The (Boston) Friends of Eddie Coyle
I’m working on the Boston accent right now for AccentHelp, so I’ve been listening to a lot of clips - both my own and online - and last night I had the pleasure of getting to see Robert Mitchum’s film The Friends of Eddie Coyle. (It’s apparently a Mitchum week for me, catching Night of the Hunter just a few days ago.)
This is an outstanding work, darkly displaying the hard life in Boston, allowing us to care about and dislike almost every character. (Peter Boyle is more of a monster in this than he was in Young Frankenstein one year later.)
The most surprising thing was that the Boston accents were actually quite good, especially Mitchum! He (and most of the cast) spoke with a light Boston sound, handling most of the main Boston accent hooks that are so distinct, such as the [ɑ] as in car and the [ɒ] of Boston and all. I think whoever coached them had a strong focus on this happening with the word for, because they almost never let it become a relaxed schwa: [fə]. It didn’t settle into the generic “New York City accent = all east coast urban accents.”
I rented it because I’d heard it was a great atmospheric Boston film, so the accents were a bonus! This is the one Mitchum should have been up for an Oscar for, but, alas, the competition in ‘73 was Jack Lemmon, Marlon Brando, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino. Bad timing for Mitchum…
