Mikey and Nicky (1976): Little Boys in Big Boys Games

Coming to Blu-ray courtesy of the Criterion Collection from 13th January is Elaine May’s 1976 gangster movie Mikey and Nicky. Starring regular collaborators John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, May’s movie capitalises on the pair’s natural chemistry, lending great authenticity to their roles of lifelong friends.

Set over the course of a single night, Mikey and Nicky stars Cassavetes as Nicky, a small-time mobster with an ulcer who has stolen money from local crime boss, Dave Resnick (Sanford Meisner). With a hit out on him, a terrified Nicky holes himself up in a hotel and turns to fellow felon Mikey (Falk), his best friend since childhood and the only man he believes can save him from the bullet of assassin, Kinney (Ned Beatty). What follows is a restless, long evening of reminiscences, paranioa, shifting loyalties, and deep soul searching.

Of course, Mikey and Nicky isn’t really a gangster movie. Granted, the film may ostensibly be about the mob, but it’s really a film about the importance of knowing when to cut loose for your own sake. It’s also a film about toxic masculinity – and, in that regard, and for my money at least, it betters Cassavetes own Husbands. I’m not actually surprised by that discovery; it takes a woman to understand how truly crap men are, I guess, and May was said to take inspiration from real-life figures she knew from her childhood in 1940s Philadelphia. It is her storyteller’s interest in the intimate and personal, combined with a scuzzy verite style, that sets Mikey and Nicky apart from other gangster movies, as she captures the tangible atmosphere of too harsh strip lighting of dive bars and night buses, the beer going flat, the fug of chain-smoke in the air and the stale smell of our jaded, edgy protagonists, which almost permeates from the screen to assault our nostrils.

Like all directors who have had a career in front of the camera, May gets the very best from her cast which includes Carol Grace, William Hickey, Joyce Van Patten and, in the small role of a bus driver, M. Emmet Walsh, as well as the dream partnership of Cassavetes and Falk. Inspired by Cassavetes spontaneous performance style, May encouraged her stars to improvise, and left the camera running for hours. One famous anecdote has it that when Cassavetes and Falk left the set one time, May left the cameras rolling for several minutes. When a camera operator, mindful of what he believed to be wasted film, intervened to yell “cut” on May’s behalf he was immediately rebuked by her. She acknowledged that her actors may have left, but added “they might come back!”. The result of this improvisation was that May shot three times as much film as that used on the near-four hour epic Gone With the Wind. Mikey and Nicky had been budgeted at $1.8million but, faced with such an experimental style, it quickly went over budget, coming in at $4.3million.

Somewhat inevitably, the film became the subject of an acrimonious battle between Paramount and May. After some to’ing and fro’ing regarding what she had shot, May eventually handed the studio control and returned to writing and performing instead. Mikey and Nicky was buried, rather than released, by Paramount in 1976. Two years later, the distributor Julian Schlossberg of Castle Hill Productions, Elaine May and Peter Falk purchased the rights to the film from the studio and set to work recreating the movie to May’s original vision. It received its premiere in 1986 as part of New York’s fiftieth anniversary tribute for the Directors Guild of America and was finally recognised as an inimitable masterpiece of New Hollywood. A year later in 1987, May released the first film she had directed since Mikey and Nicky eleven years earlier, the Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman comedy vehicle Ishtar. Despite a growing groundswell of support, Ishtar has yet to recieve the kind of re-evaluation that came to Mikey and Nicky.

The key to the film’s success is Cassavetes and Falk. As the titular Mikey and Nicky, they accurately embody two middle-aged men who have never really left the playground. Their characters’ whole lives are ones of currying favour with the bigger boys, trading loyalties, games of one upmanship, rough-housing and the playing of cruel tricks. It’s just that somewhere along the line, the game grew up around the pair without their appreciation, and their stunted development ensures that they’re just not equipped for the emotional ramifications. They may be married with children of their own, they may be greying at the sides, and they may have crumpled into the kind of middle-aged ennui that permeates the very celluloid itself, but they’re still just little boys at heart. It’s Mikey and Nicky, not Mike and Nick, after all.

This director approved Blu-ray release includes a newly restored 4K digital transfer supervised by May herself, and a new feature on the making of the film, including interviews with Joyce Van Patten and Julian Schlossberg. There are also new interviews with critics Richard Brody and Carrie Rickey, an archive audio interview with Peter Falk from 1976, and archive trailers and TV spots. The release also includes an essay by the critic Nathan Rabin.

Mark’s Archive – Mikey and Nicky