Hit Men

By JAY COCKS

MIKEY AND NICKY Directed and Written by ELAINE MAY

It's a setup. Mikey (Peter Falk) comes to the rescue of his best friend Nicky (John Cassavetes), who has shot a bookie and is holed up in a fleabag Philly hotel, going crazy. Nicky trusts no one. He has only one article of faith --that there is a contract out on him and he will be offed as sure as next morning's sunrise.

He calls up Mikey, asks him to bring cigarettes, then won't let him in the door. Mikey talks his way inside, gets milk and cream for Nicky's perforated ulcer, says he'll help him out of town. Nicky is wary, but Mikey remains steadfast. It is the best way to keep track of Nicky and make sure that he finally meets up with the fat guy who carries a pistol in a brown paper bag.

Quirky Insight. Mikey and Nicky is the work of three gifted people--the two leading actors and the writerdirector, who has been responsible for two of the funniest and most startling comedies of the decade, A New Leaf and The Heartbreak Kid. But here Falk and Cassavetes seem at sea, and May's talent gets lost in all the surrounding craziness, much of which has been well documented. Mikey and Nicky was begun in 1973, but is just now being released after numerous lawsuits. Paramount sued May for breach of contract, trying to repossess a film they already owned--which May had somehow sold off to another company, Alyce Films (an outfit backed by Peter Falk, among others). May responded in fine style by suing Paramount for breach of their contract. While the fur flew, May was bogged down by the tortuous process of editing nearly 1.5 million ft. of film. The movie is fractured, disorienting, out of control. There are fleeting moments of quirky insight, even of bril- liance, but they serve to make the whole even more disconcerting.

Throughout the film, the sense persists that May lost track of what she had wanted to do. Small points and moments are worried past endurance, while the main plot wanders. Watching the pic ture is an unsettling and eventually op pressive experience, like observing a person having a nervous breakdown.

May's notion must have been for Mikey and Nicky to be two aspects of the same victim, and to make them both prime candidates for a killing. If one is treacherous, the other is brutal. The assassination at the end seems like unfair retribution because only one of them is on the receiving end. Mikey and Nicky should have been a movie about friend ship and betrayal and a kind of cosmic, comic stalemate. Its own helpless indulgence is not just the movie's undoing. It becomes, instead, its subject. Jay Cocks

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