We made a big fuss about American crime cinema of 1973 (including the fact that was the 50th anniversary of the, as I said argued in this article, very overrated The Long Goodbye). But, actually, 1974 wasn’t too shabby either. In addition to the heavy hitters that year - The Conversation, Chinatown, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia - there were, as always, several great films that flew under the radar and continue to do so. For my money, the best of this latter grouping is Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride.
Jason Miller (best known for his role in 1973 film, The Exorcist) is Cooper, a mid-level operative in the Los Angeles crime scene, who managers several downtown warehouses where the local mob stash their stolen merchandise. This job has earned the nickname of ‘Key Man’ due to all the keys to various storage facilities he has to carry around. He is also involved in various other legal and illegal activities, including fixing fights, bail bonds and acting as a dispute solver of sorts for the members of downtown L.A.’s working class criminal milieu.
Cooper and his employers face a major problem, something far more mundane than the threat of a rival outfit moving in on their territory, but serious nonetheless: they are running out of space to store their pilfered goods and Cooper is under intense pressure to finalise negotiations on large track of old commercial warehouse space that would be perfect for their needs. But there seems to be some sort of complication preventing him from closing the deal.
Cooper’s immediate boss, Carl (John Hillerman, instantly recognisable as Higgins in Magnum PI), is getting skittish and assigns Turner (the wonderful Bo Hopkins), a cocky cowboy enforcer, to shadow Cooper. Carl insists Turner is only hanging around to learn the basics of the business, but Cooper, already unsettled by his inability to close the deal of new storage space, gets paranoid and starts to think Turner may have been sent to kill him.
I love its murky, washed out look and its slow, at times almost dream like pacing and discursive story telling style. Robert Mulligan, whose directorial credits included To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and the undervalued Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), and his screenwriter Eric Roth, keep the interactions low key and don’t reveal a lot of context about the characters and what is going on.
The film The Nickel Ride is most often compared to is the 1973 classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Both films are about ageing, low level mob figures who have lost their taste for the criminal world and, as a result, find themselves having to fight for survival against younger, much hungrier, up and comers.
The Nickel Ride is certainly a great film about the mechanics of crime, endless meetings in bars and greasy spoon cafes, putting together deals which work or don’t, smoothing rumpled egos and solving disputes. Cooper is like any other mid-level employee working for a big company. His anonymous bosses are only concerned with squeezing everything they can from him and if he’s not prepared to put in more, they’ll replace him without a second thought.
Miller is terrific as Cooper, increasingly disillusioned and retreating back into memories of his younger years pulling cons on the carnival circuit (hence the film’s title). The one joy in his life is Sarah, his ex-dancer girlfriend, a strong performance by Linda Haynes, who starred in a number of US exploitation films in the seventies and eighties, most prominent of which was the post-Vietnam revenge film, Rolling Thunder. Hillerman is also good as Cooper’s middle manager, Carl, who is conflicted between protecting his own future and looking after his employee, with whom he has had a long association. The conversations in which Cooper and Carl try and decipher the shifting dynamics of what their mob bosses want are priceless.
Screw your list of streaming TBW list
It is impossible to keep up to date with all the so-called ‘must see’ streaming television and I’ve lost track of the number of shows I want to see, including season 5 of Fargo and the True Detective: Night Country.
But now, not only am I no longer trying to keep up with what’s currently hot on streaming, I am actually eschewing the more recent stuff to catch a few older shows.
First up is the HBO prison prison, Oz. This ran for six seasons from 1997 to 2003, and I have never seen any of it. Indeed, I find it interesting that this appears to be one of the shows that kicked off the so-called ‘Golden Age of Television’ (which everyone is saying is now over), but no one ever seems to talk about it. I recently found pristine copies of season one and two in a local thrift store. Actually, all six series were there but I only bought the first two, as critical opinion seems vary wildly in terms of when the show went off the rails (was it after season two, midway through season three, or is the whole things great). Anyway, I am taking this thrift store find as a signal from the universe that I should least make a start on Oz and if I really like it, I am sure I can locate the rest for sale cheaply online.
The second television show which has been in my sights for a while now is Miami Vice, which run from 1984 to 1989. Unlike Oz, people talk about Miami Vice A LOT - the fashion, the cool eighties look, how many young actors got their start on it, etc. But for reasons I can’t explain to you, I have never even watched so much as a single episode all the way through. Anyway, following this excellent wrap of season one of the show on Canadian crime writer Sam Weibe’s Substack newsletter, I have decided to take the plunge and at least tackle the first season.
Pre-orders open for Revolution in 35mm Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990
The new book I have co-edited with the wonderful New York-based film critic, Samm Deighan, is available for pre-order at the website of the publisher, PM Press.
I’m very proud of this book, which is also going to be beautifully illustrated in full colour, and in addition to writing by Samm and myself, includes terrific essays from another twelve writers and critics.
Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960-1990 covers an incredibly broad and diverse body of cinema, spanning from the Algerian war of independence and the early wave of post-colonial struggles that reshaped the Global South, through the collapse of Soviet Communism in the late ‘80s.
It focuses on films related to the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups, as well as broader countercultural movements, Black Power, the rise of feminism, and so on. The book also includes films that explore the splinter groups that engaged in violent, urban guerrilla struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the promise of widespread radical social transformation failed to materialize: the Weathermen, the Black Liberation Army and the Symbionese Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy’s Red Brigades.
Many of these movements were deeply connected with and expressed their values through art, literature, popular culture, and, of course, cinema. Twelve authors, including academics and well know film critics, deliver a diverse examination of how filmmakers around the world reacted to the political violence and resistance movements of the period and how this was expressed on screen. This includes looking at the financing, distribution, and screening of these films, audience and critical reaction, the attempted censorship or suppression of much of this work, and how directors and producers eluded these restrictions.
Congrats Andrew!
Great post, Andrew.