"The Nickel Ride" is a good and intriguing low key crime drama and rather overlooked on the resume of producer / director Robert Mulligan of "To Kill a Mockingbird" fame. Jason Miller of "The Exorcist" is Cooper, a "key man" who operates the warehouses that the mob uses to house their stolen goods. As he is in the process of negotiating for more space, his boss Carl (John Hillerman) starts looking at him as being too much of a risk and opts to have him watched. Now, this movie isn't for those people who may become tired of a story where there's a lot of talk and not much action. In fact, having a lot of action isn't really the point of "The Nickel Ride" which is more about functioning as a character study. In fact, it does just fine in showing the nuts and bolts of a low level criminal's daily existence, as he interacts with various other types. Cooper is just one of a few characters who are veterans of the crime game; he doesn't feel particularly comfortable about outliving his usefulness, realizes that he just doesn't have enough pull to help out his friends, and tries to deal with what he feels is his inevitable fate, the subject of which his boss avoids. He's also a fairly detached individual, even among his friends and associates, except with his loving girlfriend, played by the immensely appealing Linda Haynes ("Rolling Thunder", "Human Experiments"). The script is humorous and intelligent; the movie isn't without some laughs and doesn't give in to utter predictability either. Now, it's not without flaws; as has been pointed out, it's hard to believe a professional hit-man would screw up as badly as we see towards the end of the story. But anchoring everything is Miller's heartfelt, quietly intense portrayal, as well as solid turns from Haynes, Hillerman, Victor French as Paddie, the ever amusing Bo Hopkins as southern fried, persistent shadow man Turner, Richard Evans as Bobby, Bart Burns as Elias, Lou Frizzell as Paulie, and Lee de Broux as Harry. Dave Grusin's music is good without being intrusive. To tell the truth, it helps the movie attain an almost documentary like approach to its narrative; "The Nickel RIde" is matter of fact, never overly sentimental, and gets very much to the point. While not anything really great, per se, it's still a well acted and efficiently directed movie, with the sort of downbeat ending common to cinema of the 1970's, and certainly deserves to be better known than it is. Seven out of 10.
Review of The Nickel Ride
