Mikey and Nicky

I've mentioned quite a bit how I have a tendency to put movies on the DVR simply because they have an interesting synopsis. I also mention a lot how I watch movies that have an interesting idea and that you can see why the people involved would want to make it, but that it doesn't quite work for the audience. (Or, at least me personally as a viewer.) Another example of this is Mikey and Nicky.

Nicky is played by John Cassavetes, and as the movie opens he's in one of those cheap, grungy urban hotels that were a thing especially in movies up until about the 1980s. Nicky reads a newspaper headline about a man killed by gangsters, and he realizes that he's next. He's a small-time gangster collecting betting moneys for the syndicate higher up, except that this time he's decided to try to abscond with some of that money. Unsurprisingly, the bigwigs don't like that and want him dead.

Nicky doesn't have many people he can trust, and he's even driven his wife to the point of not wanting to see him, in part because she's smart enough to understand that if Nicky comes home to her, the Mob is going to come after her, too, and not just him. So Nicky calls the one person he thinks he can still trust, old friend Mikey (Peter Falk).

The plan is for Mikey to pick up Nicky and take him, well, somewhere. There's the question of whether there's any place Nicky can go and be safe, since the Mob will follow him to the ends of the earth. Worse is that Nicky is making life difficult for Mikey to the point that it's easy to understand why everybody else has abandoned him. They go first to a diner, then to a cemetery, and eventually talk about going to and all night cinema, with a few other stops along the way, including a hopeful visit to Nicky's wife.

Meanwhile, it's up to Kenny (Ned Beatty) to find Nicky and off him if possible. Kinney is consistently hot on their trail, although for most of the movie one step behind at least Nicky. Nicky, however, does finally piss off Mikey to the point that he thinks about saying the hell with it and helping Kinney find Nicky once Kinney finds Mikey.

As I implied above, it's not hard to see why people might find the idea of Mikey and Nicky a fun movie to make. Elaine May wrote and directed, and it feels like she was able to cast several of her very talented friends who all liked the idea of a bunch of friends working together. But then the film goes wrong.

Having read a bit more about the movie, I'm going to have to put the blame on May, no Gilda pun intended. Apparently, she shot a ridiculous amount of footage, much of which was unusable. And since she went well over budget both in terms of money and time, the studio asserted its contractual right to take the final edit away from her. The version we have now may be closer to what May intended, but in any case the result is way too talky, with a main character in Nicky with whom it's extremely difficult to have any sympathy.

A lot of people, however, insist that Mikey and Nicky is a lost classic, so it's one that you might wish to watch for yourself and develop your own judgment on.