Announced and postponed many times, now available at last in France in a 7-DVD boxset: Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night. A mythical and major author, John Cassavetes died prematurely at 60 in 1989 and left us with twelve films. The five included in this boxset are central to appreciate all the facets of the filmmaker.
The boxset can nevertheless be completed with Minnie and Moskowitz (MK2), Gloria (Columbia), Love Streams (Cinemalta) and A Child Is Waiting (Cinemalta), which are already available on DVD, the only missing titles left being Too Late Blues, Big trouble and above all Husbands to gather all of Cassavetes on DVD in Europe.
In this boxset, two discs are entirely dedicated to special features: original trailers, interviews with Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, Al Ruban and Lea Goldoni, audio interviews with Cassavetes by critics and historians Michel Ciment and Michael Henry Wilson (150 mins), the documentary “Anything for John” by Doug Headline and Dominique Cazenave, which relates Cassavetes’ career through archives footage and interviews with his relatives (90 mins). Each of the five films are introduced by historian Patrick Brion and directors Alain Corneau, Claude Miller or Jean-François Stévenin.
Major films and numerous extras enable us to draw a line between a rather classical Cassavetes and a fundamentally modern Cassavetes (Shadows and Faces vs A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie).
What is even more striking is whereas Cassavetes is considered as a myth, the release of his films in France have always been quite difficult.
Shadows, first independent cinema prize
Shadows started out… with a call for donations on a radio program called “Night People” by Gene Sheppard, at 1am. Cassavetes declared that it was possible to make a film totally free of the commercial constraints imposed by the studios if every listener sent him a dollar. The next day, Cassavetes received 2,000 one-dollar bills and found himself behind the camera filming improvisations with no screenplay. For four months, Cassavetes shot scenes based on the life of a black family in New York. He said, “I thought I had a magic tool for filming impressions and what people are instead of their inner lives.”
The film opened to a full house but all the viewers soon left. This did not stop Jonas Mekas writing in “Film Culture” that the new generation of filmmakers could now make their films on their own. To mark the event, “Film Culture” created an Independent Cinema Prize, which was awarded to Cassavetes on January 26, 1959. In explaining its decision, the revue stressed that “Shadows, more than any other recent American film, presents contemporary reality in a new and unconventional way (…) the situations and the atmosphere of New York nightlife are rendered in a lively, cinematographic, real way.”
After the flop at the opening, which seemed irreparable, Cassavetes got 15,000 dollars from independent producers to shoot for ten extra days. In the portrait made for Cinéastes de notre temps by André S. Labarthe in 1965 and 1968, John Cassavetes said, “The first version was shown to movie buffs who loved it and word got around that the second version was more commercial. But I prefer the ten days of the new shoot over the four months of improvisations.” And as it happened, he never improvised again.
Faces, a myth
Picked up by the studios, Cassavetes made Too Late Blues then A Child is Waiting, which was Judy Garland’s last appearance on the big screen. The film did not appeal to the producer Stanley Kramer who had it re-edited against his director’s wishes. Cassavetes was done with studios.
Far from the Hollywood system, he made independent movies with his wife, actress Gena Rowlands, who he married in 1953, and his friends. The brilliant result was Faces.
Without having a definite subject at the start, Cassavetes’ creative spirit was in full swing. Ideas piled up. The first draft was 265 pages and only laid out half the film. Cassavetes feared it would last 10 hours and he started making the film with 10,000 dollars.
In 1965, when Labarthe visited him in Los Angeles while he was editing, he was full of hope: “It’s one of the drawbacks of low-budget movies, made with non-professionals, but we prefer it that way (…) having the freedom. We don’t know if it’s any good. But it’s worth a year with no salary to say something. If we don’t have fun, we die… Laughing in the face of tragedy. Being able to film joy. It’s so much better than all the worries (politics, religion) that waste our time.”
Cassavetes’ films would never be political. He even totally ignored the Vietnam War and the protests it sparked. Cassavetes’ aim was to “avoid self-censorship and find an inner truth. To do that means working on a subject whose truth is a little beyond us.”
Six months of shooting, three years in post-production and a house mortgaged for a result unique in the history of cinema. Thierry Jousse described it like this: “A hand-held camera always moving, following the actors’ movements, seems to grope its way along, feverishly searching for faces and bodies in long sequence shots. It is not isolated but included in the action. The editing brings another type of freer movement, giving a sense of telescoping. We start with an actor’s vague movement, but then suddenly change angles. There are very fast panoramic shots, spasmodic series of close-ups with no continuity and inserts.”
A Woman Under the Influence or nine scenes to make a masterpiece
Cassavetes went back to this slightly bombastic, excessive and violent technique in Husbands (1970) before making his only and brilliant comedy, Minnie and Moskowitz (1971).
In 1974, A Woman Under the Influence was a new masterpiece. From Faces, he kept the organization of the scenes into blocks but dropped all the affectations: the long shots, low-angle shots, sudden switches to close-ups. He also stuck with a subject that Al Ruban described as “A film on everyday life that your neighbors don’t notice.”
First, it describes in five scenes the 24 hours leading up to Mabel being locked up in a psychiatric hospital. Mabel had put forward five arguments on why it was her husband’s job to look after her. The last was the most moving: “love, friendship, comfort, a good mother, I belong to you but I’m losing my grip.”
For this actor’s film in which Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands are incredible, Cassavetes uses no long shots, even in the scene when Mabel is supposed to slide into insanity. The traditional back and forth shots between Mabel and those who look and evaluate her - the doctor, her husband and mother-in-law - accentuate the weight of social restrictions placed on Mabel that takes away the privacy the couple needs to love each other. This is what Mabel-Rowlands says in a magnificent dialogue written by her husband: “You know it’s about us and you go outside with them when you should be in here.”
The lyrical four last scenes are about children, a walk by the sea and Mabel’s return home.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie
After this peak, Cassavetes made a genre film, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. But this film noir constantly frustrates the viewers’ expectations by switching between short scenes of suspense and long scenes in which Cosmo (wonderful Ben Gazzara) demonstrates the elegance and class that a childhood trauma made into his life’s aspiration. This explains the name Mr. Sophistication for the star of his strip show and the strip-teasers called the Divines. It explains the long scene of orchids given to four dancers and the refusal to only lose a small amount gambling.
The film’s action takes place over four days and each of the evenings is marked by Cosmo’s different outfits: white suit, black suit, leather jacket and green shirt. The film, mostly shot at night, is also the one in which Cassavetes pushes furthest his experimentation with color. We also note a two-minute long scene in which Gazzara, despite being seriously injured, manages to pump up his troupe, threatened by depression and petty quarrels. “All we can give is love. It’s the only wealth I have,” says Mr. Sophistication when Cosmo is condemned to going back to the only family he has left, his show family.
The film was badly distributed in France. It was released under the title “Le bal des vauriens” with 30 minutes cut from the version Cassavetes wanted. Opening Night, his new masterpiece, fared even worse.
Opening night, the epitome of a life’s work
In Opening Night, the famous theater actress, Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands), is the star of a play by Sarah Goode called “The Second Woman”. The play talks about the progressive decline of a woman’s power with age. At some time in life, youth dies and a second woman comes on stage. This is what Sarah Goode wants Myrtle to accept but she rises up against this character, against her nature, that she is being asked to play. With the help of alcohol, she invents the ghost of Nancy, a young, passionate admirer whose accidental death she witnessed on the night of a performance. She dialogues with the ghost of the young woman as if she was the first woman of her life.
Insanity was lying in wait for Mabel in A Woman Under the Influence just as it lurks for Myrtle here. But thanks to her ability to create hallucinations, the actress manages to hold off a destiny that condemns her to growing old.
To evoke the ghost of Nancy, Cassavetes used the same methods as in Faces. Using close-ups on parts of Myrtle and Nancy’s faces he convinces us that the two of them are the same person. Alternating inserts of their hands or part of their face make them blend into one character glowing with hope.
An ode to the creativity of actors and show business people in escaping the sadness and despair of passing time and fading feelings, the film had a profound influence on Pedro Almodovar, who used it as a sub-text in All About my Mother (the hero’s age, reference to the accident scene and the flash-back to the memory of the accident) after he saw it just before shooting his film:
“Last night, I saw Opening Night and I felt someone was telling me a secret that concerned me directly. It was an active emotion. It was the most intense moment in my life for months. I would be so proud if I could make a film like that. There are all the elements I love in films: an actress, a play, the relationship with a director, the lover who is an actor and a vast ocean of despair!”
A masterpiece of lyricism, daring and humor, Opening Night, made in 1978 was only released in France 14 years later, in 1992. It took the success of Love Streams, which won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival in 1984 before The Killing of a Chinese Bookie was be re-released in its original version. Then came Opening Night, presented first at the La Rochelle Festival in 1987 without French subtitles, which was a knockout. This marked the beginning of recognition by a new generation of movie buffs for the work of Cassavetes, who became the legend he is today.
Jean-Luc Lacuve
Bibliography:
- Thierry Jousse: “John Cassavetes”, 1989, ed. Cahiers du Cinéma, collection Auteurs.
- Dominique Noguez: “Une renaissance du cinéma, le cinéma “underground” américain”.
- Portrait of John Cassavetes directed by André S. Labarthe in 1965 and 1968 for the series Cinéastes de notre temps.
More details about the John Cassavetes DVD boxset.
As the end of the year is approaching, it’s time to look back on 2008 most memorable DVD releases in France, in the United States and in England and pick your favourite titles to add them to your DVD collection or give them as Christmas or anytime presents.
“The Exterminating Angel is my “favourite film for the time being”. I love Bunuel but I’ve discovered this one recently. It’s an incredible film because it is absolutely paradoxical: it’s not rational at all, it’s filled with metaphors that don’t tell a thing -and certainly not moral things- and simultaneously it totally makes sense. You keep saying to yourself “this could be totally something else”, it seems aleatoy but it is not, it’s absolutely consistent. You have the impression there’s a lot of joy and fun. Sheep come, you think about the sacrifice, but it’s not stressed, it’s a game with symbols. And I love those forms -the returns, the repetitions, like the first scene you see once, then twice. Or like the end: the characters manage to leave the room where they were locked (without any reason, as if there as an invisible force), they are outside, they’re in the world. And then it starts again! They enter in a church, they’re even more, and they are stucked inside… You don’t know why. It leaves room for everybody’s fantasies.”
She was the journalist in La Commune by Peter Watkins, she was Sonia -the loving and idealistic lesbian teacher- in Oublier Cheyenne by Valérie Minetto, we saw her slightly crazy in The Science of Sleep by Michel Gondry… Enthusiastic about theater and cinema experiences (she wrote and performed her own play “The Cage of Blonds” with Marie Payen, starred in the last show by Philippe Decouflé…), she will star with Jean-Luc Bideau and Adélaïde Leroux in Andrew Kötting’s new film Alexander Ivul. In the meantime, you can watch her in Musée haut, musée bas by Jean-Michel Ribes and in Comme une étoile dans la nuit by René Féret…
A filmmaker with a protean work, whose documentaries are as fascinating as his fictions, Werner Herzog has been one of the most important German directors for more than forty years.
