IvanTheTerrible wrote:Lest we forget the 2 Hillerman appearances on FIVE-O - "Man on Fire" and "A Stranger in His Grave"! In the latter we even see the Hillerman character (a crooked real estate developer) reside at Robin's Nest!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
How in the world could I have left those out. I knew I was forgetting something but the post was becoming lengthy!
That's it KHale, turn in your John Hillerman Fan Club membership card on your way out the door.
Never! Not even from my cold dead hands
Hi K Hale,
You must be the number one John Hillerman fan anywhere. I was wondering, did you know that Selleck and the Magnum PI crew members referred to him as "The Great Hildini" because of
of his at times grand and imperious ways? What a great nickname! I am rubbish at posting links but if you do a search for this article:
Tom Selleck Once Revealed the Late John Hillerman's 'Grand Side'
it should appear. It's written by one Odette Odendaal, on May 17, 2019.
"He was a regular guy, but John — or as we'd call him sometimes, the Great Hildini — had a grand side,” Tom continued. “His idea of a great day was staying in bed, eating caviar and reading a good book.”
I've noticed that in many scenes with Higgins. My wife absolutely hates that look, so I like mess with her: When I'm wearing hangout clothing, sometimes I pull them way up like that. She groans and laughs, then I return them to normal.
"The conversations in which Cooper and Carl(John Hillerman) try and decipher the shifting dynamics of what their mob bosses want are priceless"
PULP CURRY APRIL 1, 2024
The best 1974 American crime film you probably haven't seen by ANDREW NETTE
We made a big fuss about American crime cinema of 1973 (including the fact that was the 50th anniversary of the, as I said argued in this article, very overrated The Long Goodbye).
But, actually, 1974 wasn’t too shabby either. In addition to the heavy hitters that year - The Conversation, Chinatown, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Bring Me the Head of Diego Garcia - there were, as always, several great films that flew under the radar and continue to do so. For my money, the best of this latter grouping is Robert Mulligan’s The Nickel Ride.
Jason Miller (best known for his role in 1973 film, The Exorcist) is Cooper, a mid-level operative in the Los Angeles crime scene, who managers several downtown warehouses where the local mob stash their stolen merchandise. This job has earned the nickname of ‘Key Man’ due to all the keys to various storage facilities he has to carry around. He is also involved in various other legal and illegal activities,
including fixing fights, bail bonds and acting as a dispute solver of sorts for the members of downtown L.A.’s working class criminal milieu.
Cooper and his employers face a major problem, something far more mundane than the threat of a rival outfit moving in on their territory, but serious nonetheless: they are running out of space to store their pilfered goods and Cooper is under intense pressure to finalise negotiations on large track of old commercial warehouse space that would be perfect for their needs. But there seems to be some sort of complication preventing him from closing the deal.
Cooper’s immediate boss, Carl (John Hillerman, instantly recognisable as Higgins in Magnum PI), is getting skittish and assigns Turner (the wonderful Bo Hopkins), a cocky cowboy enforcer, to shadow Cooper.
Carl insists Turner is only hanging around to learn the basics of the business, but Cooper, already unsettled by his inability to close the deal of new storage space, gets paranoid and starts to think Turner may
have been sent to kill him.
I love its murky, washed out look and its slow, at times almost dream like pacing and discursive story telling style. Robert Mulligan, whose directorial credits included To Kill A Mockingbird (1962), Inside Daisy Clover (1965) and the undervalued Baby the Rain Must Fall (1965), and his screenwriter Eric Roth, keep the interactions low key and don’t reveal a lot of context about the characters and what is going on.
The film The Nickel Ride is most often compared to is the 1973 classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle. Both films are about ageing, low level mob figures who have lost their taste for the criminal world and, as a result, find themselves having to fight for survival against younger, much hungrier, up and comers.
The Nickel Ride is certainly a great film about the mechanics of crime, endless meetings in bars and greasy spoon cafes, putting together deals which work or don’t, smoothing rumpled egos and solving disputes. Cooper is like any other mid-level employee working for a big company. His anonymous bosses are only concerned with squeezing everything they can from him and if he’s not prepared to put in more, they’ll replace him without a second thought.
Miller is terrific as Cooper, increasingly disillusioned and retreating back into memories of his younger years pulling cons on the carnival circuit (hence the film’s title). The one joy in his life is Sarah, his ex-dancer girlfriend, a strong performance by Linda Haynes, who starred in a number of US exploitation films in the seventies and eighties, most prominent of which was the post-Vietnam revenge film, Rolling Thunder. Hillerman is also good as Cooper’s middle manager, Carl, who is conflicted between protecting his own future and looking after his employee, with whom he has had a long association.
The conversations in which Cooper and Carl try and decipher the shifting dynamics of what their mob bosses want are priceless.
