Ahoy, squirts! Quint here with today’s installment of A Movie A Day.
[For those now joining us, A Movie A Day is my attempt at filling in gaps in my film knowledge. My DVD collection is thousands strong, many of them films I haven’t seen yet, but picked up as I scoured used DVD stores. Each day I’ll pull a previously unseen film from my collection or from my DVR and discuss it here. Each movie will have some sort of connection to the one before it, be it cast or crew member.]
This is a fascinating forgetten ‘70s gem of a movie. It’s not without its faults, but goddamnit… when it succeeds it’s absolutely amazing and when it fails it’s not bad.
The only time this movie loses steam is when they split the two leads about 2/3rds of the way through. John Cassavetes (Nicky) and Peter Falk (Mikey) play lifelong friends in the film. Cassavetes is convinced that he has stolen some money from the wrong man and there’s a hit out on his life.
He has holed himself up in a crummy little hotel and is living like Howard Hughes, swimming in paranoia and delusion. In fact, it’s quite a while into the movie before we have concrete evidence one way or the other if everything isn’t just in Cassavetes’ head.
After days or possibly weeks, Cassavetes calls up Falk, his only true friend, and tells him where to meet him. But when Falk gets there, Cassavetes doesn’t want him in, suddenly not trusting his own decision to call him.
Cassavetes plays a great paranoid bastard. He’s unkempt, bags under the eyes, a couple five o’clock shadows away from a full beard, he looks oily and keeps throwing glances at the window. He’s at the end of his rope, or so it seems.
That’s one thing you learn about this character, he constantly swings back and forth from near insanity to perfectly rational. Falk on the other hand is fairly solid, his emotional swings spurned on by the events leading up to them, unlike Cassavetes who is almost Joker-like in how rapidly and unprovoked he goes.
MIKEY AND NICKY is a fucked up, unique ‘70s buddy movie, one that should be a lot more known that it is.
Falk and Cassavetes are absolutely great together, each perfectly complimenting the other. As you’d expect from a gritty ‘70s crime movie, even one that has elements of a buddy comedy, everybody is dirty. No one is clean.
Falk is the most relatable guy, but after the first reel we find out certain… weaknesses of character. And when we find out why he has these weaknesses, in a great shouting match on a deserted city street in the dead of night, he shows himself to be an incredibly complex and relatable character, even if at this particular moment in the movie it’s hard to like him.
After Falk is able to talk Cassavetes out of the hotel room, the movie becomes their journey through the city, trying to get Nicky out of town.
The interplay between these two are so crucial that when they go their separate ways about an hour and a half into the movie the brakes are firmly applied and it slows down to a crawl until the final 5 minutes, which are great. The ending to totally ‘70s. You can’t get away with what goes down in this movie these days.
Also worthy of note are a few smaller characters, including Ned Beatty in a great role as (SPOILER) the man hired to kill Cassavetes. It’s quite perfect casting in that Beatty is probably the least threatening person in the movie. He’s a bit of a fuck-up and looks like he couldn’t hurt a fly.
I also have to give a shout-out to one of my absolute favorite character actors, M. Emmet Walsh, who has a throw-away part here as a bus driver. He makes the role memorable, though, getting in an altercation with Cassavetes, ending up in a macho-showdown that gets Walsh into a headlock, still spewing curses.
The movie is hilarious and it also has a very, very serious and well-written core of character work. Elaine May’s direction is loose, almost documentary style, and that helps give it the gritty “anything can happen” feel that is one of the reasons I loved it so much.
In fact, I’d go so far as saying that this film is almost like a Coen Bros. film that they never made. It reminded a lot of two movies… One is the Coens’ BLOOD SIMPLE (for tone as much as the common M. Emmet Walsh factor) and the other is the brilliant and Not-Available-On-DVD (or even video for that matter) GRAVY TRAIN (aka The Dion Brothers) starring Stacy Keach and Frederic Forrest. MIKEY AND NICKY isn’t as silly as The Dion Bros, but it’s got the same kind of crazy buddy movie quality.
Final Thoughts: This movie is a real find. Peter Falk and John Cassavetes are incredible, especially Cassavetes, the direction is great… it borders on arty, but it never forgets to entertain. And that’s the real reason I connected with this movie. All the drama works and the comedy works, but no matter what I was watching I was entertained. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore. If you dig ‘70s filmmaking at all, you owe it yourself to track this one down.
Here’s what we have lined up for the next week:
Sunday, December 7th: TWO MINUTE WARNING (1976)
Monday, December 8th: THE SENTINEL (1976)
Tuesday, December 9th: HOW TO STEAL A MILLION (1966)
Wednesday, December 10th: WHAT’S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)
Thursday, December 11th: BEING THERE (1979)
Friday, December 12th: THE PARTY (1968)
Saturday, December 13th: CASINO ROYALE (1967)
Only a few days away from AMAD's second Peter Sellers-A-Thon! Tons of good stuff there, hopefully, and in the meantime we have some more '70s stuff... including tomorrow's thriller TWO MINUTE WARNING where MIKEY AND NICKY's John Cassavetes co-stars with Charlton Heston. See you folks tomorrow for that one!
-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com
