Screenwriter Eric Roth was barely out of UCLA with one “very small, very forgettable little love story” credit to his name when an anxiety dream inspired him to write 50-501, a “film noir with intimations of mortality”. The script concerned a mid-level Los Angeles fence - or “key man” - confronting his fiftieth birthday and his encroaching fear of death as he attempted to negotiate a huge deal for a block of warehouses on behalf of his criminal bosses. It was a meaty part, one which caught the attention of George C. Scott, who then nudged Robert Mulligan (most famous for the 1962 adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird) to direct.
Scott would jump ship shortly afterwards, much to Roth’s disappointment, but Mulligan remained. He had recently dipped into darker fare with psychological horror The Other (1972) and had been briefly tipped to direct Taxi Driver (with Jeff Bridges as Travis Bickle) before Paul Schrader intervened. For Mulligan, 50-50 dealt with “how a man can be killed - and I don’t mean physically killed - by the judgement of other people.” He was in a noir frame of mind, and with Scott out of the picture he cast someone else who had been considered for Bickle: not Bridges, but a thirty-five-year-old actor named Jason Miller.
Miller had already made a name for himself as a playwright with the Pulitzer Prize-winning That Championship Season (1972) and had been nominated for an Academy Award for his role as Father Karras in The Exorcist (1973), but he was stretched personally - a failing marriage, combined with health problems and the stress of a national tour for That Championship Season (as well as a simultaneous opening in the UK and attempts to write a screenplay adaptation) had left him feeling fragmented. While Roth may have initially balked at Miller’s casting (he would later liken Miller to John Garfield2), the actor was already in the right mindset to play the beleaguered Cooper in what was now called The Nickel Ride.
Cooper is the “key man”, a fence and criminal go-between who operates a series of warehouses across Los Angeles, and he has the champagne problem of every successful entrepreneur: demand is outstripping supply. His warehouses are full, and when his warehouses are full, people get angry and start brandishing guns. His solution: a disused freight yard on Fifth Street with running water and electricity. He has the financial backing of his bosses - a shadowy syndicate known colloquially as “The People”. All he needs now is to close a protection deal with the local cops, headed up by a sentient pool of flop sweat named Elias (Bart Burns), whose havering is starting to concern the higher-ups and aggravate Coop. On top of that, he’s forced to deal with his fortieth birthday, a boxer who refuses to take a dive, and the appearance of Turner (Bo Hopkins), a bad apple chatterbox from Tulsa who is “old enough to know better, young enough to do it again” and who may well see Coop’s failure as a means to buy himself a brand new Cadillac.
If this all sounds rather frantic, don’t worry. The Nickel Ride isn’t Uncut Gems. Cooper may be sleepless and stressed at the beginning of the movie, but there’s a reason why he’s made it this far - he’s a professional problem-solver who, for the most part, makes solid, rational decisions. When he makes mistakes - such as when he lashes out at Bobby, his immediate boss’s rooster of an assistant - it’s to protect weaker members of the criminal community. And yet his talent is also his fatal flaw. Cooper is indispensable to the point of worrying The People - as Carl (the fantastically deadpan John Hillerman) says: “You’re like a computer and we can’t afford for it to break down.” Like any good middle-manager, Cooper is a rat among weasels, made worse by what appears to be a move towards a more corporate strategy with the “new guys”, who don’t know anything about the streets and prioritise profit over people. The stress of the new regime echoes through the streets - “things change” is the lament, the past doesn’t count for anything, and Cooper’s birthday present from the boys - a clock that is part timepiece, part bowling trophy - is an ugly reminder that time is running out for all of them. Even Carl is feeling the pinch: “Two days, I got this headache. Lots of changes. Things, they just aren’t so easy. Like friendships, they just don’t go so strong anymore, you know?”3
Cooper, like everyone around him, is being eaten alive by a voracious new form of capitalism, and no amount of lucky rabbit’s feet will keep him safe. The kicker is that Cooper never appears to take much pleasure from his work. He does it because the neighbourhood needs him and it pays well, not because he craves any position of power, and there’s a strong feeling that he never particularly wanted to be indispensable. It’s a job, not a vocation - the new block deal isn’t a product of Cooper’s ambition, but simple necessity - and his rare moments of happiness are spent in the company of his girlfriend and friends, rather than brokering the next big deal.
Mulligan referred to the movie as “a depression”, which is an incredibly difficult thing to make dramatically interesting. Luckily he had Jason Miller in the lead. With all due respect to George C. Scott, I can’t see him playing the part as well as Miller. Scott was a physically dominant, aristocratic actor; while he was capable of decent and downtrodden, it wasn’t his forte. Miller, on the other hand, had epitomised both as Father Karras. His Cooper is a street pastor and diplomat, who is able to intimidate when necessary with an obsidian stare, and Miller delivers a deeply human performance of quiet desperation. He’s aided by a stellar supporting cast of ‘70s faces including Linda Haynes, Mulligan regulars including a pre-moustache Victor French and Lou Frizzell, as well as the aforementioned Hillerman and Hopkins.
The performances, the location shooting, and Jordan Cronenweth’s soft light cinematography give The Nickel Ride a quasi-documentary feel, an unnatural naturalism - with Miller in (almost) every scene, the film centres on Cooper’s POV and becomes a strangely subtle mix of the smog-heavy external with the paranoia-drenched internal. It’s like overhearing a muttered and desperately serious conversation without context sometimes. Even a late-stage dream sequence - essentially an anxiety dream writ large - is announced and dispatched without fanfare, prefiguring the violent conclusion in stock action terms and rendering the final brawl all the more shocking for its quiet realism.
The Nickel Ride went to Cannes in 1974, where it was nominated for the Palme d’Or, but the film was met with widespread indifference at home. Critics were largely lukewarm, confusing the film’s deliberate pace with slowness, criticising Roth’s opaque, hardboiled dialogue (Pauline Kael saw Roth as a wannabe Clifford Odets4), mildly praising Jordan Cronenweth’s sepia-toned cinematography, but otherwise seeing the film’s modesty as a minus. This modesty also proved to be a turn-off for audiences, who seemingly preferred the kind of action melodrama typified by the grim Burt Reynolds vehicle Hustle, which ended up top of the double feature that spelled the end of The Nickel Ride’s theatrical life. Miller would spend the rest of his career juggling TV movies and film, trying to get his adaptation of That Championship Season to the screen5, before he returned to his hometown to become the artistic director of the Scranton Public Theatre. Robert Mulligan struggled to find work for four years before finding some success with Bloodbrothers (1978). As for the young screenwriter Eric Roth, well, nobody knows quite what happened to him.
The years since have been slightly more forgiving, at least critically, to The Nickel Ride but the movie has yet to benefit from a proper home release, showing up as a 2011 DVD double feature with John Frankenheimer’s execrable 99 and 44/100% Dead, a movie that is about as fun to watch as it is to type. Otherwise, there are versions knocking around on YouTube and it occasionally pops up in rep showings, but a full restoration and rerelease is sorely needed for this, one of the most undervalued and underseen crime movies of the ‘70s, and an excellent example of how great Jason Miller could be.6
Next up: “Peter Fonda is riding again … To the woman he lost … for the revenge he craves!”
Or Fifty-Fifty, as it’s sometimes known. I’m taking 50-50 from Roth’s interview in Backstory 5. The new title came from Robert Mulligan, which confused Roth - he wasn’t aware of any rides that cost a nickel.
Another Aero Theatre Q&A, folks.
I hope you all appreciate how much self-control it took not to quote the whole script. Roth might not think highly of his dialogue now, but it has the quality of George V. Higgins without the interminable length.
Odets was always the go-to for hardboiled dialogue comparison, just as Mamet would be later. Personally, whenever I hear Odets, I can’t help but think of Barton Fink.
That Championship Season eventually made it to cinemas in 1982 - outside the remit of this Substack - and, like many play-to-movie adaptations, struggled to make much of a mark. For what it’s worth, I kind of like it, and it’s certainly one of the better films to come out of the Golan-Globus era of Cannon.
If you need further persuasion, I refer you to Andrew Nette’s excellent piece.