n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

I don't know if Jasom Miller was acting, or just being himself. His priest in The Exorcist seemed like a variation on the same character he plays here. So perhaps that's Miller's persona. He may just have an extremely intense way about him in real life that fits certain movie characters. Or he may have used technique. Either way, his intensity is always compelling.I think the 70s was the last era when Downtown L.A. had neighborhood bars frequented by white working class men and people knew each other. In fact the film makers were trying to portray that transition here. My favorite aspect of the film and many others from that era, was the slowness. Because you get to see that for most people, the daily routine of life is fairly mundane. There is nothing glamorous about this protagonist's daily existence.All jobs require paper work or daily rounds, and solving problems. All romantic relationships involve eating and sleeping, and putting up with your partner's quirks.If this is the first time Bo Hopkins appeared in a film as a cocky cowboy criminal, than I can see why it would be interesting. He pulls the same routine in some other films shortly after this one, so it gets old. But this may be the original appearance of that character. It's effective here, because his accent and clothes are so different from everyone else's.I agree with the other reviewers that this Linda Haynes actress was good for the role. She had a weird accent and quirky looks, and seemed just the type that a guy like "Cooper" would pick up in his world. I really liked Cooper's back story of having been a "Carny," and the girl's background as a dancer in Vegas. But I can't figure out the age dilemma. Apparently Miller was only 35 during the filming, yet he plays a guy who is basically a dinosaur in the crime world. It's said that he got started as a "kid" 19 years ago, but certainly he wasn't 16. I picture this character pushing 50, and I think Miller himself looked much older than 35. Is his birth date on IMDb an error?If you have patience and appreciate dark character studies, you'll like this one. But don't lose focus as the plot develops, or you will not understand what our guy does for a living. I don't know much about camera work or music, but both seemed classically 70s in their effect. Meaning real to the bone and stylish. It worked for me.

"The Nickel Ride" is a good and intriguing low key crime drama and rather overlooked on the resume of producer / director Robert Mulligan of "To Kill a Mockingbird" fame. Jason Miller of "The Exorcist" is Cooper, a "key man" who operates the warehouses that the mob uses to house their stolen goods. As he is in the process of negotiating for more space, his boss Carl (John Hillerman) starts looking at him as being too much of a risk and opts to have him watched. Now, this movie isn't for those people who may become tired of a story where there's a lot of talk and not much action. In fact, having a lot of action isn't really the point of "The Nickel Ride" which is more about functioning as a character study. In fact, it does just fine in showing the nuts and bolts of a low level criminal's daily existence, as he interacts with various other types. Cooper is just one of a few characters who are veterans of the crime game; he doesn't feel particularly comfortable about outliving his usefulness, realizes that he just doesn't have enough pull to help out his friends, and tries to deal with what he feels is his inevitable fate, the subject of which his boss avoids. He's also a fairly detached individual, even among his friends and associates, except with his loving girlfriend, played by the immensely appealing Linda Haynes ("Rolling Thunder", "Human Experiments"). The script is humorous and intelligent; the movie isn't without some laughs and doesn't give in to utter predictability either. Now, it's not without flaws; as has been pointed out, it's hard to believe a professional hit-man would screw up as badly as we see towards the end of the story. But anchoring everything is Miller's heartfelt, quietly intense portrayal, as well as solid turns from Haynes, Hillerman, Victor French as Paddie, the ever amusing Bo Hopkins as southern fried, persistent shadow man Turner, Richard Evans as Bobby, Bart Burns as Elias, Lou Frizzell as Paulie, and Lee de Broux as Harry. Dave Grusin's music is good without being intrusive. To tell the truth, it helps the movie attain an almost documentary like approach to its narrative; "The Nickel RIde" is matter of fact, never overly sentimental, and gets very much to the point. While not anything really great, per se, it's still a well acted and efficiently directed movie, with the sort of downbeat ending common to cinema of the 1970's, and certainly deserves to be better known than it is. Seven out of 10.

Small-time criminal Cooper (a terrifically intense, restrained, and riveting performance by Jason Miller) manages several warehouses in Los Angeles that the mob uses to store their stolen goods. Known as "the key man" for the key chain he always has on him that can unlock all the warehouses, Cooper is assigned by the local syndicate to negotiate a deal for a new warehouse because the mob has run out of storage space. However, Cooper's superior Carl (a splendidly smooth and dapper turn by John Hillerman) gets nervous and decides to have cocky cowboy button man Turner (marvelously played with swaggering bravado and rip-snorting vitality by Bo Hopkins) keep an eye on Cooper. Director Robert Mulligan, working from a vivid and involving script by Eric Roth, astutely nails the nerve-wracking pressure of eking out a living through illegal means, makes fine use of the gritty urban locations, presents a neat array of colorful, interesting, and totally believable characters, effectively creates and sustains a grim tone throughout, and depicts a harsh and realistic criminal underworld in an admirably stark and unsentimental manner. Miller completely pegs the pain and anguish of a weary and aging bottom man on the totem pole who's in over his head and saddled with more responsibility than he can easily handle; he receives bang-up support from Linda Haynes as Cooper's loyal and concerned ex-dancer girlfriend Sarah, Victor French as hearty and gregarious bar owner Paddie, Richard Evans as obnoxious flunky Bobby, Bart Burns as slippery middle man Elias, and Lou Frizzel as amiable lug Paulie. Jordan Cronenworth's crisp and lively widescreen cinematography offers a wealth of stunning visuals and gives the picture an extra kinetic buzz. Dave Grusin's spare moody score likewise does the brooding trick. The downbeat ending packs a devastating punch. A real sleeper.

With its murky, monochrome photography and jangly, percussive score, The Nickel Ride could be mistaken as a film from no other decade than the 1970s. That was when the feel and the technique of movies were breaking away from the `well-made' mold enforced by studios over the previous 40 years. Some directors pioneered those changes, helping to freshen film from staled conventions by finding looser, more oblique ways to tell a story; others jumped on the bandwagon, unsure of where it was headed or quite how to get there. Robert Altman was such a pioneer; Robert Mulligan, who directed The Nickel Ride, wasn't.Like The Friends of Eddie Coyle of two years earlier (for which David Grusin also, as here, wrote the music),The Nickel Ride inhabits the talking-big-but-living-low world of organized crime at its lower strata. Also like Eddie Coyle, it takes as its subject the last-ditch schemes and final days of a loser. Jason Miller plays a small-time operator who has his fingers in a lot of shady pies: fixing fights, middle-manning hot merchandise, even hawking bail bonds. He seems to have a past as a grifter on the carny circuit, where he met his `cracker' wife (Linda Haynes), a hoochie-coochie dancer.Miller has secured an old commercial site with bays into which trucks can disgorge their hijacked merchandise; he hopes it will become an irresistible depot for stowing contraband. But he keeps getting the runaround from his superior, John Hillerman. Next emerges a `Cadillac cowboy' (Bo Hopkins) who Miller comes to believe has been engaged to kill him. But he falls back on the swagger and bluster that have turned him into a local hero, postures that cut little ice in the ever more impersonal and cutthroat world of crime gone corporate....Mulligan opts to let his story just sort of happen; unfortunately, we viewers need a little more help. Sorting out the many characters and their relationships becomes a chore, and often, thanks to the abrupt cuts, we don't know where we are or why we're there. And though a large part of the movie's strength is its raffish urban milieu, even that stays unspecific (I thought it took place in lower Manhattan, but it's set and shot in Los Angeles). The Nickel Ride is an existential downer of a mid-70s crime thriller, like Eddie Coyle and Hickey and Boggs. But, unlike The Nickel Ride, that last title (directed by Robert Culp, in his sole directorial outing) brightened its bleak vision with sharper moviemaking skills.