The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective.

4/22/11 9:48 PM

Retrospective: John
Cassavetes

By Tim Applegate

Tim Applegate is a poet and freelance

writer in western Oregon. His poems
regularly appear in various national
publications. He is also a frequent
contributor to the online film journals
Kamera and 24 Frames Per Second.

Over a span of three-and-a-half decades John Cassavetes appeared as an actor in

almost forty productions, creating in the process a compelling, if uneven, body of
work. A screen natural with an engaging, unaffected style, Cassavetes crafted a
number of indelible performances, including the unpredictable Franco in The Dirty
Dozen (1967), the husband who sells his soul to the devil in Rosemary's Baby
(1968), and the gangster Nicky in Elaine May's underrated Mikey and Nicky
(1976). But in the annals of cinema it is his groundbreaking career as a maverick
writer/director, an iconoclast who fashioned a series of brutally honest,
sometimes exasperating, fiercely original pictures, for which he will best be
remembered. From 1968, when he released Faces , until his untimely death, at 60,
in 1989, Cassavetes wrote and directed eight of the most unconventional movies
to ever grace American screens. (Before Faces , he directed two major studio
productions, Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963), as well as the
avant-garde Shadows (1959), a forerunner of the films
examined in this article.) Today, when independent filmmakers are lauded at
festivals worldwide, and even featured on their own television outlet (The
Sundance Channel), these eight astonishing pictures still represent, perhaps now
more than ever, one of the few essential canons in American film.

To audiences accustomed to traditional filmmaking, to formulaic stories told in

conventional cinematic terms, Cassavetes' movies were (and remain) difficult to
fathom. Intense character studies of middle-aged men and women in various
stages of spiritual and emotional disarray, his films break many of the accepted
rules of cinema: their pacing is erratic, their "plots" almost non-existent, their

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conclusions inconclusive. As noted Cassavetes' scholar Ray Carney points out, in

lieu of traditional stories the characters became the plot, their behavior the
narrative. And yet by refusing to pander to the audience's expectations, and by
allowing his actors (and himself) to discover their characters during the making of
the movies, Cassavetes was able to map out a kind of emotional terrain rarely
seen onscreen. "I won't call my work entertainment," he once said. "It's exploring.
It's asking questions of people, constantly. How much do you feel? How much do
you know? Are you aware of this? Can you cope with this? A good movie will ask
you questions you haven't been asked before, ones that you haven't thought
about every day of your life."

Faces (1968)

Often credited as the first independent film to attract a mainstream American

audience, Faces presented a superb cast - John Marley as a disillusioned
executive, Gena Rowlands as a prostitute, Lynn Carlin as Marley's wife, and
Seymour Cassel as the object of Carlin's misplaced affections - in a relentless,
unsparing depiction of marital strife. Like all of Cassavetes' pictures, Faces hinges
on mood swings, long passages of desperate, drunken laughter giving way to
sudden moments of knee-buckling despair. Without warning, Marley informs Carlin
that he wants a divorce. Following a night of carnal pleasure, Cassel discovers the
woman he has just bedded lying unconscious on a bathroom floor.

Many of the familiar trademarks - the jittery camerawork, the cinema verite
lighting, the extended (what some critics mistakenly considered misshapen)
sequences - are already here. The supporting performances - Fred Draper as
Freddie, Val Avery as McCarthy, Dorothy Gulliver as Florence, among others - are
all first-rate. The dialogue is scathing, ironic, and precise.

The cast and crew worked, for the most part, without pay, and many of the
interiors were filmed in Cassavetes' own home. Disdainful of a hierarchical studio
system that worshipped money andpower over art (a system which had recently
blackballed him) he did not limit the cast and crew to a single duty. Between
takes Cassel ran wires, or painted walls. The cameraman (George Sims) helped
edit the footage. Various members of the crew appear as extras in the film.

Critical reception was, to put it mildly, mixed. Surprisingly, Faces garnered three
Academy Award nominations - for Cassel and Carlin's performances, as well as
Cassavetes' original script. Not surprisingly, the film has survived as a cult favorite
long after most of the movies of 1968 are all but forgotten, and is still considered
in many critical quarters the director's most accomplished work.

Husbands (1970)

Boozy camaraderie among three New York City professionals (Cassavetes, Ben
Gazzara, and Peter Falk), following the death of a mutual friend. After the funeral
the three husbands embark on a drinking binge, argue with their wives, fly to
London, gamble at a casino, and manage to pick up women even more unstable
than they are. They confront mortality with bad jokes and expensive whiskey. Like
the male characters in Faces they are loud, aggressive, funny, obnoxious, and

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charming.

Directing himself for the first time, Cassavetes delivers a fine, ingratiating
performance. As Archie, Peter Falk is immensely likable. And Jenny Runacre,
playing the deeply conflicted woman Cassavetes picks up in a London casino,
makes an ideal match: like Cassavetes she is manic, quirky, and adrift. But in many
ways the picture belongs to Gazzara. In the trickiest role in the film Gazzara
evokes both our dismay (in one disarming scene he slaps his wife, then her
mother) and our sympathy. When he sits on a hotel bed quietly weeping, we
don't know whether to laugh or to weep along with him.

After the claustrophobic camera placements of Faces , Husbands loosens up. Even
an extended scene in a neighborhood bar feels airy, the camera casually panning a
chorus of drinkers who regale the three men with drunken renditions of old
favorite songs. In London Falk stands in the middle of a rain-swept street pleading
with the young woman he is trying, unsuccessfully, to seduce. And in the final
sequence Cassavetes kneels in his driveway to comfort his young daughter while
his son appears, like a blur, at the edge of the frame, a brief moment that
resonates long after the film is over. Here is the father and husband, not the
drunken wag.

At a dinner party in Rome Cassavetes pitched Husbands to a wealthy Italian

businessman, who agreed on the spot to finance the picture. To gain the
businessman's confidence, Cassavetes assured him that the script, which was not
yet written, was completed, and that his two co-stars, who had only briefly
discussed the possibility of even making the movie, were fully committed to the
film.

"I believe that if an actor creates a character out of his emotions and
experiences, he should do with that character what he wants," Cassavetes said of
Husbands . "If Peter and Ben and I have three characters, why should a director
come in and impose a fourth will? If the feelings are true and the relationship is
pure, the story will come out of that. Most directors make a big mystery of their
work, they tell you about your character and your responsibility to the overall
thing. Bullshit. With people like Ben and Peter you don't give direction. You give
freedom and ideas."

Minnie and Moscowitz (1971)

For those who consider Faces and Husbands too raw, too long, and too
unflinching, here is the antidote…of sorts.

Seymour Cassel is Seymour Moscowitz, a New Jersey parking lot attendant who
relocates to Los Angeles searching, like many of Cassavetes' characters, for
something he cannot quite define. Gena Rowlands is Minnie Moore, a museum
curator whose hunger for love has led her into a disastrous affair with a married
man (Cassavetes), and a blind date with a bizarre middle-aged sociopath (Val
Avery). When Avery, enraged by Minnie's rejection, confronts Rowlands in a
parking lot, Cassel rushes to her rescue. Cassel then pursues Minnie for the rest of
the picture, courting her with all the subtlety of a bulldog. He is noisy, crass,

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persistent and, finally, irresistible. When she isn't pummeling him with her fists,
Minnie wearily accepts his advances. It's modern romance, as only Cassavetes
could envision it.

There are lovely, fey moments: Cassel and Rowlands dancing in a parking lot, or
serenading each other on a stairway; Cassel imitating Bugs Bunny; Rowlands
explaining to her mother (Lady Rowlands) that Seymour enjoys being a parking lot
attendant: "Mother, Seymour likes cars. He's very happy with cars."

Cassel is, as usual, splendid; like Rowlands, we're bowled over by his energy, his
exuberance for life. As the incurably romantic Minnie, Rowlands is luminous, her
line readings fresh and provocative; she's an emotional chameleon, constantly
changing skins. And in a genuinely hilarious cameo, Cassavetes' real-life mother
Katherine plays Moscowitz's overbearing Jewish mother. "This boy has no
ambition," she tells Minnie's mother. "He's not pretty. He eats sideways!"

One can easily imagine Cassavetes' detractors cringing when they viewed this
joyful romp - what could they criticize now? His famous, almost interminably long
takes are here replaced with short scenes and rapid edits. Except for one
disturbing exchange between Cassavetes and Rowlands, when he informs her that
his wife has attempted suicide, the tone of the film is lighthearted, almost
slapstick (in one sequence Cassel chases Rowlands down a sidewalk in his truck).
And if that weren't enough to infuriate those critics who loved to disparage him,
Cassavetes even thumbs his nose at the Hollywood movie kingdom those critics,
consciously or not, represent. "You know I think that movies are a conspiracy,"
Minnie tells her friend Florence (Elsie Ames). "They set you up from the time
you're a little kid. They set you up to believe in ideals, in strength, and of course,
in love. So you believe it."

Ironically, by the end of Minnie and Moscowitz we believe it too.

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)

In 1958, the year Broadway-trained actress Gena Rowlands appeared in her first
motion picture (The High Cost Of Living ), she married John Cassavetes, a creative
union that would flourish until Cassavetes' death in 1989. Over that period, and in
addition to her sterling work in her husband's landmark projects, Rowlands
appeared in numerous productions for such disparate directors as William Friedkin
(The Brinks Job ), Woody Allen (Another Woman ), and Jim Jarmusch (Night On
Earth ). In 1997 she portrayed, flawlessly, the courageous, self-sufficient widow in
Unhook The Stars , an underrated, under-attended picture directed by her son
Nick.

As Mabel Longhetti in A Woman Under The Influence , Rowlands gives what many
consider the finest performance of her career. Earthy one moment and ethereal
the next, Rowlands has always been a mercurial actress: in her best portrayals we
are never quite sure where she is taking us next. In Minnie and Moscovitz we
caught glimpses of that unpredictability, that spontaneity which, in A Woman
Under The Influence , becomes Mabel's dominant trait. It's a painful, affectionate,
harrowing portrait of a woman teetering on the edge.

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Mabel Longhetti is an emotionally fragile wife and mother of three who, during the
course of the movie, suffers a nervous breakdown. Peter Falk, in an impassioned,
superior characterization, is Rowlands' husband Nick. A construction foreman for
the city of L.A., Nick works long, demanding hours, and in the first scene he is
forced to cancel an evening with Rowlands when a water main breaks. In
response, Rowlands wanders into a nearby bar and picks up a stranger (O.G.
Dunn). The next morning Falk returns home with the members of his construction
crew, and in a bizarre morning ritual the men share a spaghetti breakfast with
Mabel. When Rowlands cradles one of the men (Billy Tidroe) in her arms, Falk loses
his patience and the mood of the sequence, the mood of the whole movie,
abruptly changes. It's a brilliantly written scene, and its key revelations - Mabel's
free spirit, Falk's sudden temper, Rowland's immense hunger for affection - echo
throughout the rest of the film.

When Mabel's eccentric behavior becomes, in Falk's opinion, unacceptable, he has

her committed. Six months later she returns home. And then, as in so much of
Cassavetes' work, the film ends where it began, somewhere in the middle. Once
again we are provided no easy answers, no way out. This is life, Cassavetes tells
us, not the simplistic fairy tales we are so used to seeing onscreen.

For the first time Cassavetes uses a background score - by Bo Harwood - to

heighten the movie's narrative tension. Caleb Deschanel's excellent, understated
camerawork adds a touch of elegance to the proceedings: in one scene the
camera pans across a room, past a bowl of fruit at the center of a table, to the
bed where Rowlands, in a cloud of morning light, now wakes. As always, the
secondary performances are uniformly stellar; like Robert Altman, Cassavetes
often employed the same actors (including numerous members of his and
Rowlands' families) in film after film, and you can sense the pleasure and
camaraderie these actors must have shared with their director. Also for the first
time Cassavetes features, to great effect, children. Without belaboring the point,
he shows us the three children somehow surviving the maelstrom of their parents'
wobbly marriage, and the reunion between Mabel and her kids, shot in a series of
intense close-ups, could not be less contrived, or more moving; it's a visionary
moment in a visionary film.

Like Randle McMurphy in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest , Mabel is "mad"
because she is unable to play the role society has created for her. Again and
again A Woman…questions our long-held notions of emotional stability by
dissecting the instability of the people who surround her. At the spaghetti
breakfast one of the construction workers suddenly bursts into song. On the
morning after their tryst, Dunn tells Mabel that he likes to pace around in the
morning and talk to himself. In a fit of rage and dismay Falk causes a co-worker to
tumble down the side of a hill. (Indeed, as the movie progresses, Falk's behavior
becomes nearly as eccentric as Rowlands'.) Even the doctor who commits her
seems slightly unhinged.

In one scene Rowlands, the consummate actress, turns to Falk, just as she must
have turned a hundred times to her husband, the director, and says "I don't know
what you want. How do you want me to be?"

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Yourself," Falk answers.

"You mean funny, or sad, or happy, or sly, or what? Which self?"

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)

"You could call it pretentious, indulgent, and full of

actorly trope. Why, then, can we simply not forget it?" -
Derek Malcolm, Century Of Films

Cassavetes once remarked that if one of his movies elicited too many positive
responses at a test screening, he would re-shoot it. With The Killing Of A Chinese
Bookie , he needn't have worried. Densely atmospheric, murkily lit, and often
obscure and confusing, The Killing…is one of Cassavetes' least accessible films,
and one of his finest. His first foray into the crime genre, The Killing…combines
standard action sequences - a gunfight, a chase, a double-cross - with an incisive
character study of a proud man who, through recklessness, has placed everything
he has ever worked for in jeopardy. At its dark center, The Killing…is Cassavetes'
unique meditation on what it takes to be a man in America, and it is not a
comforting sight.

If Mabel Longhetti was unable to play the role society had deemed proper for her,
Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara), the central character in The Killing…, is unable not
to. The epitome of cool, of macho artifice, Gazzara hides his emotions behind a
facade of self-control. The owner of what must be the strangest strip club ever
presented on film (instead of merely disrobing, the strippers perform, to the
audience's dismay, clumsy cabaret acts), Cosmo Vitelli is a veteran of the Korean
War, the lover of one of his strippers (Azizi Jahati), and a self-made man. He is
also $23,000 in debt to a local gambling syndicate. To relieve the debt, and
presumably save his life, Gazzara reluctantly agrees to murder a rival crime lord.

With each successive film Cassavetes' writing became more expansive, and in The
Killing…he explores such manly issues as money ("money, that's Jesus", one of
the characters says), drinking, sex, gambling and guns. He also explores, as he
does in all his work, the idea of authenticity. Gazzara, like his strippers, lives his
life on a stage - in one way or another they are always performing - and once
again Cassavetes' screenplay mines that theme for all it's worth. "I'm only
happy," Cosmo tells the strippers, "when I can be what people want me to be,
rather than be myself."

In minor but seminal roles, Seymour Cassel and cult favorite Timothy Carey play
small-time hoods, and in their quiet manner they are as menacing as anyone
Scorsese or Coppola ever put onscreen. (Proving once again that he is more
interested in the ineffable mysteries of human behavior than in formal cinema
technique, Cassavetes shoots an entire sequence between the gangsters and
Gazzara in near total darkness, only their ghostly voices rising through the murk.)
As Cosmo's girlfriend Rachel, Johati projects a touching vulnerability. And in the
role of a lifetime, Gazzara absolutely shines. A deeply intuitive actor, Gazzara here
relies on his instincts, and in so doing crafts what is perhaps the most memorable
character in the entire Cassavetes' oeuvre. His Cosmo is a model of restraint,

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modulation, and self-deceit: in the final scene he stands in front of his club,
gingerly patting his side, where a bullet is lodged, as if through sheer will he could
make the blood disappear. When, in the movie's most remarkable passage, he
discusses the mother who abandoned him, he holds the pain inside - he stays cool
- which makes the revelation even more wrenching.

After the relative box-office success of A Woman Under The Influence , The
Killing…was, predictably, a financial disaster. Fortunately in Europe it fared much
better, particularly in France where Cassavetes was once again hailed as an
authentic innovator, an American Godard.

Opening Night (1977)

First shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1977, and not released theatrically in the
United States until 1991, Opening Night tells the story of Myrtle Gordon (Gena
Rowlands) a famous stage actress who is rehearsing a play which details, in
Myrtle's words, "the gradual lessening of my power as a woman as I mature." The
play, written by a sixty-five year old playwright (Joan Blondell, in a role originally
conceived for Bette Davis), tackles the issue of aging head-on, a subject
Rowlands finds unworthy; "Age is depressing," she tells Blondell, "age is dull." In
the days leading up to the play's opening night on Broadway, the cast and crew
(including Cassavetes as an actor and Gazzara as the director) rehearse during the
day and then perform the play in front of a small live audience at night. Meanwhile
we watch, with that queasy fascination these pictures often evoke in the viewer,
Rowlands' attempts to come to grips with both her role in the production and her
own inner demons (aging, alcoholism, and the death of a young fan). Like so
many of Cassavetes' creations, Myrtle is dangling on the edge of an emotional
cliff.

Cassavetes never made a simple movie. To say, as some critics did at the time of
its release, that Opening Night is "about" aging, is to miss the point, for these
pictures were never about any one thing. Like his own directing methods, his films
are fluid; at their best, they seem to be occurring in real time. And if Opening
Night is "about" aging, it is also "about" actors, mortality, alcohol, insomnia, self-
delusion and finally, in the end, a kind of hope. And it is also very much about the
mysterious process of making movies in the first place. During the rehearsals
there are direct references to Minnie and Moscowitz, as well as A Woman Under
The Influence . And in the final scene Falk, Cassel and Peter Bogdanovich appear
backstage, playing themselves. In Cassavetes' movies, real life and filmed life
constantly blur, which is why they are so often compared to home movies, or
cinema verite. Unlike the previous films, the cinematography in Opening Night (by
Al Ruban) is formal, almost stately; Ruban often places the camera in a long
establishing shot, and then leaves it there, letting the actors find their space
within the static frame. Since many of the scenes take place on a stage, this
choice makes perfect sense; like the audience in the movie, we always know we
are watching a production or, in our case, a production within a production.

Cassavetes bristled at detractors who claimed he relied too much on

improvisation, and in Opening Night he addresses those critiques by showing, as
he once said, that "There's a difference between ad-libbing and improvising. And

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there's a difference between knowing what to do and just saying something. Or

making choices as an actor." When Blondell tells Rowlands "All you have to do is
say the lines with a degree of feeling," she is suggesting, of course, the
antitheses of Cassavetes' technique. And when Rowlands arrives for opening night
highly inebriated, Gazzara coaxes her onto the stage where she reinvents her role,
and with that reinvention greatly enhances the power of the play. Roger Ebert
once suggested that the key to understanding these movies is to recognize that
Cassavetes is always the Rowlands' character, and perhaps in this instance Ebert
is right. At the end of the picture Cassavetes stands on the stage, reveling with
the rest of the cast in the night's triumph, holding the hand
of the woman who has brought the audience to its feet.

For the live rehearsal scenes, Cassavetes placed an advertisement in a local paper
for people who would dress up and watch some actors perform scenes from a
play. He did not tell them when to laugh or applaud, because he wanted their
reactions to be genuine.

"He loved actors," Rowlands once said. "And he wanted the audience to enter
into the film with all of us, to have the feeling not just of observing but of being
there."

Gloria (1980)

"Look, I'm not very bright. I wrote a very fast-moving,

thoughtless piece about gangsters. And I don't even
know any gangsters." - Cassavetes on Gloria.

Now here is a true oddity, a Cassavetes' film shunned by many of his staunchest
admirers for being, gasp, too conventional. A cat-and-mouse chase movie played
out on the streets of New York City, Gloria is the director's second foray into the
crime genre, but unlike his inimitable The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie , Gloria is a
fairly traditional gangster tale. And though there are memorable touches - the
gritty locations, Bill Conti's excellent score, and Gena Rowlands' entertaining
performance - there is little to distinguish it from dozens of others of the same
ilk.

Rowlands is Gloria, the former girlfriend of a Mob boss, who now lives alone in a
shabby apartment building. When a neighbor (Buck Henry), an auditor for a crime
syndicate, turns over evidence to the FBI, his family is killed by hit men, but not
before one of the children, a six-year old boy, escapes with Gloria. For the next
two hours Gloria and the boy flee the pursuing mobsters, holing up in cheap
flophouses while trying, for reasons that are never made quite clear, to travel to
Pittsburgh.

The first problem with Gloria is that Cassavetes is not, and never claimed to be, a
particularly visual director. And although there is nothing inherently wrong with
his handling of the action scenes, clearly those sequences would have been better
served by a more visceral helmsman, a Sam Peckinpah, or a Walter Hill. Secondly
there is the performance (or, to be more exact, the non-performance) of Juan
Adames as the boy Rowlands rescues from the Mob; Adames seems

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uncomfortable in front of the camera, his line readings are clumsy, and despite
Rowlands' yeoman efforts there is little chemistry between her and the boy. And
then there is the issue of Cassavetes himself, who later admitted to an
interviewer that "I was bored because I knew the answer to the picture the
moment we began…All my best work comes from not knowing." Unfortunately
that boredom shows through. It isn't a bad movie, just a lazy one.

It's impossible to watch Gloria without comparing it to The Killing Of A Chinese

Bookie. In The Killing…the mob figures - Seymour Cassel, Timothy Carey, Morgan
Woodward - have a quiet intensity: when they strong-arm Gazzara you can feel
the heat, the tension, the sweat. In Gloria there is only one scene, near the end of
the movie, that attains that kind of authenticity, and it is no surprise that this
particular passage (featuring Rowlands and Basilio Franchina, as her former
boyfriend) is the best one in the film. But what ultimately sets The Killing…apart
from a hundred other similar stories, what gives it an air of greatness, is Gazzara's
absolute realization of the troubled central character Cosmo Vitelli. Gloria, on the
other hand, suffers by comparison because, for the first time in the Cassavetes'
oeuvre, we know where Rowlands isgoing. It's a smart, consistent, funny
characterization (Rowlands is simply too good an actress to give a bad
performance) but it lacks the spontaneity we've come to expect from her, a
spontaneity that would reappear, and reappear with a vengeance, in Cassavetes'
next project, the beautifully rendered Love Streams .

Gloria was originally submitted as a screenplay to MGM, and Cassavetes only

agreed to direct it as a favor to Rowlands, who had always wanted to play a
swaggering, tough-talking broad. Then, a few weeks before shooting began,
Cassavetes' father, whom John was very close to, passed away. Was Cassavetes,
admittedly bored and perhaps despondent over his father's death, merely going
through the motions? Was he doing it for the money? If so, then it was time well
spent, for the money that was gained from the picture was used to finance his
next project, a stunning personal testament and a fitting capstone to his and
Rowlands' remarkable collaboration.

Love Streams (1984)

"Love is a stream, it's continuous, it doesn't stop." -

Gena Rowlands as Sarah Lawson in Love Streams

A fearless, poignant, uncompromising portrayal of the lives of an alcoholic writer

(Cassavetes as Robert Harmon) and his emotionally-fragile sister (Rowlands),
Love Streams is not only Cassavetes' finest movie, not only one of a handful of
genuine masterworks in independent American film, it is also a brilliant summation
of an artist's entire career. With its numerous references to his past efforts -
echoes of the now-familiar themes - Love Streams stands as the final
confirmation of one man's vision of what personal cinema could achieve.

Like all of Cassavetes' work, Love Streams evolves on so many levels it is

impossible to assimilate in a single viewing. Many of the director's thematic
concerns - madness, alcoholism, emotional disconnection, sex, and love - are on
full display, and while, true to form, he strenuously avoids sentimentalizing those

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concerns, the emotional impact of the material is undeniable. When Rowlands

arrives at her brother's house with a menagerie of pets, we may laugh, but our
laughter is uneasy. When Harmon offers his eight-year old son a beer (because he
doesn't know how else to connect with him) we cringe at the implications. And
when Harmon is left bloodied and beaten by the husband of his estranged wife,
we experience sympathy for his plight and, at the same time, bewilderment over
the behavior that has caused that plight. Once again Cassavetes blurs the moral
distinctions, muddies the emotional waters, and demands the viewer's open mind.

As Sarah Lawson, Rowlands is a composite of her previous characters - of Mabel

Longhetti and Minnie Moore, of Myrtle Gordon and Jeannie Rapp - and once again
Rowlands superbly displays the elusiveness, the unpredictability that makes her
such a powerful screen force. Sarah's hallucinations - a fatal car accident, a
disastrous pool party, and a Felliniesque ballet recital - are particularly effective;
brief, haunting sequences that foreshadow the dreamlike ending of the film

Robert Harmon, too, is a compilation of previous roles. He is Cosmo Vitelli, in a

tux. He is Nick Longhetti, trying to physically drag Rowlands back from the brink
of insanity. He is John Cassavetes, who will die five years later of cirrhosis, with an
ever-present drink in his hand. And finally he is the consummate filmmaker who,
in the final shot of his final film, waves goodbye to Rowlands, and waves goodbye
to us.

Love Streams began as a play, by Ted Allan, starring Rowlands and Jon Voight.
(In the movie, Voight was originally scheduled to play the Harmon character -
rumored to be based, loosely, on Leonard Bernstein - but Cassavetes balked when
Voight said he also wanted to direct.) Then a few weeks before shooting began,
Cassavetes was informed by his doctor that he had six months to live, a time
frame that proved to be wildly incorrect and yet one that must have
lent the production a sense of urgency, particularly its stunning final scene when
Cassavetes, desperate for affection, tells Rowlands that she is the only person he
has ever truly loved.

Footnote

In the mid-eighties Cassavetes was brought in by friends, including Falk, to finish

directing Big Trouble , a hapless comedy he later disavowed. Following a long
illness he died, in Los Angeles, on February 3, 1989.

Conclusion

To claim that the movies of John Cassavetes are some of the most influential in
modern American cinema is not to overstate the case. Directors from Robert
Altman to Martin Scorsese, from John Sayles to Sean Penn, as well as scores of
lesser-known independent artists, have acknowledged the debt. And yet there are
those in the critical community who still consider Cassavetes' pictures nothing
more than pretentious exercises in self-indulgence, and perhaps the best measure
of their worth is that even now, thirty-five years after the release of Faces , these
works still spark fierce debate.

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The Film Journal...Passionate and informed film criticism from an auteurist perspective. 4/22/11 9:48 PM

Watched in sequence, these eight pictures have a raw, cumulative power, the
resonance of true art. If they seem strange, difficult, and demanding, they are so
by design. And as long as cinema is regarded as a bona-fide art form, they will
continue to be seen, continue to be rediscovered by successive generations of
discerning filmgoers. Like the characters they so ably portray, the movies of John
Cassavetes are crude, vibrant, aggressive, and essential, and they are not about
to go away.

© FILM JOURNAL 2002

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