Best Video Goes To Bat For ​“May”

Nicky (John Cassavetes) is squirreled away in a seedy hotel. He’s sure that the mob has a contract out on his life. He calls Mikey (Peter Falk) his childhood friend and the only ally he thinks he has left in the world. Mikey arrives to tell Nicky that he’s just being paranoid; everything’s going to be fine. The problem is, Nicky’s right. And Mikey just might be in on it.

So begins Mikey and Nicky, a 1976 film from writer and director Elaine May, which got a screening at Best Video Film and Cultural Center as part of its month-long film series focusing on her films. 

May (who is now 91) first made her name in the entertainment world in the 1950s doing improvisational comedy with Mike Nichols. She built on that to have a long and decorated career as a playwright actor (including, in 1980, an appearance at Long Wharf in its production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), screenwriter, and director, winning a BAFTA award, a Grammy, and a Tony. In 2013 she was awarded a National Medal of Arts, and in 2022 she received an Honorary Academy Award in 2022.

May’s career, however, has been even more interesting than the above paragraph might lead you to believe. As a director, she made only four films — which made them ripe for a month-long screening series at Best Video. Her first feature, which she wrote and directed, was the 1971 comedy A New Leaf, which received adulation from critics but didn’t get a big audience. She fared better with 1972’s The Heartbreak Kid (written by Neil Simon), which was a critical and commercial success, and gave her the kind of clout to make Mikey and Nicky.

May proceeded to run the production of Mikey and Nicky over budget and way past deadline, trying to capture the story she’d written in just the right way. Lawsuits ensued. Film footage disappeared. It came out in 1976 in a recut version that May disapproved of and vanished from sight. May didn’t direct another movie again — until 1987’s infamous Ishtar.

But in the intervening years, something happened to Mikey and Nicky, as it developed enough of a cult following for the film to be re-screened in the 1980s (using May’s cut) and for Criterion to release it on Blu-Ray in 2019. Its critical reputation also continues to rise, as evidenced by a rave from Peter Sobczynski at Rogerebert.com. ​“For those who have actually seen it before, watching it again will only confirm its greatness,” he wrote. ​“But for those who have not seen it before, it will no doubt prove to be a revelation — a work so brash and consistently surprising that newcomers will wonder what the hell people could have been thinking four decades ago when they passed it over.”

Before screening the film Tuesday night, Teo Hernandez gave it a brief introduction, noting that the film is so naturalistic that it might appear unscripted (in the style of Cassavetes’s own films). But that wasn’t the case: the movie was, in fact, fully scripted, and a testament to May’s abilities as a writer and director that it feels so lived in.

It’s easy to see how Mikey and Nicky has developed its champions, urging us to reconsider it as an unsung classic. In its subject, it’s something of an answer to 1972’s The Godfather; it focuses on the mobsters on the lowest rungs of organized crime, the people who usually show up only as corpses in classier mob pictures (May apparently based the movie on true stories about mobsters she knew growing up in Philadelphia). The tone of the movie is something of a marvel, often landing in the uncomfortable (and quite absorbing) gray area between bleak drama and absurd comedy. Its casual depictions of racism and violence toward and humiliation of women are particularly tough to watch, even as they cement the idea for the audience that Mikey and Nicky are terrible people, capable of doing terrible things. In the end, it’s a detailed study of their friendship, and the way that it frays, piece by piece, under pressure. With nearly five decades separating us from it, it’s a glimpse into how urban life moved then that feels almost like a documentary. And it’s a reminder that the 1970s was a time of adventurous filmmaking the likes of which we really haven’t seen since — a time when you could make a movie about irredeemable people in which they are, in fact, not redeemed.

Does all this mean that Elaine May’s entire filmography is due for a critical reevaluation? The real test comes next Tuesday, when the May series concludes with Ishtar, a movie that the Guardian in 2021 called ​“a rare movie bomb that’s such a catastrophe it becomes a byword for cinematic failure.” Starring Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman as two musicians caught up in a CIA plot in the Middle East, Ishtar had a rocky production and an oversize budget. It came out in 1987 to relentlessly bad reviews and empty theaters. ​“Though it has high-profile fans (Tarantino and Scorsese are among them), Ishtar is a comedy whose greatest joke is still widely thought to be its own monumental failure.” But, as the Guardian argues, ​“years removed from the drama of its making … Ishtar doesn’t play like the dud of legend.” It may be ​“undeniably shaggy,” but ​“what works about Elaine May’s fourth picture amounts to some of the finest material produced by a brilliant but sadly unprolific filmmaker.”

Are The Guardian, Martin Scorsese, and Quentin Tarantino right about Ishtar? Next Tuesday, viewers at Best Video will have a chance to judge for themselves.

Ishtar screens at Best Video on May 30 at 7 p.m. Visit Best Video’s event page for more information. Mikey and Nicky can be found at Best Video and streaming services that host the Criterion Collection.