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Friends of "The Friends of Eddie Coyle": Film Screening

January 15, 2014
All Day
Wexner Film and Video Theatre

Looking for something good to read? Something great to watch? Then join OSU’s Project Narrative in reading, watching and talking about The Friends of Eddie Coyle, the classic crime novel by George V. Higgins, basis of a classic Seventies film by Peter Yates.

The late Elmore Leonard called The Friends of Eddie Coyle "the best crime novel ever written" and said that it "makes The Maltese Falcon look like Nancy Drew," while crime writer Dennis Lehane called Eddie Coyle "the game-changing crime novel of the last thirty years." "One of the best of its genre since Hemingway's ‘The Killers,’" the New York Times reviewer wrote back in 1970. Life magazine said that Higgins "can write dialogue so authentic it spits!"  

As for Peter Yates's film, it has been called "one of the true treasures of 1970s filmmaking." Playing Eddie, Robert Mitchum turns in "one of the best performances of his legendary career." Higgins returned to the big screen in last year’s Killing Them Softly, based on his novel Cogan’s Trade, but Eddie Coyle is the novel, and the film, that got it all started, and it hasn’t been surpassed.

If you haven’t read the novel or seen the movie, now is your chance!  Pick up Eddie Coyle--copies are available through Barnes & Noble at OSU (1598 N. High Street; email bookstore@osu.edu)--and come along to a screening of the film at the Wexner Film and Video theatre, Wednesday, January 15, 7:00pm (general admission $8; members, students and seniors $6). Then join OSU faculty Jared Gardner, John Hellmann, Linda Mizejeweski and Jim Phelan for a roundtable discussion of the novel and the film on Wednesday, January 22 at 4:00pm in the Thompson Library Room 165 on the OSU campus--free and open to the public. Help us think out loud about novels, movies, crime, the Seventies, George V. Higgins and Eddie Coyle

Read the book! See the movie! Join the conversation! Become one of the Friends of “The Friends of Eddie Coyle”