FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

CommentsXp Best movie ever!

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

mgtbltp LA Smog Noir, circa 1974Cooper "Coop", is a small but successful cog in the LA underworld. He on top of his world, He is a fence, receiving stolen goods which he stores in the various warehouses around 5th Street in downtown LA. He is known as the "Key Man" for the large ring of keys he always carries. Business is booming, and there is a serious shortage of storage space.The film begins at night, a tractor-trailer backs up to a loading dock. The hijackers pile out and a hood in a seersucker suit and straw hat beats on the sliding steel door of a warehouse as the rest of the crew unload the goods. The watchman opens up the door and tells the hood in the seersucker there is no room.Cooper has been cobbling a deal to get "the block" a very large brick warehouse complex, 400,000 square feet, with rail spurs, comprising nineteen addresses, that sits on a full city block down in the 5th and Alameda district. It will be "like Grand Central Station". The word is out that the old street boss is losing control, if he doesn't deliver this block, 5th Street goes down the toilet and he'll go with it. The deal is in limbo because crooked LAPD official Elias and his downtown cronies are dragging ****, wanting more juice. Cooper's immediate boss Carl is putting pressure on him to get it done. Carl's bosses are a new breed, razor cuts, bookkeepers and lawyers who don't understand the streets.Carl also has Coop lean on boxing manager Paulie. He wants, to have boxer Tonozzi, who has been making a bit of a comeback, take one last dive in his next bout. When Tonozzi doesn't deliver, Carl thinks Coop is slipping. Coop tells Paulie to leave town but Carl's goons get to him first. Carl also hires a goofy looking enforcer named Turner, a quasi hippy-ish, off-putting hayseed imported from Texas who wears a cowboy hat and boots with denim bell bottom jeans and a jacket embroidered with flowers on the front and a marijuana leaf on the back.Coop has been on the job for 19 years, an ex carney, con man who worked his way West to LA then up the crime ladder. He has a live in gal pal Sarah who was working as a keno gal in Vegas when he found her, but in one sequence she demonstrates some bumps and grinds to Coop and his long time friend Paddie, the owner of the local bar. Coop's become a respected and loved 5th street neighborhood fixture, his friends and the patrons of Paddie's even throw him a surprise birthday party. This respect and love proves his undoing, the new breed of crook wants to rule on fear and brutality and Coop is coming to the end of his nickel ride.Jason Miller is practically a double for Charles McGraw without the gravelly voice, there are some great believable performances here from Victor French (who you won't recognize) he comes off as an interesting mix of Art Carney and Walter Matthau, and from Linda Haynes the small town born, ex Vegas showgirl. The side story of Coop and Sarah and their affection for each other is well done. John Hillerman is the "Hollywood-ish" mob under-boss, and Bo Hopkins is outlandish as the politely creepy "Cadillac Cowboy" hit man. This film builds slowly in tension much like Night And The City (1950) does.The noir-ish cinematography is excellent, emphasizing gritty, smoggy, downtown LA, an LA that's slowly succumbing to high rises and parking lots, but it also is juxtaposed by nicely composed 2.35 : 1 widescreen closeups and also throws in a sequence reminiscent of the Big Bear Lake segment featured in the Van Heflin-Robert Ryan Noir Act Of Violence (1948) The subtle soundtrack nicely compliments the storyline. 8-9/10.

Woodyanders Small-time criminal Cooper (a terrifically intense, restrained, and riveting performance by Jason Miller) manages several warehouses in Los Angeles that the mob uses to store their stolen goods. Known as "the key man" for the key chain he always has on him that can unlock all the warehouses, Cooper is assigned by the local syndicate to negotiate a deal for a new warehouse because the mob has run out of storage space. However, Cooper's superior Carl (a splendidly smooth and dapper turn by John Hillerman) gets nervous and decides to have cocky cowboy button man Turner (marvelously played with swaggering bravado and rip-snorting vitality by Bo Hopkins) keep an eye on Cooper. Director Robert Mulligan, working from a vivid and involving script by Eric Roth, astutely nails the nerve-wracking pressure of eking out a living through illegal means, makes fine use of the gritty urban locations, presents a neat array of colorful, interesting, and totally believable characters, effectively creates and sustains a grim tone throughout, and depicts a harsh and realistic criminal underworld in an admirably stark and unsentimental manner. Miller completely pegs the pain and anguish of a weary and aging bottom man on the totem pole who's in over his head and saddled with more responsibility than he can easily handle; he receives bang-up support from Linda Haynes as Cooper's loyal and concerned ex-dancer girlfriend Sarah, Victor French as hearty and gregarious bar owner Paddie, Richard Evans as obnoxious flunky Bobby, Bart Burns as slippery middle man Elias, and Lou Frizzel as amiable lug Paulie. Jordan Cronenworth's crisp and lively widescreen cinematography offers a wealth of stunning visuals and gives the picture an extra kinetic buzz. Dave Grusin's spare moody score likewise does the brooding trick. The downbeat ending packs a devastating punch. A real sleeper.

bkoganbing 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.

bmacv 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.