The film tells the story of Eddie Coyle (Mitchum), a small-time career hoodlum in the Irish Mob in Boston, Massachusetts.

He supplies pistols to a bank robbery crew led by Jimmy Scalise and Artie Van, first obtaining the guns from a fellow gunrunner named Jackie Brown.

While unsure at first if he can complete the task, Jackie complies and heads to Rhode Island later that night with an associate to get the guns, which he is successful in doing.

Towards the end of the robbery, one of the tellers triggers a silent alarm and is shot dead by one of the robbers, requiring a hasty exit.

Afterward, Jackie meets Coyle in the parking lot of a Dedham grocery store to deliver him the guns.

Jackie recognizes the agents' cars and attempts to flee but is boxed in at the exit and arrested, immediately realizing that Coyle had set him up.

In preparation for the third robbery, the crew moves in to kidnap the bank's manager but are ambushed by Foley and other ATF agents and placed under arrest.

Journalist George Kimball, a sports writer on the Boston Herald at the time, claimed that Mitchum wanted to meet Whitey Bulger and was warned against it by Higgins.

Grant's, Woolworth's, Barbo's Furniture, Liggett's Drugstore, Capitol Supermarket, Friendly's, and Plaza Liquors.

's Pastry Shop, McLellan's, and Gilbert's Package Store can be seen as the movie's bank manager drives through the Square.

In Time magazine, Richard Schickel wrote: "Now, at last, Mitchum achieves a kind of apotheosis in Peter Yates' strong, realistic and totally absorbing rendition of George V. Higgins' bestselling novel...

At 56, when many of his contemporaries are hiding out behind the remnants of their youthful images, he has summoned up the skills and the courage to demonstrate a remarkable range of talents.

"[9] Upon the film's release, Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it four stars, his highest rating, while Vincent Canby of The New York Times also reviewed it favorably, calling it "a good, tough, unsentimental movie".