The Nickel Ride

With its murky, monochrome photography and jangly, percussive score, The Nickel Ride could be mistaken as a film from no other decade than the 1970s. That was when the feel and the technique of movies were breaking away from the `well-made' mold enforced by studios over the previous 40 years. Some directors pioneered those changes, helping to freshen film from staled conventions by finding looser, more oblique ways to tell a story; others jumped on the bandwagon, unsure of where it was headed or quite how to get there. Robert Altman was such a pioneer; Robert Mulligan, who directed The Nickel Ride, wasn't.

Like The Friends of Eddie Coyle of two years earlier (for which David Grusin also, as here, wrote the music),The Nickel Ride inhabits the talking-big-but-living-low world of organized crime at its lower strata. Also like Eddie Coyle, it takes as its subject the last-ditch schemes and final days of a loser. Jason Miller plays a small-time operator who has his fingers in a lot of shady pies: fixing fights, middle-manning hot merchandise, even hawking bail bonds. He seems to have a past as a grifter on the carny circuit, where he met his `cracker' wife (Linda Haynes), a hoochie-coochie dancer.

Miller has secured an old commercial site with bays into which trucks can disgorge their hijacked merchandise; he hopes it will become an irresistible depot for stowing contraband. But he keeps getting the runaround from his superior, John Hillerman. Next emerges a `Cadillac cowboy' (Bo Hopkins) who Miller comes to believe has been engaged to kill him. But he falls back on the swagger and bluster that have turned him into a local hero, postures that cut little ice in the ever more impersonal and cutthroat world of crime gone corporate....

Mulligan opts to let his story just sort of happen; unfortunately, we viewers need a little more help. Sorting out the many characters and their relationships becomes a chore, and often, thanks to the abrupt cuts, we don't know where we are or why we're there. And though a large part of the movie's strength is its raffish urban milieu, even that stays unspecific (I thought it took place in lower Manhattan, but it's set and shot in Los Angeles). The Nickel Ride is an existential downer of a mid-70s crime thriller, like Eddie Coyle and Hickey and Boggs. But, unlike The Nickel Ride, that last title (directed by Robert Culp, in his sole directorial outing) brightened its bleak vision with sharper moviemaking skills.

Not so much a review as an observation. Cooper's position seems to be as much a function of his outmoded sense of honor as any other reason. His boss speaks to the corporate nature of the "higher ups" who want results while Coop seems to have a sense of obligation to the small fry who look up to him. He "carries" thieves whose goods are clogging his warehouses when he should be taking their goods and selling them off opening space for those clamoring to get in. He refuses to force a two-bit fighter who is all but washed up to take a dive and throw his career because of a friendship with his manager. His beat down of his bosses enforcer is in defense of the "little guys" who hang on in his territory by their fingernails. Their love and respect is shown in the birthday party. This notion of Coop being driven by an out of place sense of honor is what gives the denouement its sense of inevitability. He cant change. He knows it and he knows where it will lead - certainly most clearly after his "dream."

A painfully slow noir (?) flick. Jason Miller (The Exorcist) plays an aging insomniac gangster who lays in bed staring into space. He manages local warehouses where the mob stores their stuff. We are treated to scenes from his daily life. His relationship with his wife played by the beautiful Linda Hayes. A birthday party at a local bar. And then we learn that he is out of favor with his boss and that they could be trying to ease him out of the business. It's all very vague. We are not supposed to understand all of it. There was a problem with the sound on the print that I watched. I couldn't really understand what was going on all the time. It is set in a really ugly town with many seedy bars and joints.

The Nickel Ride reminded me of Michael Mann's Thief with its themes of the domestication of a gangster and the horror of middle age. The brooding Jason Miller is terrific. Its a shame that he was working in the wrong decade when Hollywood had so many great actors.

Victor French is great in a supporting role as miller's friend. I'm glad I watched it. I don't know if i'll watch it again.

(6.5/10)

If anyone thinks the criminal life is any kind of glamorous watching The Nickel Ride will disabuse anyone of such notions. Anyone who particularly wants to enter the life of crime.

Jason Miller stars in The Nickel Ride and he's known as the key man because of the ring of keys that are 24/7 in his possession. The keys unlock several abandoned warehouses that organized crime uses to stash whatever they've stolen in various heists until it can be fenced.

The syndicate is running out of said space and Miller is supposed to close a deal involving a whole block of these warehouses for such purposes. But for whatever reason Miller can't close the deal and his bosses such as John Hillerman are getting impatient.

Probably Miller ought to just retire, but organized crime has only one kind of retirement package and that he doesn't want.

Miller's predicament is something Richard Widmark's in Night And The City. He's not the ego-maniacal hustler that Widmark was in that classic, but he's made too many commitments he can't deliver. One was that a certain fighter he knows throw a bout where syndicate money is riding. Miller doesn't and a good friend of his, the manager of said fighter Lou Frizzel is killed. A harbinger of his own future that Miller doesn't like.

The Nickel Ride is a gritty and realistic film, as downbeat as Night In The City or The Asphalt Jungle, close but not quite in their league. One should also take note of a good performance by Bo Hopkins as the button man imported from Tulsa to do Miller in.

The Nickel Ride for some reason disappeared for years after its initial showing in theaters. Glad to see its finally out on DVD.

"The Nickel Ride" is all about mood. There's a nearly-constant feeling a dread in the air. From the first scene, you get the terrifying sensation that something bad is going to happen, and that anything to the contrary is a fleeting illusion. Cooper (played by Jason Miller) is supposedly a guy who everyone likes, but it soon becomes clear that no one respects him. Maybe it's because he stopped fighting a long time ago, back when his apathy buried his anger. There's a sense of hope in him, though, but that just makes him a target. He's in a line of work that perceives anything but the iron fist as a sign of weakness - and it's these desperate days that the opening scene drops us into. Out of a nearly-waking dream, like a mirror of Miller's first film "The Exorcist", he sees something coming that's more a thing of impeding doom than that of direct prophecy.

It's a somewhat atypical film for director Robert Mulligan. He was more one for straightforward dramas, rarely tackling a subdued loner-driven narrative like this. This is also an early original script for Eric Roth, who is certainly treading much more uncomplicated ground than on his later stories. He's written something that can be carried completely by performances. "The Nickel Ride" doesn't reach very far, so it's not totally capable of the sort of staying power that keeps other 1970s classics in our minds. But the powerful uneasy feeling and the performance of Jason Miller makes it something special. This is a curious, angry, scared little alleycat of a film.