Mikey (Peter Falk) and Nicky (John Cassavetes) are "schtick figures" in lonelynight's landscape, on the run from death in this Elaine May film. It was billed as a black comedy and is about as funny as Samuel Beckett; Cassavetes' influence-and both actors' finest performances outside of Cassavetes' own films-infuses Mikey and Nicky with an absurd humanity. Mikey and Nicky are petty gangsters, garden variety white-collar crooks who grew up and grew middle-aged together in Philadelphia. Now Mikey has a patina of respectability in the 'burbs, replete with a wife who naively runs center for his criminal escapades; while Nicky maintains the ruthless egotism of a charmed child, at once attractive and deadly to anyone who falls in his spell. That would be his wife, his girlfriend-and Mikey. When, as the film opens, Nicky's karma comes home to roost and he finds there is a hit out on him, disheveled and ulcerous he calls on Mikey to say it isn't so. "Just because they wanna kill you doesn't mean you're gonna die," is the best Mikey can do, and for good reason. The tension between tenderness and betrayal builds excruciatingly as Nicky leads Mikey, and Mikey leads Nicky, through a long last night. In all-night cafes, mistrust and misgivings are passed like table-salt; in a graveyard, ghosts of a shared childhood come leaping out. And the May/Cassavetes schtick continues, unabated: "It's hard to talk to a dead person. We have nothing incommon," Nick complains at his mother's grave; but when death nears, he tries to talk it down: "Wait," he says, "you wait."