As a film professor at Boston University, Jan Egleson can tap into a wealth of firsthand experience. He has directed top-shelf actors including Michael Caine, John Savage, and Kevin Bacon and filmed concerts for James Taylor and Pat Metheny.
But it’s the few minutes he spent on camera at the beginning of his career, in a bit part credited only as the “Pale Kid,” that still draw more attention than anything else Egleson has done in 50 years in the film world.
Not that he’s complaining.
“That film has a warm spot in my heart,” Egleson recently said of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” the tense, talky Boston crime film that cracked the combination on the genre. Directed by Peter Yates, who also made “Bullitt” (1968) and “Breaking Away” (1979), and starring the estimable Robert Mitchum as the title character, a low-level lawbreaker, “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” debuted in theaters half a century ago, on June 26.
Egleson played a wayward young man who is supplying unmarked guns to the two-bit hood Jackie Brown, portrayed by the late character actor Steven Keats. Jackie Brown — yes, he’s the inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s film of that name — is selling the guns to Coyle, who in turn is secretly talking to federal agent Dave Foley (Richard Jordan), hoping to get a reduced sentence on a criminal charge “up in New Hampshire there.”
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The film was based on the debut novel of the same name by the late George V. Higgins, published in 1970. A Brockton native and Boston College alum, Higgins served as an assistant United States attorney for Massachusetts, working on organized crime cases. He also did stints writing columns for the Globe and the old Boston Herald American.
It’s Higgins’s dialogue — and the cast’s pitch-perfect delivery of it — that make “Eddie Coyle” a minor masterpiece to the film’s fans.
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“This life’s hard, man,” chirps Jackie Brown in one memorable scene, his gun drawn. “But it’s harder if you’re stupid.”
“Higgins was a legend,” Egleson said during a phone call. “He had such a fantastic ear. That stuff was kind of baked into the rhythms of the language.”
“No one, before or since, has ever written dialogue this scabrous, this hysterically funny, this pungently authentic,” wrote Dennis Lehane in an introduction to a 40th-anniversary reprint of Higgins’s book. Lehane, of course, is a reliable source: His own Boston crime novels “Mystic River,” “Shutter Island,” and “Gone, Baby, Gone” have all been made into feature films.
Egleson, a former student at the Yale School of Drama, was a member of the Theater Company of Boston, where the artistic director David Wheeler attracted an impressive roster of acting talent beginning in the 1960s, including Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and Robert De Niro. Yates, the British filmmaker, and casting director Marion Dougherty leaned on the Theater Company to ensure “Eddie Coyle”'s Boston bona fides, Egleson recalled. Jordan, a Harvard grad, was part of the company, as were Everett native Gus Johnson, who had a small part in the film as a detective, and Carolyn Pickman, who played a bank teller named Nancy.
Like Egleson, Pickman knew the territory. She grew up a descendant of Polish immigrants in the old West End.
“I had a good view growing up of the Charles Street Jail, actually,” she said in a separate phone call. Today, Pickman is the namesake of CP Casting, the long-running agency that has placed actors in “Good Will Hunting,” (1997) “The Departed” (2006), “Manchester by the Sea” (2016), and many other celebrated New England films.
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“Sometimes we cast specifically for the Boston accent, and the second aspect is if they’re a good actor or not,” she said with a laugh.
Her interaction on the set of “Eddie Coyle” with Dougherty, a pioneer in casting, turned out to be formative, she said. Though she auditioned for the part in Terrence Malick’s “Badlands” (1973) that eventually went to Sissy Spacek, in hindsight Pickman is glad that she ended up behind the scenes.
“I’m way happier in the back,” she said.
During filming, Mitchum took it upon himself to adopt an authentic Boston accent. He’d already built his legend in Hollywood by playing antiheroes, in “Out of the Past” (1947), “The Night of the Hunter” (1955), “Cape Fear” (1962), and other classics. But there are no heroes in “Eddie Coyle.” The irony of the title: None of the characters have any true friends.
“If you listen, he had it exactly right,” Egleson said of Mitchum’s accent. “He got it from the Teamsters.”
Alex Rocco, the actor who played the bank robber Jimmy Scalise, spoke of Mitchum’s diligence in an interview with “Eddie Coyle” mega-fan J.P. Giuliotti, conducted privately a few years before Rocco’s death in 2015. Best known for playing the mobster Moe Greene in “The Godfather,” Rocco became an actor after changing his name and leaving Boston, where he’d been involved with the infamous Winter Hill Gang.
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Mitchum loved to hang out with the Teamsters he met on the set and Rocco’s old friends from the neighborhood.
“I knew a couple of the wise guys,” Rocco said, recalling that during production they often took the actor out to the bars. “It wasn’t really my scene, but Mitchum loved that.”
The movie is packed with familiar locations in and around Boston. Old-timers may recall the Kentucky Tavern, which was located on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Newbury Street. In the film, the bartender, Dillon (Peter Boyle), exchanges tips and payoffs with the feds during weekly strolls through Government Center.
Coyle’s house, a nondescript two-family in Quincy, is still standing today. He meets up with his gun dealer at the 1950s-vintage Boston Bowl, which remains in its original location on Morrissey Boulevard in Dorchester. (The staff there is too young to remember “The Friends of Eddie Coyle,” but some of them have watched “The Next Karate Kid,” the 1994 Hilary Swank movie that includes a bowling scene shot there.) Perhaps most memorably, Eddie Coyle’s fate is sealed when he attends a Bruins game at the old Boston Garden with Dillon, the bartender on the take.
“You imagine being a kid like that?” Coyle says, gushing over Bobby Orr on the ice. “Geez, what a future he’s got, huh?”
Jim Botticelli, who created the popular Dirty Old Boston Facebook page, recently rewatched “Eddie Coyle” for the first time in years. For him, it nails the mood of a bygone Boston.
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“The whole thing is gray, gloomy, grimy, gritty,” he said. “There’s this feeling of, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s what it felt like.’ There was always a slight element of danger in the air.”
“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” took the long route to its current reputation. Unloved when it was first released, it was hard to find in the home-video era and largely forgotten, as Egleson noted.
Now, however, the film is part of the prestigious Criterion Collection.
“It’s not the only kind of movie Boston or New England makes,” said Pickman, “but it might have given Boston a certain signature.
“We do have an extraordinarily rich history of coming up in the world from the lowest, the bottom of the bottom, and how you survive that,” Pickman continued. “Our immigrant parents really suffered here in all ways, socially and economically, for a very long time. We have that survival instinct.”
It’s been more than a dozen years since “The Town” (2010) directed by Ben Affleck, acknowledged “Eddie Coyle”'s influence with a hostage scene that mirrored one in the older movie. Recently, Pickman’s company handled the casting for “Any Day Now,” an upcoming indie film about a Boston art heist.
The new film, said Egleson, a co-producer, includes a scene with a guy sitting by himself at the end of a long bar. It is, naturally, an homage to “The Friends of Eddie Coyle.”
E-mail James Sullivan at jamesgsullivan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @sullivanjames.