COGAN’S TRADE’s Release Date
UPDATE: The title of the movie has been changed to Killing Them Softly and the date has been changed to Oct. 19.
Hollywood sites are going crazy over Brad Pitt’s look for the film version of George V Higgins’ Cogan’s Trade (gasp; is that a MULLET?). A release date of Sept. 21 was just announced (as MovieFone notes, it’s the anniversary of the release of Moneyball).
Pitt is joined by Ray Liotta and James Gandolfini (yes, they play mobsters, but this time, they’re Boston mobsters) as well as Sam Shepard and Richard Jenkins. It’s the third film by director Andrew Dominik, who also directed Pitt in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
Cogan’s Trade is the third of Higgins’ 25 published novels. He claimed to have scrapped 14 before The Friends of Eddie Coyle, was published in 1972. It was made into a movie, starring Robert Mitchum, the following year, but this is the first adaptation of a Higgins’ title since. As the Independent said in Higgins’ 1999 obituary,
Oddly, despite the rich dialogue, Higgins’s books did not effortlessly translate into the cinematic medium. The Friends of Eddie Coyle made an excellent movie, thanks partly to a riveting, and almost poetic, performance by Robert Mitchum as Coyle, but its success was really one for its director Peter Yates.
Higgins has influenced many of today’s writers. Among them is Elmore Leonard who recently noted that he often re-reads a portion of The Friends of Eddie Coyle before beginning his work day; “The book set me free. I saw, this was how you do it. I learned so much about dialogue and cadence from this book.’’
Random House’s Vintage/Lizard imprint recently re-released several of Higgins’ books (in print and as ebooks, available on OverDrive).
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