The Nickel Ride (1974)

User Rating:

6.6/10   

Director:

Robert Mulligan

Writer:

Eric Roth (writer)

Release Date:

15 January 1975 (USA)

Genre:

Crime | Drama

Tagline:

The Nightmare Was Over... Or Had It Just Begun!

Plot Keywords:

Mob | Los Angeles | Warehouse | Neo Noir | Hitman

Awards:

1 nomination

Cast

Jason Miller	...	Cooper
Linda Haynes	...	Sarah
Victor French	...	Paddie
John Hillerman	...	Carl
Bo Hopkins	...	Turner
Richard Evans	...	Bobby
Bart Burns	...	Elias
Lou Frizzell	...	Paulie
Mark Gordon	...	Tonozzi
Harvey Gold	...	Chester
Lee de Broux	...	Harry

Runtime:

99 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Color

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Iceland:14 | USA:PG

Company:

David Foster Productions

Trivia:

Selected by Quentin Tarantino for the First Quentin Tarantino Film Fest in Austin, Texas, 1996.

Soundtrack:

The Nickel Ride Theme

Trying to ride out the storm

(Spoiler Alert) If it wasn't from 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 who 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 him 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 thats coming. In the end Cooper sees that all his fear and paranoia had some truth to it with Elias never showing up and him and his girlfriend Shara, Linda Haynes,alone in the woods with Turner seeming 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 it's 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.