The production ran over its schedule and budget, leading to tensions between May and Paramount Pictures, who revoked her final cut privilege. When finally released on December 21, 1976, the film bombed at the box office, which led to May not directing again for a decade.[1] Her director's cut of the film was screened in 1978, which was remastered and released by the Criterion Collection in 2019.[2]
Plot
When Nicky (John Cassavetes) calls Mikey (Peter Falk) yet again to bail him out of trouble—this time a contract on his life for money he stole from his mob boss—Mikey, as always, shows up to help. Overcoming the obstacles of Nicky's paranoia and blind fear, Mikey gets him out of the hotel where he has holed up, and starts to help him plan his escape, but Nicky keeps changing the plan, and a hitman (Ned Beatty) is hot on their trail. As they try to make their escape, the two friends have to confront issues of betrayal, regret, and the value of friendship versus self-preservation.
May originally cast Paramount president Frank Yablans as a gangster, but Charles Bluhdorn, the chairman of parent company Gulf+Western, was not amused, and demanded that she recast.[3]
Production
The film's original $1.6 million budget grew to $2.2 million, causing original producers Palomar Pictures and distributor Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation to drop the project. May had agreed to deduct any over-budget costs from her salary in exchange for final cut privilege.[4] Paramount picked up the film, with studio President Frank Yablans forming "an ironclad deal" with May for a $1.8 million budget; the agreement also stipulated that the completed film must be delivered to the studio no later than June 1, 1974. Principal photography (which took place at night) began in Philadelphia in May 1973, lasting through August, and continued in Los Angeles from January to March 1974. By the time production wrapped, the budget had grown to nearly $4.3 million. Due to May missing the film's delivery date, litigation between her and Paramount began in 1975, with the studio gaining possession of the film and negating May's final cut privilege.
May shot 1.4 million feet of film, almost three times as much as was shot for Gone with the Wind. By using three cameras that she sometimes left running for hours, May captured spontaneous interaction between Falk and Cassavetes. At one point, Cassavetes and Falk had both left the set and the cameras remained rolling for several minutes. A new camera operator said "Cut!" only to be immediately rebuked by May for usurping what is traditionally a director's command. He protested that the two actors had left the set. "Yes", replied May, "but they might come back".[5]
Post-production
When Paramount assumed control over Mikey and Nicky, May, who had unsuccessfully sued the studio once before to have her name removed from A New Leaf after being unhappy with their cut, hid two important reels of footage in her husband's friend's garage in Connecticut. Although Paramount traced the reels to the garage, the company had no legal jurisdiction to search a house outside of the state of New York.[6] May eventually returned the reels and allowed Paramount to create its cut; she did not direct again for over a decade.
Release
Angered by May's contentiousness during filming and editing, Paramount booked the completed film into theaters for a few days to satisfy contractual obligations, but did not give the film its full support. Paramount's cut, riddled with continuity errors, was released to the ridicule of critics. This led John Simon to call the film "a celluloid death wish" in a 1976 article in New York Magazine.[7] In 1978, Julian Schlossberg, who had previously worked in acquisitions for Paramount before starting his own company, Castle Hill Productions, purchased the rights from the studio with May and Falk.
A new version of the film, approved by May, was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for the Directors Guild of America Fiftieth Anniversary Tribute on November 17, 1986. The film was also shown in Park City, Utah, at the United States Film Festival's Tribute to John Cassavetes on January 25, 1989. The film was released on Blu-ray and DVD by The Criterion Collection in 2019.[8]
Reception
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 88% based on 25 reviews, with an average rating of 7.6/10.[9] According to Metacritic, which assigned a weighted average score of 81 out of 100 based on 15 critics, the film received "universal acclaim".[10] In 2018, The Guardian praised the film as 'a neglected gem of 70s cinema', granting it a five star review.[11]
Leonard Maltin gave the film 21⁄2-stars-out-of-4, calling it a "Ragged film" that "improves as it goes along" with "superb performances by Falk and Cassavetes."[12]Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader wrote: "May allows the improvisational rhythms of her actors to establish the surface realism of the film, but beneath the surface lies a tight, poetically stylized screenplay that leads the two characters, as they pass a fearful, frenzied night together, back over the range of their lives, from infancy to adulthood. What emerges is a profound, unsentimental portrait of male friendship-and of its ultimate impossibility."[13] A retrospective review from Richard Brody for The New Yorker stated: "This hard-nosed masterpiece, from 1976, was written and directed by the doyenne of loopy comedy, Elaine May, who borrowed the scarily intense and spontaneous performance style of Cassavetes’s films to expose the cruelty of their male bravado—the ugliness of what his men do to women and what his women take from men. The wild emotional swings render the inevitable conclusion all the more shattering, as the film lays bare the price of friendship and the gall of betrayal. In May’s view, it takes a real man to stop being one of the guys."[14]
Vincent Canby of The New York Times found much to criticize: "It's a melodrama about male friendship told in such insistently claustrophobic detail that to watch it is to risk an artificially induced anxiety attack. It's nearly two hours of being locked in a telephone booth with a couple of method actors who won't stop talking, though they have nothing of interest to say, and who won't stop jiggling around, though they plainly aren't going anywhere. They just seem to be carrying on—making elaborate actor fusses—in front of the camera. Miss May is a witty, gifted, very intelligent director. It took guts for her to attempt a film like this, but she failed."[15]
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