In short: The Nickel Ride (1974)

Former carny man Cooper (Jason Miller) is working as lower middle-management for the LA mob. He’s mainly taking care of warehouses used for stashing stolen goods, but he’s also fixing boxing matches, threatening someone here or there, and so on. He is a bit of a local celebrity on his home block, and has is married to Sarah (Linda Haynes), who’d probably catch a bullet for him if she’d see it coming. Right now, Cooper is working on a project that might very well get him one step up the criminal ladder. He is trying to procure a whole city block of warehouses, legally if you ignore the bribes, which would make things much easier for criminals around the city, or so he believes.

But as the film starts, things begin to go slowly unravel. The officials he’s trying to bribe become evasive, boxing matches aren’t as easily fixed as they should, and his boss (Tony Hillerman) is sending him a weird Southern guy (Bo Hopkins) he is supposed to take care of. Though you don’t need to be a genius to realize the man’s actually supposed to keep an eye on Cooper. Once things start slipping, Cooper deteriorates fast, exacerbating his problems with rash decisions that’ll only make them bigger, and beginning to fear a quick, sudden death by his associates.

While certainly being a noir-ish gangster movie, what mainly resonates for me about Robert Mulligan’s quiet and atmospheric noir-ish gangster movie is its deep sense of paranoia. This isn’t just the portrayal of a man who built his life on violence seeing age taking some of his abilities away, or that of a man trapped in the gangster version of a job without much perspective. Most of all, it is the portrayal of a guy who wakes up one morning and starts to realize that the world is slipping around him, that the things he once thought secure are anything but, and that his safety is an illusion. Cooper is quickly slipping into the paranoia that naturally must come with this sort of realization, seeing enemies everywhere – where they are and where they aren’t and slowly realizes that his hopes for the future have brought him inevitable doom.

Miller’s portrayal of this process is highly nuanced, avoiding any kind of hyperbole, instead finding a very precise way to show Cooper losing his grip on a world that’s all too willing to get rid of him.

Precision is an important word for the whole of the film: before we even realize we are already witnessing Cooper falling, Mulligan has created the social world of dark and grimy streets and people of dubious jobs and morals around him slowly and carefully, making very clear what’s at stake for Cooper and why.

The Nickel Ride is full of clever decisions. A nice example is its use of Bo Hopkins’s patented Southern folksiness, or rather, how Mulligan and Hopkins (in a really clever performance) suggest an abyss of menace lurking just beyond a corny exterior, turning a Hopkins standard character into a perfect focus for Cooper’s paranoid (and not so paranoid) nightmares.