Mikey and Nicky: Cassavetes Directs a Gangster Night

There is a whole subgenre of the American crime film that has almost nothing to do with crime. The robbery is offscreen or already over; the money is gone or never mattered; what fills the frame is two men talking, circling, lying to each other about things that stopped being negotiable years ago. Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976) is the purest example anyone has managed, and for decades it was also the hardest to see. It sat in a vault, sued over, recut, misunderstood, until a restoration finally let people watch the thing May actually shot. What they found was a gangster picture with the manners of a marriage counselling session and the pulse of a horror film.

One night, two men, a contract

The plot is a single sentence. Nicky (John Cassavetes), a low-level Philadelphia mobster who has skimmed money from the boss he works for, is holed up in a hotel room convinced there is a hit out on him. He calls the one person he still trusts, his childhood friend Mikey (Peter Falk), to sit with him through the fear. Over the course of one long night the two of them move through the city — a bar, a bus, the apartment of a woman Nicky knows, the streets themselves — while a hired killer named Kinney (Ned Beatty) tries to keep them in sight.

That is the entire architecture, and May builds everything on it. The film has the shape of a thriller — a man marked for death, a clock, a gunman working the margins — and almost none of a thriller’s forward motion. Nicky cannot stay still and cannot decide anything. Mikey manages him, soothes him, needles him, and the closer you watch the two of them the less the plot seems to be about who lives. It is about the fifty years of grievance underneath the friendship, and about what one man will finally do to another he has loved his whole life.

Elaine May’s invisible hand

The title of this piece is a small provocation, because May directed the film and Cassavetes only acts in it. But the confusion is honest, and it is worth sitting with. Mikey and Nicky looks and breathes like a Cassavetes production — handheld, low-lit, actor-forward, apparently caught rather than composed — and Falk and Cassavetes were his people, veterans of Husbands and A Woman Under the Influence. Audiences who came to it cold in 1976 assumed they were watching him. They were watching a comic director from the Nichols and May stage act taking that improvisatory-seeming style and bending it toward dread.

The seeming is the key word. The film feels loose, but May scripted it tightly and then shot at a ratio that became Hollywood legend, running through an amount of film stock that horrified Paramount and blew past every schedule. When the studio moved to seize the footage, the reels reportedly went missing; the dispute ran into lawsuits, and the version that limped into cinemas was cut against her wishes. Only years later did the film she intended surface. Knowing that history changes how you read the texture. The rawness is engineered. May shot take after take to wear the performances down to something that no longer looks like performance. The repetition was a tool of erosion, aimed past the accidental at the exhausted truth underneath.

That is a genuinely radical way to make a crime film, and it explains why the picture unsettles people who expect the genre’s comforts. There is no procedural pleasure here, no elegant plan, none of the professional cool the heist tradition runs on. May took the machinery of the mob film and pointed it at two frightened middle-aged men, and let it grind.

Why it works: the friendship is the suspense

The craft move that makes Mikey and Nicky more than an exercise is that May relocates the tension from the plot into the relationship. In a conventional version, the suspense is will the killer find them. Here the suspense is what does Mikey actually want, and May keeps that question live by letting Falk play warmth and calculation in the same gesture. Falk is astonishing precisely because he never tips it. He is soothing and he is watchful; he is the best friend and he is something else, and the film refuses to resolve which until it has to.

Cassavetes, meanwhile, plays Nicky as almost unbearable on purpose — grabby, cruel to the people around him, swinging from terror to bravado — and the performance is a dare. May makes you spend a whole night with a man who is difficult to like, and the discomfort is the point, because it forces the real question. Is Nicky worth saving? Would you save him? The film lets Mikey’s face carry a version of that calculation, and the horror creeps in as you realise the two men are asking it about each other.

The visual grammar backs this up. May and her cinematographers keep the camera close and slightly unstable, so the city becomes a smear of streetlight and the two faces are the only fixed things. Kinney, the killer, is filmed almost comically — a fussy, complaining professional annoyed at how badly the job is going — which drains the menace of any glamour and pushes it toward the banal. Beatty plays him as a man doing tedious overtime. That flatness is a deliberate joke, and it makes the eventual violence land harder because nothing about it has been dressed up.

Where it sits in the crime canon

Mikey and Nicky belongs to a specific and precious lineage: the American crime film of the early-to-mid 1970s that stripped the gangster of romance and left the sad, cheap, mortal man underneath. Its closest sibling is The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which shares the conviction that betrayal in this world is a matter of tired logistics rather than operatic treachery, and that a man gets sold out by the people nearest to him because it is convenient. Both films understand that the mob is a workplace and that loyalty is the first thing it liquidates.

It rhymes, too, with the fatalism of Get Carter, though Mike Hodges gives his revenger a cold competence that Nicky could never dream of, and it makes an instructive contrast with the professionalised crime cinema that came after — the world of Heat, where men are defined by their discipline and their code. May’s men have no code. They have a history, which is worse, because a code can be honoured and a history only accumulates. If you want to see how far the American crime film travelled in twenty years, watch this against Mann’s monument to control.

Within its own moment it sits beside the other two films I have been revisiting this season, The Getaway and Charley Varrick — three 1970s American crime pictures that each quietly refuse the genre’s usual satisfactions. Peckinpah keeps the momentum and dirties the romance; Siegel keeps the craft and lowers the stakes to survival; May throws out momentum altogether and gives you two men and a clock. Together they map how flexible the form was in that decade, before the blockbuster tightened everything back up.

The verdict

Mikey and Nicky is a difficult, abrasive, genuinely great film, and its difficulty is inseparable from its greatness. It asks you to spend ninety-odd minutes inside a friendship that is curdling in real time, with two of the finest American screen actors of their generation working at full, uncomfortable stretch, under a director whose control is so complete that it looks like chaos. It is not a film to reach for when you want the pleasures of the genre. It is the film to reach for when you want to understand what those pleasures are covering up.

Where to watch: the restored cut is the only one worth your time, so look for the Criterion presentation of May’s version rather than the compromised theatrical edit. Everything below the line assumes you have seen it.

Spoilers below

The film’s cruelty is that it tells you the truth early and then makes you watch Nicky refuse to believe it. Mikey is in contact with Kinney throughout; the “help” is a delivery service. May does not hide this from the audience for long, which is the crucial choice, because it converts the film from a whodunit into a study of complicity. We know Mikey is walking his friend toward a gun. We watch him do it while telling himself, and us, that he is the wronged party.

And he has a case. The night keeps surfacing the reasons — the slights, the humiliations, the sense that Nicky has spent decades treating Mikey as a lesser man — so that the betrayal arrives dressed as justice. May refuses to let Mikey be a simple Judas. He is a man who has been made small by his friend for fifty years and has finally been handed the means to end the friendship permanently, and the film understands that he half believes he is owed it.

The ending is one of the bleakest in American cinema. Nicky, having finally understood, comes to Mikey’s own house at dawn, pounding on the door, begging to be let in. Mikey stands on the other side and does not open it. Kinney shoots Nicky there on the doorstep, in front of the home and the family Mikey has kept apart from the whole sordid business, and the film’s last movement belongs to Mikey — alive, safe, and utterly alone with what he has done. He has won the argument. He got the last word. The picture ends on the face of a man who has just discovered that being right was worth nothing at all.

That is the move that separates Mikey and Nicky from the revenge cinema it superficially resembles. In the tradition of Point Blank, the settling of a score is a kind of grim triumph, a man imposing order on the people who wronged him. May gives you the mechanics of exactly such a score and then denies you the triumph. The door closes, the gun goes off, and the friendship — the only real thing either man had — is simply gone. No order is restored. There was never anything to restore. There were just two men who loved each other badly, for too long, and one night that made it fatal.