How one man trans­formed Boston into a city of sin and squalor

“I’ll bet if I was to go to con­fes­sion, I’d get three Hail Marys and then the priest’d ask me con­fi­den­tial­ly if I can get him some­thing light to car­ry under his coat. People’re des­per­ate for guns – I had a guy ask me seri­ous­ly the oth­er day, could I get him a few machine guns.”

So begins British direc­tor Peter Yates’ sem­i­nal Boston crime film from 1973 – one that has influ­enced so much of what came after – The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Based on the best­selling debut nov­el by Boston native George V Hig­gins, it’s the sto­ry of a weary, low-rung crim­i­nal, beau­ti­ful­ly played by Robert Mitchum, who acts as a mid­dle-man in sup­ply­ing guns to bank rob­bers and who makes the bad mis­take of turn­ing informer to the cops (or ​‘help­ing Uncle’ as is the police par­lance for snitch­ing) to avoid a jail sentence.

In the film Boston is depict­ed as bleak and grey but pop­u­lat­ed with colour­ful char­ac­ters – Irish gang­sters, long-haired gun-run­ners, over-sexed Mafia hench­men and the like. It also showed the city as a viable alter­nate gang­ster movie loca­tion to New York and Chica­go, with its very own breed of vil­lains, both on the wrong side of the law and in pub­lic office.

George V Hig­gins, who worked at The Boston Globe and went on to become a dis­trict attor­ney, knew these peo­ple. The gre­gar­i­ous, untrust­wor­thy Dil­lon (played by Peter Boyle) – who is a bar­man, police informer and also a hit man – was thought to be based on infa­mous Boston hood­lum Whitey Bul­ger, when in fact Hig­gins claims this was mere­ly a coin­ci­dence, and that he’d writ­ten the char­ac­ter ​‘before Bul­ger became Bulger.’

While work­ing in the courts, Hig­gins realised that Boston was a boon for a crime writer – and it still is, with a report last year nam­ing it as one of the most cor­rupt cities in Amer­i­ca. Despite being rel­a­tive­ly small – the city prop­er has an offi­cial pop­u­la­tion of less than 700,000 – it seems to have pro­duced a dis­pro­por­tion­ate amount of real life scan­dals and crimes, which inevitably draw pro­duc­ers there.

In 1950 armed rob­bers made off with over $27 mil­lion from the Brink’s Build­ing in Boston’s North End in what at the time was the biggest heist in US his­to­ry. The event was a sen­sa­tion, dubbed by nation­al papers as ​‘the crime of the cen­tu­ry’, and nat­u­ral­ly it was turned into a film – or rather, four films, the most notable being The Brink’s Job, direct­ed by William Fried­kin in 1978. Between 1962 and 1964, 13 young women were killed by a man the press dubbed ​‘the mad stran­gler of Boston.’ Albert DeSal­vo was arrest­ed for the crimes and was lat­er killed in prison. In 1968 Tony Cur­tis played DeSal­vo in Richard Fleischer’s film The Boston Stran­gler. There have been four oth­er film ver­sions of the story.

And in 2013, two bombs were explod­ed by ter­ror­ists dur­ing the Boston marathon, killing three peo­ple and injur­ing 264. A mas­sive police man­hunt fol­lowed result­ing in the cap­ture of two broth­ers, one of whom was killed after a fire­fight, while the oth­er is cur­rent­ly serv­ing a life sen­tence on death row. Bostonite Mark Wahlberg has been cast in Peter Berg’s upcom­ing drama­ti­sa­tion, Patriot’s Day.

This year’s Oscar-tipped Spot­light, based on the real-life scan­dal of sys­tem­at­ic child abuse with­in the Catholic church as exposed by The Boston Globe, fol­lows hot on the heels of 2015’s Black Mass, which detailed the crimes of Whitey Bul­ger, who, incred­i­bly, was giv­en pret­ty much a free pass in the city in exchange for hand­ing juicy infor­ma­tion to the FBI. Oth­er Boston crime dra­mas set for release this year are Ben Affleck’s Pro­hi­bi­tion-era thriller, Live by Night, and Ben Wheatley’s Free Fire, a ​’70s shoot ​’em up set in a ware­house star­ring Brie Lar­son and Armie Ham­mer. Wheat­ley has said that Free Fire was part­ly inspired by The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

All roads, it seems, lead back to George V Hig­gins, who not only intro­duced a fresh, fear­some brand of gang­ster but pio­neered a new style of dia­logue – cap­tur­ing the argot of the crim­i­nals and their day-to-day pat­ter – that would heav­i­ly influ­ence crime nov­el­ist Elmore Leonard (who once described The Friends of Eddie Coyle ​“the best crime nov­el ever”) and, in turn, Quentin Taran­ti­no (a major char­ac­ter in Eddie Coyle is called Jack­ie Brown, which Leonard bor­rowed for ​‘Rum Punch’, and Taran­ti­no used for the title of his loose adap­ta­tion of that book).

In Hig­gins’ works, the bad guys bitch and moan and are forced to find mon­ey to pay the plumber like any nor­mal per­son – only they do it by rob­bing banks and offload­ing stolen goods. A hit man in The Friend of Eddie Coyle sug­gests a bot­tle of wine, a steak and a hock­ey game to the man he has been hired to kill: Hig­gins’ way of show­ing us that this stuff goes on, and a killer’s got to eat.

Here Boston is a big city where bad things hap­pen – Hig­gins’ sto­ry remind­ing us that beneath its pol­ished, pre­sentable exte­ri­or, behind the his­to­ry and indus­try and pol­i­tics, down on street lev­el you’ve just got to sur­vive any way you can. In doing so, Hig­gins makes the city’s mot­to, ​“As God was with our fathers, so may He be with us,” sound like a cry for help.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle is released on Blu-ray/D­VD by Eure­ka! films on 25 Jan­u­ary. Spot­light is in cin­e­mas from 29 January.