THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE / FOX AND HIS FRIENDS

ABOUT THE FILMS:

THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE, 1973, Peter Yates, 103 Minutes, Paramount, USA

Based on the best-selling novel by George V. Higgins, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE chronicles the last days of a weary Boston-based weapons dealer. Eddie Coyle (Robert Mitchum) doesn’t want to serve a life sentence in prison, so he becomes an informant for both the police and the treasury department. Coyle is likewise unwilling to give up his lifestyle, thus he continues his illegal gun-running operation for the underworld. The mob becomes aware that Eddie is squealing to the cops, so they send his best friend, Dillon (Peter Boyle), to rub him out. Dillon compassionately takes Eddie out on the town, treating him to dinner and a hockey game…then drives to a deserted field to carry out his orders.

FORMAT: DCP

FOX AND HIS FRIENDS, 1975, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 124 Minutes, Janus Films, Germany

In German with English subtitles

A lottery win leads not to financial and emotional freedom but to social captivity, in this wildly cynical classic about love and exploitation by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Casting himself against type, the director plays a suggestible working-class innocent who lets himself be taken advantage of by his bourgeois new boyfriend and his circle of materialistic friends, leading to the kind of resonant misery that only Fassbinder could create. FOX AND HIS FRIENDS is unsparing social commentary, an amusingly pitiless and groundbreaking if controversial depiction of a gay community in 1970s West Germany.

FORMAT: 35mm