Like a lot of people, I dig heist films. A random mugging is just vulgar, but there's something about all the planning to a heist that fascinates me. I think it's the writer in me. The chief problem I often have with heist films is that it becomes pretty obvious who will get away with what. Here, though, I wondered if they would pull it off at all, and that's an exciting element to have in a heist story.

In his 1988 essay for The Criterion Collection, David Ehrenstein makes note of "the clinical distance held by Kubrick" regarding his characters and their plot. Kubrick can be frustrating because there is a coldness to his films that belie their content matter, but here it works well. Our protagonists are, after all, conspirators to armed robbery and the killing of a horse (even if its legal definition is up for grabs!).

Ehrenstein praises Marie Windsor for her performance as the cruel Sherry Peatty, but I think it's Elisha Cook who actually makes the film work so well. It's his performance as her cuckolded husband George that imbues the film with its personality. Cook moves deftly from one gradient of emotional motivation to the next, alternately desperate, bitter, loving, hopeful, confident, terrified, and any state between. A clumsier actor could have ruined not just that role, but the entire picture, dragging it into the B-movie realm of melodrama.

Though Sterling Hayden is the top-billed actor and the whole scheme is orchestrated by his character, Johnny, it's really Cook's turn as George that makes The Killing even matter to us. Without his very accessible, very human motivations and reactions, there's little reason to invest ourselves in how the caper goes. But we quickly empathize with George. Here's a guy who smelled the roses on his way home from work, only for the wife he adores to mock him for it when he tries to share that rewarding moment with her.

Just like that, we're in. We want to see George be part of this plot. We don't necessarily care how Johnny or any of the others come out of it, but we want George to finally have his day. Before George and Sherry finish their first scene together, we're on his side. We get it. He's our point of view character, but he's also our reason for caring about not just the heist, but the film. And it's all because Elisha Cook nailed his part.

Star Trek nerd alert: Elisha Cook appeared in two episodes of the original series ("The Court Martial" as Captain Kirk's legal representative and "Wolf in the Fold" as a man possessed by Jack the Ripper). The Killing was also the first film scored by Gerald Fried, who went on to become one of the core composers for the original series, including the iconic "Amok Time". Fried was a childhood pal of Kubrick's, recruited on that basis for the film that launched both of their respective careers.

The Killing entered my Flickchart at #492/1563

This one came to my attention because it's #1 on Anthony Bourdain's Top 10 list of Criterion titles. Aside from Peter Boyle, familiar to me from The Dream Team and Everybody Loves Raymond, I was pretty much entirely unfamiliar with this cast. I knew Robert Mitchum by name, of course, but offhand I can't even say that I've ever seen any of his other films.

Yet despite not having that "Hey, that guy!" reaction to anyone, there was a sort of unconscious familiarity. Everyone looked like the guys who should have been in a movie like this, and by extension had probably been in dozens of movies like this. Kent Jones asserts at the end of his 2009 essay, The Friends of Eddie Coyle: They Were Expendable, that:

"Young film fans raised in the multiplex era might look back and lament the fact that no one is making movies like The Friends of Eddie Coyle anymore. The truth is that they never did. There’s only this one."

There are cinematic descendants of the film, such as The Departed (name-checked twice by Jones), but he's quite right to note how unique the film was to its time. Just a few hours before streaming The Friends of Eddie Coyle, I had watched Kubrick's breakout work, The Killing. It was pure happenstance that both were films about crime, but what struck me most during Eddie Coyle was how it seemed to make The Killing feel like a work of fiction by virtue of its own verisimilitude.

Director Peter Yates, screenwriter/producer Paul Monash, and the terrific ensemble all manage to do something rare: They get out of the way of the story and let it tell itself. At no point does The Friends of Eddie Coyle feel orchestrated - not even when an entire operation, be it a transaction, a sting or a hit, plays out as set up in detail in the preceding scenes. I can appreciate why this film would appeal to a traveler such as Bourdain, who is accustomed to acclimating quickly to places by peering beneath the superficial, tourist-friendly offerings to find the reality of the local way of life.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle entered my Flickchart at #339/1564