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Showing posts with label John Cassavetes. Show all posts

Saturday, November 6, 2010

John Cassavetes - Husbands (1970)

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Quote:
After FACES, Cassavetes embarked on HUSBANDS, in which he starred with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. The film centered around three friends dealing with life and mortality after the death of a mutual friend.
Though neither FACES nor HUSBANDS were very popular with the mainstream moviegoing audience, both were pivotal in the integration of cinema verité traditions in future Hollywood films. This crossover of the experimental and popular was clear in Cassavetes most successful film.

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no pass

Friday, July 9, 2010

John Cassavetes - Gloria (1980)

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The film tracks the adventures of Gloria Swenson (Rowlands) with six-year-old Phil Dawn (John Adames), after the boy's family is murdered by the mafia. Phil retains his father's ledger of the mob's illegal activities, which might earn him FBI protection. But, because Gloria has a criminal past, she cannot go to the authorities, and instead attempts to make a deal with the mob to hand over the ledger in exchange for Phil's life.

Version Francaise
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English version
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English & French (French, English, Spanish, Italian, German, Arabic, Portuguese, Hindi, Dutch, Turkish, Hungary, Greek idx+sub in file)

no pass

Monday, June 21, 2010

John Cassavetes - A Woman Under The Influence (1974)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072417/

'A Woman Under Influence' Stars Gena Rowlands as Frenetic Wife:The Cast

When a husband and wife need to keep saying how much they love each other, something's apt to be awfully wrong. That nervous repetition is one of the danger signals in John Cassavetes's "A Woman Under the Influence," and it contains all the warning urgency of a siren. The movie played on Saturday at the New York Film Festival.

Throughout, the film dwells on the abrasions of daily living, centered in the domestic world where each individual grinds on the other's nerves. Gena Rowlands plays a woman adrift. Her manic, likable, hard-hat husband (Peter Falk) quite hysterically keeps assuring her that everything's fine. Meanwhile, she looks to him for her identity, asking him to tell her "what" to be, insisting that she'll "be anything" he wants. Later, he punctuates a horrendous uproar by shouting "Just be yourself!" But she hardly has a self--beyond the bundle of symptoms that make up her hectic public persona.

Miss Rowlands unleashes an extraordinary characterization of a harried, anxious creature, who's convinced that she "makes a jerk of" herself every day. (The actresses' style of performing sometimes shows a kinship with that of the early Kim Stanley or the recent Joanne Woodward, but the notes of desperation are emphatically her own.) Despair lurks behind her smile--which often collapses suddenly--as she jabbers, hums or retreats to a little-girl manner. Pantomime is one of her defenses. She mugs with exasperation, working her jaw and rolling her eyes when she's annoyed or throwing indignant punches into the air. When frenzy gives way to apology, her mouth tightens with resentment, which then yields to a miserable leer. With her three small children, she's wildly demonstrative--she seems to be pleading for their affection; trying to be a fellow-child who plays their games.

A troubled person, yes, and certainly an insecure one. But she doesn't seem sick or crazed enough to justify the crack-up that's awaiting her, nor to spend six months in a sanitarium. And that's the hitch in the movie: you can't really tell how the director regards this character. Mr. Cassavetes is unquestionably sympathetic to the rootless state of the middle-American housewife. (Moreover, the hospitalization is meant to seem like a betrayal by the husband.)

But--perhaps unintentionally--he has made the man appear much crazier than his wife; are we supposed to assume that his frantic nature has driven her over the edge? Or are we meant to see madness as contagious? Ultimately, the essential problems of this woman remain unclear: we're shown her behavior, but not what inspired it.

The movie is also a study in embarrassment--since that's the dominant emotion shared by everyone who encounters this head-long person. There's also a conscientious effort to show a continuing relationship, but the picture doesn't touch a common nerve in the way that Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes From a Marriage" does--because a number of moments that could be moving or touching are made to be farcical.

Peter Falk gives a rousing performance as the man who lives at a perpetual bursting point, and the children are very well directed. But the movie didn't need to be 2 hours and 35 minutes long: there's too much small talk, which doesn't really reveal character. Still, the most frightening scenes are extremely compelling, and this is a thoughtful film that does prompt serious discussion.
Nora Sayre, NY Times, October 14, 1974

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Spanish sub:
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http://rapidshare.com/files/166986784/A_Woman_Under_The_Influence_2.srt

no pass
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English | Subtitles: French and Spanish .srt
no pw

John Cassavetes - Faces (1968)

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The disintegration of a marriage is dissected in John Cassavetes’ searing Faces. Shot in high-contrast 16mm black and white, the film follows the futile attempts of captain of industry Richard (John Marley) and his wife, Maria (Lynn Carlin), to escape the anguish of their empty marriage in the arms of others. Featuring astonishingly powerful, nervy performances from Marley, Carlin, and Cassavetes regulars Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel, Faces confronts suburban alienation and the battle of the sexes with a brutal honesty and compassion rarely matched in cinema.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

John Cassavetes - Opening Night (1977)

Plot:
Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) rehearses for her latest play, about a woman unable to admit that she is aging. When she witnesses the accidental death of an adoring young fan, she begins to confront the personal and professional turmoil she faces in her own life. Featuring a moving performance by Rowlands (and with some scenes shot on stages with live audiences reacting freely to the writing and performing), John Cassavetes’ Opening Night exposes the drama of an actress who at great personal cost makes a part her own.

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

John Cassavetes - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

Plot synopsis:
Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), an amiable strip-club owner, pays off his debt to a group of sleazy loan sharks. To celebrate, he spends the night partying with a few of his favorite girls, indulges his unfortunate weakness for drinking and gambling, and ends up owing $23,000 to gangsters, putting him right back where he started. The gangsters demand that he pay off the debt by executing a competitor of theirs. What sounds like a simple enough plot is at it's heart an allegory, though, about the everyman vs. the powers-that-be.

The story obeys the step-by-step fatalism of an unfolding nightmare, whereby small mistakes and temptations lead to deeper consequences, such as can be found in classic films noirs with Edward G. Robinson, Glenn Ford, and Jean Gabin. Looked at purely as narrative, there is surprisingly little waste in the script: each scene advances and intensifies the central dramatic situation. Cassavetes even fulfills the genre contract with action sequences (rare for him) that involve shootings, chases, and sinister underlit garages, perhaps drawing on his own past experience as an actor in crime movies. On the other hand, the film’s enduring power comes across most in subtle details of setting and character that play against, or in inertial counterpoint to, these obligatory propulsive scenes.

Cosmo’s strip club, the Crazy Horse West, functions as a viscous flypaper to which the film keeps attaching itself, where time dawdles and dilates in a constant night. (Cassavetes insisted these nightclub scenes be shot through gels, the effect of which created stylized pools of isolating red or blue light for the owner-impresario to walk through.) Cosmo has gilded his tawdry peep show with a series of fantasy backdrops, all introduced by the dumpy, epicene master of ceremonies, Teddy, professionally known as Mr. Sophistication, who “takes” the audience to exotic locales. Unforgettably portrayed by Meade Roberts, Mr. Sophistication belongs to that tribe Dostoyevsky called “the insulted and the injured.” He oozes affronted, buffoonish humiliation. But he also epitomizes the needy, oversensitive artist, a self-parody of Cassavetes himself, who is hungry for the spotlight but believes himself fundamentally homely and unloved.

Ben Gazzara turns in a brilliant performance as the unhappy Cosmo. (That Gazzara was unhappy himself through much of the shooting, finding it hard to sympathize with or admire his character, only reinforces our sense of Cosmo as discomfited with his chump role in life.) Cosmo seems always to be sniffing himself for something rancid or fraudulent. Trying to live up to an elegant standard of sophistication, he mutes his Sicilian street temper with a false veneer of politeness and seductive blather. In many ways, this character is another alter-ego for Cassavetes.

Cassavetes clearly believed the self to be a constant bluff, a desperate improvisation launched in heavy fog. He told an interviewer: “People don’t know what they are doing, myself included. They don’t know what they want or feel. It’s only in the movies that they know what their problems are and have game plans for dealing with them.” The closest thing Cosmo has to a game plan is: The show must go on. At bottom he is a man of the theater, at its most Fellini-esque and flea-bitten. You do your job the best you can, even if it’s just shaking your tits onstage in the no-win situation life hands you. It is this sort of philosophical stoicism that informs much of the nobility in Cassavetes’ grubby universe.

Thirty years ago, when The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was first released, it bombed at the box office. Critics found it disorganized, self-indulgent, and unfathomable; audiences took their word for it and stayed away. Today, the film seems a model of narrative clarity and lucidity: either our eyes have caught up to Cassavetes, or the reigning aesthetic has evolved steadily in the direction of his personal cinematic style. Now we are more accustomed to hanging out and listening in on the comic banality of small talk (no small thanks to Seinfeld, one might argue); to a semidocumentary, handheld camera, ambient-sound approach; to morally divided or not entirely sympathetic characters, dollops of “dead time,” and subversions of traditional genre expectations.

The film, seen today, generates considerable suspense, part of which comes from classic man-against-the-mob conventions: seeing how the noose of fate is tightened. Part of it, however, comes from Cassavetes’ perverse reluctance to play the game of simple entertainment, offering more complex rewards instead.