This week has seen ’70s crime classic and Playlist favorite “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” get the Criterion upgrade to Blu-Ray. Peter Yates’ film has been undervalued for too long, but its cult has been growing in recent years, and the new 1080p release is a welcome one, not least because it gives us another chance to watch one of the finest performances from a true cinematic legend: Robert Mitchum.
A Connecticut native who had a troubled adolescence, including time on a Georgia chain gang that he claimed to have escaped from, Mitchum got into acting after moving to Los Angeles in the early 1940s, and swiftly got work in B-movie westerns before finding sudden fame in “Nevada” and “The Story Of G.I. Joe.”
The actor soon became a leading figure in film noir pictures, and his career survived an arrest and brief prison spell for marijuana possession (a conviction later overturned for entrapment), as well as a somewhat tumultuous reputation that saw him fired from the John Wayne flick “Blood Alley.” But Mitchum wasn’t just a hard man, he was capable of surprising range, soulfulness and had impeccable and sometimes even adventurous taste in projects (his last movie beingJim Jarmusch‘s “Dead Man“). He even had a brief side career in music, including a notorious calypso record.
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Never fading away, continuing to work well into his 70s, and married to his wife Dorothy for 57 years when he passed away in 1997, Mitchum was a contradictory and fascinating figure, and a tremendous performer (David Thompson wrote in “The Biographical Dictionary Of Film” that “since the war, no American actor has made more first-class films, in so many different moods”). So, with “The Friends Of Eddie Coyle” returning to Criterion, we decided it was time to take a look at the star’s career, and pick out his ten most essential roles. Take a look below, and let us know your own favorite Mitchum movies in the comments.
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“The Story Of G.I. Joe” (1945)
The film that cemented Mitchum’s stardom and won him his only Oscar nominated (and which was shot just before he was briefly drafted into the real army), “The Story Of G.I. Joe” was mostly redundant as propaganda by the time it arrived: it landed in theaters after V.E. Day, and about six weeks before the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But “Wings” director William Wellman’s film was then, and still remains, one of the better war pictures of the period, an unsentimental, near docu-drama look at the everyday life of a soldier. Burgess Meredith headlines the film as real-life, well-loved war correspondent Ernie Pyle (who was killed before the film was released, at the Battle of Okinawa), here attached to C Company in the 18th Infantry, a mostly untested group of soldiers led by Captain Walker (Mitchum). It’s a troops-eye-view approach that stresses realism above all else — this is war as dull stretches of nothingness punctuated by bursts of horrifying combat — but the film’s all the more moving for eschewing over-the-top acts of heroism and placing its emphasis on the sheer ordinariness of the troops, and the bond that Meredith forms with them over time. And though Meredith (who’d been serving as a captain in the military until he was picked out to star here, and had his career launched as a result) is the film’s lead, it’s Mitchum that is its real heart: a man wearied by combat and by the loss of his men, but remaining a quietly beloved leader nevertheless. The ending, when it comes, packs a real punch, and it’s little wonder that, despite being unavailable on video for years, it’s one of the most influential war pictures ever.
