Tuesday, May 5, 2009

NY Times on El Dorado, Friends of Eddie Coyle

Story at New York Times

The veteran Hollywood directors still working in the ’60s sometimes seemed to be addressing the decay of the studio system that had nurtured them. Decay is very much the subject of Howard Hawks’s penultimate movie, the 1966 western “El Dorado,” but less the decay of golden-age Hollywood than the decay of age itself....

The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) Think of Boston and images of genteel, picturesque beauty come to mind: swan boats gliding across the pond at the Public Garden, a Paul Revere statue nobly silhouetted against the sky. There’s none of that in Peter Yates’s cold, damp and piercing modern noir from 1973, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.” Its chief visual feature is the sad-eyed, beaten-down mug of the low-level hood Eddie, played by ROBERT MITCHUM. But that’s enough. ...