The unhinged Nick Nolte performance that summed up a lost New York City
Time can be a cruel mistress, and if you’ve seen the cracking throwback heist movie Crime 101 this year, then you may well have recognised the elderly man at the end of the bar collecting envelopes stuffed with money from Chris Hemsworth. Because that man is an 85-year-old Nick Nolte.
I say time can be cruel only because Nolte is seen as a fading figure, his voice shaking and his role that of a once fearsome criminal who still shows flashes of the anger that must have made him someone you wouldn’t cross, but whose body is starting to crumble. And that passing of time is magnified when you watch him in movies where he was at his physical peak, like in Sidney Lumet’s Q & A.
Made right at the end of the 1980s, the decade where greed was good in New York City but the streets could be a terrifying place to frequent, it is a movie that has flown under the radar somewhat, not one of Lumet’s better-known films, certainly not compared to classics like 12 Angry Men or Dog Day Afternoon, but a taut, violent cracker nonetheless.
And at the heart of it is a completely unhinged performance from Nolte as a drug-snorting, rent boy frequenting, murderous ‘old school’ cop, huge in stature and without any rulebook whatsoever.
Nolte’s role of Mike Brennan, the detective trying to get away with shooting an informant in cold blood, while a young, ambitious district attorney attempts to bring him to justice, is pure, terrifying intimidation, and he put on 40 pounds in weight in order to run amok through the film right up to an explosive climax.
Lumet’s films, like Al Pacino’s Serpico and the massively overlooked Prince of the City from 1981, never shied away from showing the gritty flipside to the glamour of the ‘Big Apple’, and Q & A is no exception. The streets are awash with prostitutes, gangsters, corrupt cops and hoodlums, and Nolte’s character is on first-name terms with them all, as long as they stay on the right side of him.
He also has his colleagues under his spell, regaling them with locker room tales and racist jokes, which even his black colleagues will entertain simply because ‘that’s just how Brennan does things’. Nolte throws his weight around, punches first and asks questions later as criminals and cops cower before him. And it seems at one point that he’s going to get away with murder until finally he is slain in the very place that has allowed him to get away with his behaviour for decades: NYPD HQ.
Q & A is a fantastic watch, although almost ruined by some very questionable music choices, and Nolte’s performance is one of the most impressively evil of that decade, a man desperately clinging on to a city that is changing and a police department trying to clean up its act. Seeing him so frail in Crime 101 is almost a career bookend to that; a man still attempting to make his way in the underworld but relying on younger legs to do it for him.
While Nolte didn’t win any awards for playing Brennan, it wasn’t long, the next year in fact, that he took on his most acclaimed role, in 1991’s romantic drama The Prince of Tides, opposite Barbara Streisand. Nolte was Academy Award-nominated and won a ‘Best Actor’ Golden Globe for the film, which told the story of a troubled man telling the story of his abusive upbringing, only to fall in love with her.
