The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973)

Those are certainly no friends of Eddie Coyle. Robert Mitchum plays Eddie, a Boston-area family man and gunrunner who is facing serious jailtime for a New Hampshire hijacking. He tries to trade information with an ATF agent to reduce his sentence, but unbeknownst to him, there are others who are working similar angles. It’s a tragic story for Coyle and Mitchum plays him with a world-weary, grizzled desperation. The story is a bit twisty and it takes some attention to follow how all the pieces play together, but it’s fairly worth the commitment in the end.