Husbands (John Cassavetes, 1970)

 

Cast: Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Jenny Runacre, Jenny Lee Wright, Noelle Kao, John Cullers, Meta Shaw Stevens, Leola Harlow, Delores Delmar, Eleanor Zee, Claire Mallis, Peggy Lashbrook. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Victor J. Kemper. Film editing: John Cassavetes.

There are those who think Husbands is a masterpiece and those who think it’s a self-indulgent mess. While I incline to the latter opinion, I’m willing to hear what those who admire it have to say. Cassavetes is a favorite of those who admire his uncompromising individuality as a filmmaker, and he never displayed it more thoroughly than in Husbands. He compiled months of raw footage shot in New York and London, which he then submitted to an editor, who made what previewers though was a superbly commercial comedy about suburban husbands on a spree. But that wasn’t what Cassavetes wanted, so he took the footage back and edited it into a wholly idiosyncratic film with flashes of comedy but extended scenes of pain. It opens with still photographs, snapshots of some family gathering attended by four buddies: Harry (Ben Gazzara), Archie (Peter Falk), Gus (Cassavetes), and Stuart (David Rowlands). But Stuart appears in the fim only in these photos because he’s dead: The actual movie starts with his funeral, after which Harry, Archie, and Gus express their grief by going on an extended bender, which eventually winds up with the three carousing with any women they can pick up in a London hotel. I can see what Cassavetes is up to with the film: a searching look at the 14-year-old boy in every middle-aged man. And I have to admit that it works. But is it a satisfactory movie? Why do scenes like the beer-sodden song contest in a bar, and the consequent vomiting scene in the bar’s men’s room go on so long? Does Cassavetes not trust the viewer to get the message? Admirers of the film argue that this is exactly the point: the message is in the experience of enduring these and other scenes. We squirm in our seats because Cassavetes wants us to. But is that art or torture? 

Opening Night (John Cassavetes, 1977)

Gena Rowlands in Opening Night

Cast: Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Joan Blondell, Paul Stewart, Zohra Lampert, Laura Johnson, John Tuell. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Al Ruban. Production design: Brian Ryman. Film editing: Tom Cornwell. Music: Bo Harwood.

If at some moments you're uncertain whether what's happening in Opening Night is taking place on-stage or off-, that's the point. Gena Rowlands's Myrtle Gordon is no longer able, in part (but not entirely) because of her alcoholism, to distinguish art from life. This, to me, is John Cassavetes's most accessible film -- which is ironic, since it was a critical and commercial disaster on its initial release in the United States. Cassavetes was unable to find an American distributor for the film, and it didn't get one until two years after his death. Myrtle is struggling through the New Haven tryouts for a play called The Second Woman, which is about the difficulties the character she's playing has with getting older. After one performance, a hyped-up young fan all but assaults her with adoration, but then, as Myrtle's limousine pulls away from the theater, the fan is struck by a car and killed as Myrtle looks back in horror. The fan's death precipitates a breakdown: Myrtle acts up on stage, objecting to a scene in which her co-star and former lover Maurice (Cassavetes) slaps her, arguing with the playwright (Joan Blondell, in a role that was first offered to Bette Davis) that the play's preoccupation with aging is wrong-headed, fighting with her director, Manny (Ben Gazzara), and breaking character on stage during performances. She also begins to see the young woman who was killed, sometimes explaining the vision away as an actress's technique for getting into character, but eventually resorting to consultations with spiritualists. Rowlands is simply phenomenal throughout the film, a performance that must be seen. But Opening Night is overlong at 144 minutes, and it has some of its writer-director's too-loose improvisatory qualities, especially in the scene in which the play finally opens on Broadway and Myrtle and Maurice improvise the final act to the great amusement of the audience, turning the opening night into a hit. In fact, it doesn't seem nearly as hilarious as that audience finds it, and Myrtle's transition from falling-down drunk at the beginning of the opening night performance into quick-witted improviser is hardly convincing. But it's a mistake to try to put any Cassavetes story into a conventional context; he's doing his own thing, and you either appreciate it or you don't. Look for Cassavetes regulars Peter Falk and Seymour Cassel, along with his friend Peter Bogdanovich, in the crowd at the opening night.

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

Ben Gazzara in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

Cast: Ben Gazzara, Timothy Carey, Seymour Cassel, John Kullers, Al Ruban, Azizi Johari, Virginia Carrington, Meade Roberts. Screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cinematography: Mitch Breit, Al Ruban. Production design: Sam Shaw. Film editing: Tom Cornwell. Music: Bo Harwood.

I am never going to be a fan of John Cassavetes's movies, and I don't care if I ever see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie again, but I have to admit that his unconventional moviemaking had a deep influence on American movies. What could be more conventional, after all, than a film about a club owner forced by the mob into assassinating a rival mob leader? It's the stuff of 1940s film noir, and of countless movies afterward. But Cassavetes's unconventional approach to conventional material obviously exerted an influence on directors like Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, to name only the best. The club owner is Cosmo Vitelli, played superbly by Ben Gazzara, who runs up gambling debts he can't start to pay. So the mobsters agree to forgive the debt if he will kill their chief rival, the Chinese bookie of the title, who turns out to be the capo di tutti capi in L.A.'s Chinatown. (The film was made two years after Roman Polanski had Jake Gittes told to forget it.) And although a full plot summary would reveal its conventional bones, it's what Cassavetes, along with the improvisatory crew of actors and his freewheling cameramen, does with the material that matters. Cosmo's club, for example, is a strip joint with a master of ceremonies called Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts), who resembles Joel Grey's M.C. of the Kit Kat Klub in Cabaret (Bob Fosse, 1972) only in that he's heavily made up and a bit epicene. As the girls sashay about topless in shabby costumes, he sings (very badly) sentimental oldies like "I Can't Give You Anything but Love," "After the Ball," and "Imagination." The effect is gruesomely hilarious, a tone that persists throughout the film. When Cosmo sets out to accomplish his murderous mission, he's been provided with a stolen car that's been hot-wired, so he can't stop anywhere once he's started. But the car blows a tire in the middle of freeway traffic, eliminating that part of the plans. Nevertheless, he persists, calling a cab to get him closer to the target. First, however, he has to buy a dozen hamburgers to feed and quiet the guard dogs, but the waitress argues with him that he really doesn't want them all put unwrapped in a single bag. These mishaps are the stuff of black comedy, and they're nicely handled. But Cassavetes's improvisatory style and the somewhat dizzying hand-held closeups on the action seem more mannered than is really good for the film. There's brilliance here, especially in the performances of Gazzara and the mainstay of many Cassavetes films, Seymour Cassel, but the whole thing seems like a rough draft of a better movie.

Anatomy of a Murder (Otto Preminger, 1959)

Joseph N. Welch, Lee Remick, and George C. Scott in Anatomy of a Murder

Paul Biegler: James Stewart
Laura Manion: Lee Remick
Lt. Frederick Manion: Ben Gazzara
Parnell Emmett McCarthy: Arthur O'Connell
Maida Rutledge: Eve Arden
Mary Pilant: Kathryn Grant
Claude Dancer: George C. Scott
Judge Weaver: Joseph N. Welch

Director: Otto Preminger
Screenplay: Wendell Mayes
Based on a novel by John D. Voelker (as Robert Traver)
Cinematography: Sam Leavitt
Music: Duke Ellington

An exceptional film, far more deserving of the year's best picture Oscar than the bombastic Ben-Hur (William Wyler), Anatomy has a lot of great things going for it: the wonderful courtroom conflict between old Hollywood pro James Stewart and Method-trained newcomer George C. Scott; the tension and volatility of Ben Gazzara as the defendant; the presence of such scene-stealers as Arthur O'Connell and Eve Arden in the supporting cast, along with other character actor stalwarts like Murray Hamilton, John Qualen, Orson Bean, Howard McNear, and Jimmy Conlin. And even the "stunt casting" of non-actor Joseph N. Welch, famous for the integrity he showed in his confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings five years earlier, pays off handsomely, with Welch bringing both gravitas and humor to his role as the trial judge. The soundtrack by Duke Ellington also adds a touch of greatness to the movie, which  David Thomson calls "magnificent." Where I think it falls short of magnificence is in the treatment of the rape victim played by Lee Remick. There is, of course, some ambiguity remaining in the film as to whether she was in fact raped, but the part as written by Wendell Mayes and the performance as directed by Preminger turns the presumed victim into an air-headed sex kitten. It's possible that Hollywood, so long precluded by the Production Code from even treating the subject of sexual assault, hadn't yet developed a grammar and vocabulary for dealing with the subject. Remick was a fine actress, and she does manage to show moments of vulnerability in her performance, but the general impression of the character given by the film verges on the despicable "she was asking for it." Preminger had been taunting the Code since The Moon Is Blue (1954) and The Man With the Golden Arm (1955), challenging the strictures on language (the words "virgin" and "seduce") in the former and drug use in the latter. Anatomy continued the assault on prudishness, though few who watch it today will be shocked by its rather clinical discussion of whether Laura Mannion was indeed raped, or be inclined to sniff daintily, as Time magazine did in its review, that the film "seems less concerned with murder than with anatomy."