Preview: The Thomas Crown Affair and The Friends of Eddie Coyle

The Thomas Crown Affair
and
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
Brattle Theatre, Harvard Square, Cambridge
Wednesday-Thursday
Showtimes and tickets

Millionaire Beacon Hill residents have a lot of time on their hands. Who can blame them if they use it plotting bank heists?

Norman Jewison's The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), which screens tonight and tomorrow at the Brattle, doesn't point any fingers. It's a schizophrenic movie with a paper thin plot and a clumsy script. Thomas Crown (Steve McQueen) loves robbing banks, riding his dune buggy and flying his glider; he wants to get one over on the squares. One problem: he's totally a rich white dude. Faye Dunaway plays an easily distracted insurance investigator. (She falls for her target, the millionaire bank robber.)

In the end, it's an enjoyable flick. Jewison gives us a gussied up Boston and keeps our eyes busy with his crazy split screens (during the heist, the film looks like a comic book page). Dunaway and McQueen are pure sex, providing a minute long on-screen kiss and the only chess game in movies that you can't watch with your parents.

But director Peter Yates, whose Bullitt also benefitted from McQueen's cool swagger, provides the real treat of the double-feature. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), never released on DVD, is nonetheless a masterpiece. Robert Mitchum is at his best as Eddie "Fingers" Coyle, a small-time gunrunner with a dilemma: snitch on the Irish mob or spend the rest of his life behind bars. Peter Boyle plays one of Coyle's titular friends, who also happens to be the guy the mob sends to kill him.

Mitchum strides through the grittiest Boston this side of Gone Baby Gone and gains our sympathy as his time runs out. Watching it tomorrow will give you the chance to give thanks that you aren't a gunrunner. (Unless you are a gunrunner, in which case tomorrow would be a good day to stop!) Nostalgic Bostonians should check for the scene at the old Boston Garden, where Coyle goes to a Bruins game.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle trailer can be seen on the Brattle's homepage.

One sheet image from Brattle's promotional announcement