Ben Affleck names the greatest heist movie in cinema history

Ben Affleck names the greatest heist movie in cinema history: 1973's 'The Friends of Eddie Coyle,' a crime classic he homages several times in 'The Town.'

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Film » Cutting Room Floor

Sun 6 April 2025 3:30, UK

In 1973, a neo-noir crime thriller was released that told the story of a rumpled, small-time gunrunner selling weapons to a criminal crew who use them to pull off a daring bank robbery. The movie was beloved by critics – with Roger Ebert awarding it his full four-star rating – but it sank without a trace at the box office before being largely forgotten for more than 35 years. Ben Affleck remembered it, though. In fact, he loved it so much that he named it the greatest heist movie ever made, and included several homages to it in his own Oscar-nominated heist picture.

When Affleck directed and starred in 2010’s The Town, he added another piece to cinema’s rich tapestry of Boston crime films. In the years prior, The Departed, Mystic River, and Affleck’s own Gone Baby Gone had put Beantown’s tough Irish neighbourhoods and blue-collar criminals back on the cinematic map.

The Town tells the tale of a bank robber with a heart of gold who falls in love with a victim of his previous robbery, and it ends with a thrilling shootout outside the city’s iconic baseball stadium Fenway Park. It was extremely warmly received by critics, made a ton of money, and landed Jeremy Renner an Academy Award nomination for his performance as Affleck’s unpredictable right-hand man, Jem.

It was fitting reward for a movie put together with great care and precision, like any real heist would be. As a happy by-product of the movie’s subject matter, though, its press tour allowed Affleck to wax lyrical about all of his favourite heist movies – and this was where he spotlighted The Friends of Eddie Coyle.

“That’s probably my number one,” Affleck told Daily Beast. “It definitely is vis à vis The Town. Same setting—they even had the same safe front in one of the bank robberies. Like, the actual safe was the same in ours as it was in Eddie Coyle. I don’t know what that says except that they don’t update safes very much.”

A similar-looking safe was far from the only reference to Eddie Coyle in Affleck’s movie, though. He revealed, “We put a little piece of dialogue from The Friends of Eddie Coyle on the television that someone’s watching in The Town.” The old classic also inspired the unsettling rubber masks that the robbers wear, and the scene where Rebecca Hall’s hostage is led blindfolded to the edge of the Mystic River is an intentional recreation of a scene from the ’73 movie.

What is it about the movie that Affleck loves so much, though? Well, he believed that director Peter Yates – who also made the seminal Steve McQueen action movie Bullitt – was one of the first helmers to make a crime movie that wasn’t sexed-up or glamourised in any way.

Indeed, star Robert Mitchum (Night of the Hunter) played Coyle with such realism and nuance that he almost doesn’t feel like a movie character. He also had no vanity in the part, as Coyle spends the entire movie looking like someone who sleeps in his clothes and smells of stale cigarette smoke. Eddie Coyle isn’t set in a Hollywood version of Boston like, arguably, The Town is. Instead, it’s set very much in the real Boston.

“It’s an exceptional film,” Affleck insisted. “You feel like these are real guys, who really are doing this. And the stakes feel kind of dangerous and real in a sort of slightly scary, upsetting way; I think the way it would in real life.”

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Ben AffleckRobert Mitchum

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