Somewhere in a studio vault in the mid-1970s, two reels of film went missing. They did not disappear by accident. Elaine May, who had spent more than two years cutting and re-cutting her gangster picture Mikey and Nicky, had reportedly hidden them — a last act of defiance against Paramount Pictures and its chief executive Barry Diller, who had grown so impatient with her that they had already obtained a court order compelling her to deliver the film. May surrendered it, minus those two essential reels, and did not return them until the studio agreed to let her supervise the final edit herself.

It was, in its way, a heist worthy of the movie she was making. The film is set in the flophouse hotels and late-night diners of Philadelphia, and it follows two gangsters — Nicky, played by John Cassavetes, who has robbed his own boss and knows a contract killer is closing in on him, and Mikey, played by Peter Falk, who must choose between sheltering his oldest friend and surrendering him. What unfolds is less a thriller than a long, anxiety-soaked vigil. The two men drink beer, ride buses and play childish games together, while something ancient and unspoken shifts beneath every exchange.

May's great achievement is to have made a film in which love and betrayal are not opposites but, rather, the same feeling wearing different clothes.