Peter Boyle

Peter Boyle has died.

I suppose most people remember his turn as the monster in Young Frankenstein, especially his song-and-dance routine with Puttin' on the Ritz. OK, that was good fun, but for real class acting you have to go back to The Friends of Eddie Coyle, where he played a shady character called Dillon.

Friends, directed by Peter Yates, is based on the novel by former Boston DA, George V Higgins, and incidentally provides Bob Mitchum with one of his finest roles. It's a fine, but forgotten film. I'm not sure it's even available on DVD.

Higgin's novels are unusual in that they are composed almost entirely of dialogue, rather like those of Ivy Compton-Burnett. It's no mean trick to advance the plot of a thriller purely with conversations but Higgins pulls it off in highly readable fashion. The film is also heavy on dialogue and remains thoughtful and downbeat throughout. Nonetheless it is absorbing and for my money one of the best gangster films ever made.

The 'friends' of the title is highly ironic, for no-one is to be trusted, least of all the cops, who conduct a favour-for-favour relationship with the various hoods involved.

Boyle's Dillon is a bartender, with fingers in many criminal pies. One of his 'friends' is Mitchum's small-timer, Eddie, trying to avoid prison and tempted to shop one of his other 'friends' in exchange for leniency. Dillon also is receiving his $50 a week from the cops. He is greasy, slippery, humourless and menacing, with his great bulk and slow, padding walk. He is also totally without scruple, and by the end of the film we find he is probably the most evil of all the dodgy characters involved.

It's a memorable performance, but Boyle's potential as a heavy - he was never going to be a romantic lead -was never realised. A lot of TV work came to him as the years passed and he seems to have retired into the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond.