Can you imagine remaking this movie without emotionally unintelligent, macho men causing every other character around them miserable? There’d be nothing left.

Be careful how you treat your friends... As Mikey and Nicky begins, the latter (John Cassavetes) is a low-level gangster who has called his colleague and childhood pal (Mikey, Peter Falk) for help. He's sure their boss has put a hit out on him. And so follows a night of paranoia where the audience is progressively ahead of Nicky in terms of who he can trust. The movie feels raw and semi-improvised (which, as I found out, it was) and is essentially a two-hander between two neurotic forces of nature. Nicky probably deserves what he gets - he's such an A-hole - and it's something we discover through Mikey's responses to him. This is a friendship on the rocks, one that has been neglected, taken for granted, and was rooted in pecking order masculinity in the first place. But has it deteriorated to the point where Mikey would sell him out? There are surface answers to that, but also deeper, more ambivalent ones.

Worst killer ever