The Nickel Ride (1975)

Powerful

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

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)

"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.

Late actor Jason Miller is best remembered (on the rare occasions he IS remembered) for his exemplary performance as Father Karras in William Friedkin's The Exorcist, but he deserves better. Gritty drama The Nickel Ride features him in perhaps the finest performance of his career as Cooper, a low-level LA hoodlum whose hold on his assigned section of town is being threatened by the arrival of new punk Turner (Bo Hopkins). It's a surprisingly complex tale of one man's slow realization that he may no longer be at the top of his game, and features very impressive widescreen cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth. Look for Magnum P.I. regular John Hillerman (you know, the dapper guy with the neat little moustache) as Cooper's boss Carl.

(Spoiler Alert) If it wasn't for Jason Miller's smoldering performance as the troubled paranoid and eventually doomed L.A mobster Cooper the movie "The Nickel Ride" would just die on the screen as soon as the opening credits stopped rolling. Playing a low-level hood involved in the storage of stolen mob merchandise, at a warehouse complex that he runs in the city, Cooper is no longer of any use to his new mob bosses. Cooper's bosses now feel that his old ways of doing things is just not cutting it in this modern era of organized crime. After 19 years on the job and being the best at it Coop's days are numbered as the syndicated is now planning to have him retired permanently. With his immediate boss Carl, John Hllerman, feeding him this line of bull about how he's falling behind in his work and now his mob boss want an even bigger piece of his cut from his storage and selling business. Carl comes to an agreement with Cooper on his payoff to the head mobsters to be increased from $8,500.00 to just under $20,000.00.Things just don't seem to be going right for Cooper senses that somehow he's being set up for a "Hit" and all this talk about him not coming through for his mob bosses is really a diversion to keep him from realizing that. They don't really care how his operation, or block, is going they just want him to have Cooper drop his guard in order to have him whacked and then replaced. Cooper get a message, of sorts, when his friend Paulie, Lou Frizzeli, who manages boxer Tonozzi, Mark Gordon, ends up murdered because he couldn't get his boxer to throw a fight that the mob bet heavy on for Tonozzi to lose. Feeling he still has his "touch" with the mob bosses Cooper did his best to call the "Hit" on Paulie off. When he got the bad news about Paulie from the hoodlum who "Hit" him Bobby, Richard Evens, Cooper getting him alone on an elevator almost kills him! This convinced his bosses from Carl on up that he's not suitable in their new reconstructed business and has to go. Being introduced by Carl to his out-of-town driver Turner, Bo Hopkins, who's always in Cooper's face and obnoxious to the point where Cooper has nightmares about him being the "hit-man" sent by the new mob bosses to do him in. Cooper tries to get in touch with an old associate of his Elias, Bart Burns,to meet him outside of the city at his country home in a desperate attempt to stave off the "Hit" that he feels that's coming. In the end Cooper sees that all his fear and paranoia had some truth to it with Elias never showing up. With Cooper and his girlfriend Shara, Linda Haynes, now alone in the woods Turner, in Cooper's mind, seems to be behind every tree and ready to finish him as well as Shara off. Surreal and dark thriller that has a number of fine twists and turns in it but it's obvious from the start that the dye was cast and Cooper was to become history by the time the movie ends. There were a number of off-beat moments in the film that didn't seem to make much sense with a dream sequence involving Turner at Cooper's country home that to me came across like an alternate ending that was left in the movie by its director by mistake. The actual ending in the film with Turner and Cooper at his office in L.A was also very hard to accept since it made the sly and methodical Turner come across unbelievably unprofessional as a professional hit-man.