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.

And this is my friend, Mr Hardy

This is substantially a comment I posted on the Internet Movie Database. I thought it deserved a narrower audience.


Earlier this year, 2006, the BBC televised the play Stan, formerly a radio play, by Neil Brand.

It has all the virtues of a small budget. It is concise, focused and unambitious. The actors, relatively unknown, inhabit their roles, not attempting impersonations like Little and Large, just occasionally reminding you of little quirks of speech or mannerism, conveying perfectly the essence of 'the boys'.

It is called Stan and it is Stan who has the lines and carries the story, but I prefer to concentrate on the portrait of Babe Hardy. We all know that Stan considered himself, and was paid as, the brains of the outfit. Babe, easy-going and unambitious, never disagreed. He knew there was more to life than work. But he was a lot more than the fat fool falling on his arse to earn enough to fund his golf habit.

The play goes some way to correct the received wisdom.

Stan pays tribute to Babe's comic skills: his timing, his inventiveness, his patient and courageous milking of laughs.

We see Babe persuading Stan, determined to rival Chaplin and disgruntled at being teamed with anyone, that they have have the makings of an effective partnership. Babe is not just a natural comic (something it is possible to argue that Stan was less so), but one with comic intelligence.

It is Babe, for example, who recognises the importance of humour even in hard times - especially in hard times - when Stan is going through one of his periodic bouts of discouragement and doubt. I hope it's true that it was Babe who had the idea for Their First Mistake, where they adopt a baby, an idea neatly used to make a little joke out Ollie's incapacity at the last.

Just a word or two about their comic abilities. There is no doubt that they would have got nowhere without each other, but I believe Babe was an instinctively funny man, while Stan would grind out a funny routine, which he would then implement. Rather like Steve Martin or Robin Williams today. Babe is more like reminiscent of the late Tommy Cooper.

Towards the end it is Babe who recognises that they are past it, that their work has become poor. He was right, of course, and I for one refuse to watch the last films. While the ever dissatisfied Stan can't bear to leave off, Babe has the wisdom to walk away, knowing that their best work is preserved for ever. I can vouch for that, having never known them until they were retired or dead.

The play's end is all the more moving for the touch of humour injected into it. Stan, portrayed sympathetically despite what other viewers have thought, for all his frustrated, over-achieving self-obsession, has to admit to himself the depth of his friendship and the debt he owes to his partner.