it tends to wander into unfamiliar territory from time to time. The young ones flee Harry’s murderous wrath, narrowly escaping on a skiff that carries them downstream on the river Huckleberry Finn style, and the film begins to feel more Mark Twain than James M. Cain.

At other times we get a distinctly western vibe, in part because of its rural setting, but especially when Harry takes to horseback in pursuit of the runaway children. 

To add yet another flavor to the stew, you might call it a monster movie and that wouldn’t be too far off base, either, although nothing supernatural occurs and it has not a hint of science fiction. But Harry Powell is clearly a demon and a serial killer in clerical garb who wants money and is willing to murder women and children to get it. 

Robert Mitchum, Billy Chapin, Sally Jane Bruce.

Also muddying the noir waters are those carefully arranged visual motifs that crop up every now and then. Even the dark, forbidding basement, with the staircase and doorway looming above the kids as they hide from Harry, is an artfully framed composition that is at once terrifying and strangely aesthetically pleasing. Almost each scene begins with a well composed, meticulously framed shot, like photographs in a picture book that come to life. Shots of the crescent moon, jackrabbits and an owl are incorporated into the nighttime scenes on the river. We see the kids on their skiff shot through a spiderweb in the foreground —  a metaphor that makes us wonder if they will be caught in Harry’s web? 

As the youths journey downriver, heavy (maybe heavy handed) symbolism continues. They pass a flock of sheep and we think of sacrificial lambs — Harry liked to call the kids “little lambs,” a creepy smokescreen that fooled everyone except John. 

Safe at Last?

Lillian Gish, Robert Mitchum, Gloria Castillo,
Harry waits to pounce.

They finally drift into the sheltering arms of kindly Miss Cooper (Lillian Gish), who has turned her home into a refuge for orphans and we’re allowed to breathe a momentary sigh of relief. Echoing John and Pearl’s dramatic trip downriver, more symbolism is in store at Miss Cooper’s nightly Bible reading, which happens to include the parable of Moses and the bulrushes; the infant Moses, floating downstream, is rescued by the Pharaoh’s daughter, a story that is all too familiar to the two youngsters.

I must admit that part of my problem with these thoughtfully composed sequence was that I didn’t get the B-movie charge I’d associated with noir. That’s not to say I didn’t care for films from the major studios, but I was, and still am, hooked on the slapdash craftsmanship that went into low budget Poverty Row B-movie, such as “Detour.” To me, their kind of ragged, shot on the fly aesthetic has an unselfconscious energy that’s hard to replicate.

Confronted with “The Night of the Hunter,” a strangely allegorical film, I had trouble accepting it as a noir. It’s full of dark shadows, thundering locomotives and murder; all the stuff that sounds like noir. But how could it be noir? It doesn’t take place in the present day, nor is it set in the city. Needless to say, my short-sighted views have since been revised.

Most significant of all was that “revealing moment” in “The Night of the Hunter” that caused me to rethink my opinion of the film. It’s one of the story's most important scenes: Harry’s arrest. 

It passes rather quickly so it’s easy to miss its significance — especially if you’re not particularly alert at the time. In it, John witnesses the lawmen’s takedown of Harry. As the police wrestle him to the ground and snap on the cuffs, John is nearly moved to tears, pleading with the cops to take it easy on Harry. 

John and Pearl's father, Ben (Peter Graves),
is taken into custody.

That scene is a replay of the one we see in the beginning of the film in which John witnesses his father, Ben, being roughly taken into custody. It’s a dramatic flashback for the young boy, who had remained stoic as he and his sister traveled through hell before arriving at this concluding scene, and it opens a floodgate of emotion in him. The whole experience may have cost him his innocence, but John has not forfeited his humanity. He still regards Harry as a human being even though the murderous thug killed his mother and was inches away from slaying him and his sister.

Because John was dragged through the virtual fires of Hades and survived, and was not tarnished or jaded from the experience, he is one of the film’s heroes. The other is Miss Cooper, who, with her trusty rifle saves the day. 

Another thought I had after seeing the film again:

In the end, it took a perceptive 9-year-old boy to see through a charlatan’s facade while most of the adults were hoodwinked by a conman who exploited their religious fervor. 

John's clarity of vision is something we could well use more of today.  

Gumshoe Confidential: Would-Be White Knights, Reluctant Heroes and Rotten Apples, Otherwise Known as Private Detectives, Walked the Mean Streets of a Noir Hellscape

Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Mary Astor,
Sydney Greenstreet, “The Maltese Falcon” (1941).

By Paul Parcellin

Private eyes, those lone rangers who traverse bleak urban landscapes, are romanticized in books, radio dramas and movies as upholders of right and wrong. They do the dirty work that the cops can’t or won’t touch. Often hired by those who are monied, corrupt, or both, they’re the go-to guys when it comes to cleaning up messes that the well heeled and their offspring leave in their wakes. 

But reality clashes with the fictional representation of the private eye. 

Some shamuses may be straight arrows, but few are Boy Scouts. In the 1930s-’40s, private detectives were apt to earn their bread and butter by spying on adulterers and snapping steamy photos that would turn up in divorce proceedings. Others were thugs for hire who busted heads to break up strikers’ picket lines — company men had no use for organized labor, you see.

Both crime fiction and movies of the 1940s paint a morally ambiguous but mostly favorable picture of the private sleuth. They are renegades, loners and upholders of justice in a world where, to quote crime novelist Jim Thompson, “Nothing is what it seems.” 

They’re often weather-beaten men with shabby offices and thin bank accounts. The honest ones mostly live in cramped walk-ups. A couple have a penthouse and a country club membership, but it’s a cinch that dirty money pays for their luxuries. 

Here’s the rundown on some noir private detectives — my favorites, not an exhaustive list, mind you — who work for the greater good, and a couple who never heard of the word “ethics”:

Many actors have played Philip Marlowe in adaptations of Raymond Chandler’s novels, but let’s stick with the two most prominent ones from the classic noir period, about 1940 to 1959.

In describing Marlowe and his world, Chandler notes that “down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. He is the hero; he is everything.” 

Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, “The Big Sleep.”

“The Big Sleep” (1946)

First-time viewers may find the film's labyrinthine plot challenging. No matter. We're immersed in Philip Marlowe's world and wherever he goes we gladly follow. Then, there's the Bogart-Bacall chemistry — always a treat to behold.

Humphrey Bogart gives Marlowe a streetwise, working class persona. He went to college and worked in the district attorney’s office, parting ways due to his tendency toward insubordination and a dislike of red tape. He’s not above skirting the edge of the law when the situation calls for it, but strongly believes in an incorruptible code of ethics.

Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, "Murder, My Sweet."

“Murder, My Sweet” (1944)

This adaptation of Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely” was retitled to avoid confusion. Dick Powell, who stars as Marlowe, was best known for musicals, and audiences might have thought it a romance or light comedy. Far be it from the truth. Marlowe is hired by ex-con Moose Malloy who is obsessed with finding his former girlfriend, Velma. Be careful what you wish for, Moose.

Powell plays Philip Marlowe with the air of a sophisticated wise guy who harbors an extreme reluctance to toe the line. He’s an outsider who doesn’t suffer fools and can’t bring himself to play ball with the big guys. The actor's background as a song and dance man shows through when on a whim he playfully skips across a kid’s chock-drawn hopscotch outline on the pavement — a move we could never picture Bogart making.

Jack Nicholson, "Chinatown."

“Chinatown” (1974) 

In 1930s Los Angeles, murder and corruption tarnish the city's pastel vistas. He who controls the water supply is king, and private eye Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) stumbles upon a scheme to grab land, money and natural resources from humble farmers.

Jake Gittes wants respect. He’s got a fancy wardrobe, — he’s dapper and vain — a swell office with a staff at his beck and call. But he ain’t respectable. Like the guy in the barber shop says, “You’ve got a hell of a way of making a living.” Jake sees the water scheme as a means to redeem his reputation. He’s a sleazy but successful detective who specializes in catching adulterers en flagrant. He wants to be the white knight who rescues a damsel in distress (Faye Dunaway), perhaps making up for another woman in his past whom he tried to help but ended up hurting. Add to that, he means to save the humble working people of Los Angeles from the clutches of evil men who would steal their land and their water rights. He overreaches and it gets him in trouble.

Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum, "Out of the Past."

“Out of the Past” (1947) 

We're doomed to repeat our mistakes, especially if Jane Greer is involved. In "Out of the Past,” gas station owner Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) thinks he left his days of shady dealings behind. But gambler Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) thinks otherwise.

Jeff Bailey used to ply his trade as a shamus in New York, then dropped out of sight. By chance his past comes back to haunt him. He’s unlike real private detectives of that era. He doesn’t peep through open transoms or photograph adulterous couples in the heat of passion. He couldn’t abide by his employer, gambler Whit Sterling, but his weakness for the dangerous Kathie Moffat (Greer) proves to be more than he can resist. He wants to disappear, but he’s smitten with Kathie and will go down with the ship if he must. As the reluctant private eye forced out of retirement he’s about to be framed for murder. His respectable life in a small town is about to go up in flames. Yet he tells the scheming Kathie, “Baby, I don’t care.” 

Ward Bond, Humphrey Bogart, Barton MacLane,
"The Maltese Falcon."

“The Maltese Falcon” (1941)

A motley gaggle of thieves and cutthroats enlist private investigator Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) to help locate a missing jewel encrusted statue, the "dingus," as Spade calls it. The search is an exercise in futility. The film itself? Exhilarating.

Sam Spade wants to protect the code of honor among private eyes everywhere. He needs to avenge his detective partner Miles Archer’s death even though he didn’t like him much. He messed around with Miles’s wife once — loyalty has its limits. Much of Dashiell Hammett’s book, on which the film is based, is taken nearly verbatim in the movie. But Bogart’s Samuel Spade isn’t as callous and ruthless as the one in the book. Spade is smooth and can pretend to be corrupt when it helps him take down the bad guys, all of whom want to hire him to do their bidding. But he’s a straight arrow who protects his clients, even when he doesn’t follow in their criminal ways.

Nick Dennis, Ralph Meeker, “Kiss Me Deadly.”

“Kiss Me Deadly” (1955)

P.I. Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) roams Los Angeles with a suitcase full of hell fire. Mickey Spillane's blood and guts opus, transported from the grimy streets of New York to L.A., sees the city teetering on the brink of nuclear armageddon. And Hammer means to stop it.

Mike Hammer is the kind of private eye who doesn’t mind twisting an arm when vital information is being withheld. He’s sleeker and better looking than others in his field. He’s got a swank apartment, drives a Corvette and lives the lifestyle of James Bond. A crew of marauding gangsters is after a suitcase full of hot nuclear soup and Hammer finds himself in the middle of a mad scramble for the deadly stuff. It’s a detective story for a world living in the shadow of the H-bomb. The film received the condemnation of the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Commission, which accused it of being "designed to ruin young viewers.” 

Sounds like an endorsement to me. 

How a Real-Life Prison Sentence Added Another Dimension to Mitchum's Performance as a Woozy Doctor on the Run in a Nightmarish Flight From Justice

Robert Mitchum, "Where Danger Lives" (1950).

By Paul Parcellin

This article contains spoilers

A lot of red flags should go up when Dr. Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) meets Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue). But she’s a real dish and this is noir, so naturally he ignores the many warning signposts screaming at him that he’s about to drive over a cliff.

Margo is an emergency room case whom Jeff treats after a suicide attempt. There’s an instant attraction between the two and she persuades him to meet with her outside of the hospital. 

He ditches his steady girl, nurse Julie Dorn (Maureen O’Sullivan, wife of the film’s director John Farrow), for the more exciting, emotionally scarred rich one. As bad decisions go, this is a whopper and it’s all but impossible to stop watching the impending train wreck take shape. 

In the first part of the movie Jeff is smitten with Margo, and he at least still has his wits about him. A little later he’s smitten again — this time literally. He suffers a concussion and it doesn’t improve his judgment, but it explains why the level-headed physician would fail to see that his newfound love is an erratic maniac. 

She lives with her rich dad (Claude Rains) — that’s what she tells him, at least — and is financially dependent on the infirm old geezer. She and pop reside in a swell mansion and when Jeff stops by for a visit he’s surprised by the opulence but isn’t impressed with it. Money isn’t so important to him, and it’s evident that his infatuation with Margo is taking up a lot of real estate is his brain. 

But things start going sour. He gets into a scuffle, gets clocked on the head with a fireplace poker that puts him in a fitful stupor, his judgment deteriorating — clearly something he doesn’t need. Soon, he’s in the kind of trouble that only femmes fatale can get a fellow into and he and his new lady friend go on the run as fugitives from justice.

Mitchum, Faith Domergue, dazed and confused.

The nightmarish scenario in which he’s trapped is a classic noir trope. He’s the average guy who unexpectedly plunges into a hellish abyss. Mitchum brings his every-man persona to this doctor who’s torn between the straight life and the rush of staying one step ahead of the law. 

Maybe the same could be said about Mitchum, although living strictly on the straight and narrow didn’t much appeal to him. In 1948 he was busted for possession of marijuana, a pretty big deal back then, and he served prison time not so long before shooting this film. The ex-jailbird at first thought that his career was over. But his boss at RKO, Howard Hughes, stuck by him and ignored the voices wanting to cancel the controversial actor. It turns out the publicity actually enhanced his career and this role is but one example of why a pot bust turned into a plus for bad boy Mitchum.

Audiences in 1950 must have sensed that Mitchum brings an essential element of danger to a character who might have otherwise come across as too straitlaced. He did that before the pot bust, too, but by the time the film came out that image was fresh in the public’s mind. It’s not hard to believe that, given the opportunity, Jeff is the kind of guy who just might take up with a dangerous woman like Margo. Maybe his attraction to her is due in part to his doctorly instincts to heal the afflicted. But with his guard down he morphs into a moth drawn to the flame — and his distorted powers of reasoning aren’t helping him see the follies of his ways, either.

Once on the road together, both he and she suffer from bouts of paranoia. Every cop they see is out to get them; people everywhere have them pegged as fugitives from justice. They stumble upon police at the airport, get spooked and hot foot it back to the highway. When they come upon a roadblock they assume it’s a dragnet set to capture them, so they make a U-turn and barrel off in another direction.

Typical of their muddled way of thinking, they opt to dump her expensive auto to a cliche of a used car dealer, as if that would throw the police off their trail. The used car jockey wears a houndstooth sport jacket with mis-matched patterned shirt and tie that are fighting a bloody war against each other. He gets a twinkle in his eye, seeing that the two are desperate and will make easy pickings for a chiseler such as himself, and he promptly fleeces the two pigeons.

They move onward, but try as they might it becomes apparent that they’re playing a losing game. Despite his injuries, Jeff is still thinking clearly enough to realize that his condition is deteriorating, so their mission turns into a dash for the Mexican border in hope of making it before he expires. 

For her part in this fiasco, Margo plays it cool, but a few stunning revelations about her eventually come to light. Like most noir anti-heroes, Jeff comes to the hard, cold facts a bit too late to slow down his inevitable trudge toward the gates of hell. 

We’re left to ponder whether Jeff’s misadventures are due to fate simply paying him back for callously leaving his girl back home. As paybacks go, that one exacts a rather high price. Something like prison time for smoking a reefer.

 

‘Eddie Coyle’ Introduced Us to ‘Boston Noir’

Robert Mitchum in 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle' (1973).

How Boston labor union muscle
terrorized Hollywood film crews

No one was quite ready for the grittiness of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” when it arrived in theaters in 1973. 

It didn’t look like most films that Hollywood turned out — it had a certain rawness in each shot that probably wouldn’t pass muster in Tinsel Town, and there’s not a single hint of glamor in the crumbling urban landscape in which the story unfolds. 

What’s more, it’s a tale of low-level hoods, about as far as one can get from the top echelon mafioso of “The Godfather” (1972).

All of those elements could and did work in various films set in the big, shiny, bustling American metropolises, but not so much in Boston. Sure, there was “The Boston Strangler,” a ripped-from-the-headlines police procedural that used then-fashionable split screen montages. But that was a psychological study, not nearly as unapologetically raw as “Eddie Coyle.” 

Lacking in Allure
You had “Mean Streets,” “The French Connection,” both New York stories, and even “Get Carter,” set in London and Newcastle, England. But, my God, this was Boston, a backwater with an abundance of colleges and universities and a depressed economy. 

City folks had been moving out to the suburbs in droves at least 10 years prior. As movie locations go, it was no New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco. 

Labor Pains
To make matters worse, labor unions presented a major problem for film crews working in Boston in those days. A production could get shut down by a guy with a broken nose and a blackjack in his back pocket. The Teamsters labor union held Boston film productions in a hammerlock, according to Boston film critic Ty Burr. 

Teamster truck drivers smashed windshields and beat up crew members if they didn’t get what they wanted. It appears that the “Eddie Coyle” crew didn’t have significant difficulties with the union — could it be because the Teamsters were Robert Mitchum fans? 

A Familiar Kind of Criminal
Despite the drawbacks, British-born director Peter Yates liked Boston as a filming location and remarked that the criminals in Boston were like those in London. They wouldn’t harm others so long as they got the loot they were after — a criminal ethic of a bygone era, he wistfully declaims on the “Eddie Coyle” DVD commentary track.

What changed the perception of Boston as a lackluster setting for a crime story was George V. Higgins’s novel “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” on which the film is based. The book was so highly regarded that it not only put Boston on the crime film map, it inspired a sub-genre of fiction and crime movies — Boston noir, if you will. 

Novel Influenced Writers
The novel was a big influence on writers local to his area as well, such as Robert B. Parker (“High Profile,” “Valediction”) and Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River,” “Gone, Baby, Gone”). Elmore Leonard, who was based in Michigan, said “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” was the best crime novel he’d ever read, and it was an inspiration in his own writing. 

When Quentin Tarantino adapted Leonard’s novel “Rum Punch” into the film “Jackie Brown,” he changed the lead character’s name from Jackie Burke, as it was in the novel, to Jackie Brown in homage to George Higgins’s book — one of Eddie Coyle’s gun-running cohorts is named Jackie Brown. 

A Dialogue Driven Novel
What made Higgins’s book stand out, unlike other crime novels of that era, is that it’s around 80 percent dialogue and the dialogue beautifully defined the story’s characters. Higgins, born and raised in the Boston area, had a sharp ear for the way people talked. He knew their accents and inflections. 

Before embarking on a writing career, he was an assistant prosecutor who helped bring a number of Boston-area gangsters to trial. Then he went into private law practice and defended them. He knew how they spoke and how they thought and was skilled at getting the nuances and details of their speech down on paper. 

The Rich and the Poor
But what makes “Eddie Coyle” the cornerstone of Boston crime novels and movies is its depiction of two separate but intertwined worlds that are endemic to the city. There’s the Harvard-educated upper class and the struggling working class. 

The dingy areas in which Eddie Coyle travels are shown in marked contrast to the glimpses we get of bankers’ comfortable suburban homes. Prior to Higgins’s novel we’d not seen Boston portrayed in such a divided state, at least not in crime novels.

The story takes place in the late 1960s or early ‘70s when the city was especially down at its heels. Director Peter Yates shot the least photogenic sides of the city, unlike “The Thomas Crown Affair” (1968), which presented a tourist’s view of Boston. 

The City's Rough Edges
“Eddie Coyle” shows the places that the chamber of commerce didn’t want outsiders to see, the tacky strip malls, dingy bowling alleys, dive bars, seedy cafeterias and the like — where working-class folks circulate. For that it has an authentic, unvarnished look. 

Shots are efficient, blunt and not as conspicuously composed as are other films of the genre in that era. It has none of Martin Scorsese’s artfully designed, meticulously lit scenes that somehow make desolation look beautiful. “Eddie Coyle” is as often as not lit by the greenish glow of fluorescent tubes and flickering neon Narragansett Beer signs.

Peter Boyle as Dillon, and Mitchum.

Adding Up the Pieces
We see meetings between gangsters and sometimes between gangsters and cops. The story’s episodic nature leaves us to piece together the facts and figure out what’s going on. Eddie Coyle is in only about half of the film. 

The rest of the time we witness his so-called friends, their machinations and the jockeying they do to get what they want. The title is ironic — Eddie has no friends, only acquaintances and crime associates on whom he’s come to depend and obviously shouldn’t. 

A Page Right Out of the Novel
The film retains the novel’s local flavor due largely to the screenplay’s loyalty to Higgins’s dialogue. Entire scenes are transcribed verbatim from the book, which works because the book often reads like a film treatment. 

In the end, the job of adapting the novel to a screenplay was given not to Higgins but to veteran TV writer Paul Monash who had worked on shows as varied as “The Untouchables” and “Peyton Place.”

The Low Man
It’s the dialogue that pulls us into the life of the title character, Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum), an almost flat broke gangster who sells guns to criminals. He’s on the bottom rung of the crime syndicate ladder and he doesn’t get much respect from his peers. 

Eddie is a family man who lives in a cramped apartment with his wife and three kids in a blue collar town on the outskirts of Boston. The family is his only ray of sunshine in the bleak world that he inhabits. He’s facing a criminal charge that means jail time and he’s desperate to avoid that. 

Not only because his family will have to go on welfare, but because people are beginning to wonder if he’s snitching to the police. Once inside prison it would be easy to have him done away with.

Made for the Role
Mitchum is a natural fit for the role of Eddie, the hard-luck gun runner whose life is in a state of increasing turmoil. He was first approached to play the role of Dillion, a bartender whose saloon Eddie frequents to sip draft beer and commiserate. 

But Mitchum read the script and decided he wanted to play the title character. As it turned out, his sleepy eyed, world-weary demeanor was made to order for the role. 

A 'Noir God' 
And what qualifications he had — a bona fide film noir god who in real life did time for a pot bust in the 1940s, further cementing his bad boy credentials. Other actors’ careers would have been devastated by the publicity. For Mitchum, it was merely good press.

He’d recently starred in David Lean’s “Ryan’s Daughter” (1970) playing against type as a cuckolded Irish schoolteacher. Although the film was a financial success the critics eviscerated it. His career was at a lull and he needed a role that would put him back in a favorable light, and Eddie Coyle was just such a role. 

A Night on the Town
Peter Boyle ended up playing the shifty bartender Dillon and handled the part magnificently. He was a shoulder for Eddie to cry on, and even gave the gun runner a night on the town prior to his sentencing. But beware of hoodlums bearing gifts.

Bank robbers use the guns Eddie provided to them.

To prepare for his role, Mitchum wanted to hang out with notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger. 

A Word to the Wise
Actor Alex Rocco, who plays a bad guy in the film — he was also Moe Green in “The Godfather” — had a real-life history of association with Boston criminals having grown up in the city and gotten into scrapes with the law. 

Rocco gave Mitchum sound advice. “You don’t want to hang out with Whitey.” Instead, he introduced him to Howie Winter, a local gangster with whom Mitchum eventually spent time, all in the name of research.

An Insider's Pointers
Speaking of authoritative advice on the ins and outs of organized crime, Yates found that working in Boston, even with the hassles of dealing with thuggish union men, had its advantages. He recalled attempting to direct a scene depicting a gang hit, and he wasn’t sure how to stage it authentically. 

A Teamster truck driver piped up, saying he knew others who did such things, and he offered some advice which the director ended up following. It was at that point that Yates realized that the driver had probably done exactly what he was advising the on-screen talent to do.

That brought a greater sense of realism to the screen — much greater than anyone would have anticipated. And that's what you don’t learn in film school.