"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.

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.

Unfortunately for this film, only a few people saw it, it seems, and few appreciated it, but it is one of the most impressive films of Mulligan, specially the last scene, with Jason Miller sitting outside his office, the keys in his hands, and dead, because he has nowhere to go, and with his friend talking to him, not knowing yet that he is not alive. It is a gangsters movie in a different way that gangsters movies are: it is the end on an era, the fall of a little man in the gang, beloved by his friends, but ignored by his chiefs, that had ordered his death. One thinks that this "camera piece" was in advance of its time, and it is a pity that more people everywhere ignores one of the masterpieces of Mulligan.

(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.