Opening Night

OPENING NIGHT           A      
USA  (144 mi)  1977  d:  John Cassavetes 

[Opening Night] is the other side of A Woman Under the Influence, about a woman on her own, with no responsibility to anyone but herself, with a need to come together with other women. [Myrtle] is alone and in desperate fear of losing the vulnerability she feels she needs as an actress. [She is] a woman unable any longer to be regarded as young: Sex is no longer a viable weapon. You never see her as a stupendous actress. As a matter of fact, her greatest thrill was comfort, as it is for most actresses. Give me a play I can go into every night and can feel I have some awareness of who I am, what I am. [She didn't] want to expose myself in [certain] areas. So when she faints and screams on the stage, it's because it's so impossible to be told you are this boring character, you are aging and you are just like her. I would be unable to go on to the stage feeling that I'm nothing. I think that most actors would, and that's really what the picture is about. Although she resists [facing them,] Myrtle must finally accept and resolve the dilemmas which lie not only at the core of the play she is doing, but which [reflect] the basic realities of her own existence, from which she has heretofore fled, aided by alcohol, men, professional indulgence – and fantasy! The character is left in conflict, but she fights the terrifying battle to recapture hope. And wins! In and out of life the theme of the play haunts the actress until she kills the young girl in herself. 

—John Cassavetes

Perhaps the gutsiest film about theater ever made, right alongside Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952) or Desplechin’s ESTHER KHAN (2000), and though filmed in 1977, it was not released commercially until 1991, two years after Cassavetes’ death, as until then, incredulously enough, no theatrical distributor expressed an interest.  A film about the making of a theatrical play, both onscreen and off, with Gena Rowlands starring as Myrtle Gordon in the play A Second Woman written by the 65-year old Joan Blondell as Sarah Goode, which concerns a woman at the moment in her life when she realizes she has lost her youth, and the second woman takes over.  The part of the writer was originally conceived with Bettie Davis in mind, both screen legends from the 30’s, where the film was originally about the writer, where the integrity of the story came by showing an actress standing up to her.  Davis would have brought a much tougher dimension to the role, adding her own sense of theatricality as well.  Rowlands plays a still vibrant middle-aged star in her forties who has difficulty coming to terms with Blondell’s age, so avoids it at all costs, continually haunted by the ghost of a teenage girl (Laura Johnson), one of her fans whose accidental death she tragically witnessed one night, fantasizing a younger version of herself.  Perhaps inspired by ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), purportedly one of Cassavetes’ favorite films, a movie that might be called a woman’s picture, as it delves into different phases of a woman’s life and career, examining the various motivations, where Cassavetes turns the adoring fan of the Hollywood picture into a disturbing hallucination that haunts the actress, while also similarly staging out of town, tryout rehearsals of the play in New Haven, Connecticut as it nears its premiere in New York on Broadway.  One of her onstage actors is Cassavetes himself as Maurice Aarons, who interestingly plays a version of himself had he not married Gena Rowlands, a charming actor onstage who is something if a cynical womanizer offstage, largely making his way on his own, much as he did before he met Ms. Rowlands.  A word about the giant photographs of aging women on the set, a similar device was used by Woody Allen in Stardust Memories (1980), who used a giant, wall-sized photograph in his apartment that continually kept changing pictures, depending on his changing moods.  Also, the introductory still photos shown in the opening credits are used to brilliant effect, opening credits montage Opening Night YouTube (1:11), where Cassavetes, as he did in Faces (1968), uses close ups of blown-up photographs to exude sensuality to the character, while also using a cavernous penthouse apartment to reflect the immensity of Myrtle’s isolation and loneliness.     

Using the theatrical device of a play within a play, what’s curiously interesting about the film is there’s more time spent together onscreen between Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands than anything previously seen in a Cassavetes film, where they appear to relish each moment shared with the audience, becoming a sheer, unadulterated joy to watch, where through various rehearsals there’s a continuous stream of looks at scenes within the play, and each time it’s played just a bit differently, where their performances are not so much acted as captured in a time capsule retaining all its original vibrancy, where their characters are so effortlessly and absolutely real.  Rowlands gives an enthralling performance, perhaps especially significant because she absolutely defies the part she’s been given, even though it’s been written especially for her.  Part of it appears like a melodramatic soap opera as she wanders into an earlier part of her life, almost like a ghost, but the scenes onstage playing ex-lovers with Myrtle and Maurice are unmistakably more significant, as it appears they’re talking about their own lives, where the film continuously blurs the line between performance and real life.  Part of the genius of the film is this rare glimpse of intimacy into their real lives, yet it’s always shown with a flair for theatricality, where the underlying emotions grow more abstract by negotiating this strange and somewhat illusory boundary world that exists between reality and the imagination.  Art impacts life, where Cassavetes and his real life wife have achieved a work of astonishing emotional depth that may be unique in all of cinema.  Cassavetes has indicated “I won’t make shorthand films, because I don’t want to manipulate audiences into assuming quick, manufactured truths,” where the beauty of this film is creating a work of art that explores the mystery of the personality and the often unfathomably complex motivations of artists.     

Myrtle, however, has found herself in the midst of a full-blown identity crisis, where an early tragic encounter with a young fan continues to haunt her for the rest of the film, as she’s literally visited by the young woman’s ghost who’s not at all happy with the outcome, yet Myrtle attempts to channel some of her own character through her youth, but her warmth and affection for the young woman is received with anger and disgust, turning brutally ugly on occasion, where the two are literally fighting spirits, creating a whirlwind of emotions that continually swirl around the theatrical production.  Countering this maelstrom of dramatic force is the play’s director, none other than Ben Gazarra as Manny, as suave and debonair as ever, who continually coddles his actress, believing she is one of the great actresses of our time, and perhaps an ex-lover as well, but he constantly pushes her to accept Sarah’s play, which he feels offers brilliant insights into a woman aging.  Manny, Sarah, and a kindly producer David, Paul Stewart, the butler in CITIZEN KANE (1941), form a kind of troika of theatrical convention, like the drama police, as they continually urge Myrtle to accept the provisions of the play, while she continually experiments with the role, often changing the lines altogether, telling Sarah “age is depressing, age is dull,” claiming “I’m looking for a way to play this part where age doesn’t make any difference,” which deeply offends the author by changing the intent of her play, who believes all the emotions are clearly evident on the written pages, where “all you need to do is say the lines clearly and with a degree of feeling.”  But therein lies the problem for Myrtle, because if she’s accepted as an “older woman,” she’ll never receive any other lead casting roles for the rest of her career, relegated to the world of older secondary character performers.  For men, like Maurice or Manny, they typically deal with the questions of aging in full denial by having an affair, but Myrtle has to reach inside herself to find something else. 

More than anything, the film is about personal transformation, where theater simply offers an artistic vehicle for personal expression.  Myrtle’s defiance to accept a role as written because she feels it’s constrictive and suffocating leads to major disagreements and confrontations with the consistently inflexible theater management, continually altering the format of the play, inventing new lines, literally fighting for her life by turning to the audience in live dress rehearsals and exclaiming, “We must never forget this is only a play.”  Exacerbating the fears is heavy alcohol use, where in the middle of the night before the play opens, Myrtle desperately turns to Maurice, her co-star and ex-lover for comfort, exactly as Judy Garland used to call Cassavetes in the middle of the night looking for reassurance during the filming of A Child Is Waiting (1963), where Myrtle encourages him to try a radically new approach to the play, “Let’s dump it upside down and see if we can’t find something human in it,” an approach the real life Cassavetes would find inspired, but Maurice rejects her, telling her “You’re not a woman to me anymore.  You’re a professional,” telling her “I have a small part. It’s unsympathetic.  The audience doesn’t like me.  I can’t afford to be in love with you.”  By morning, however, she becomes traumatized, where her inner demons take over, and she mutilates herself viciously in front of the playwright, who by this point she despises, believing this may put her own demons to rest, telling her, “I will do anything, anything, to give my character authenticity on stage.”  Myrtle is late for the opening, then arrives dead drunk, yet she is cruelly pushed by Manny to perform anyway, refusing to allow anyone to help her, forcing her to literally crawl her way to her dressing room.  Unbelievably, still careening off walls, she stumbles to her backstage position, receiving the encouraging words from Cassavetes stalwart John Finnegan, “I’ve seen a lot of drunks in my day, but I’ve never seen anybody as drunk as you and still be able to walk.  You’re fantastic!”    

Leaning against walls, and with the help from everyone involved who often carry her from one location to the next, she goes onstage, where she then proceeds to change all the lines of the play, totally improvising with co-star Maurice, leaving characters alone onstage as she disappears unexpectedly, then completely reinvents the dialogue when she returns.  Despite her state of extreme inebriation, she remains a sympathetic figure, actually reversing the roles, with Maurice playing her aging character while she flirts with everyone in sight, showing signs of Buster Keaton, Lucille Ball, even the Marx Brothers, some of which is brilliant, other times failing miserably.  Breathing life into an otherwise failed literary misadventure (despite those giant feathers in Joan Blondell’s lavishly ostentatious hats!), this is a film that is not afraid to fail, and is about the fear and pain of performing, heightening the anxiety and the insecurity of the star to the limit, somewhat similar to the exaggerated theatricality of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), but stretched and expanded here, juggling on stage and off stage actions, becoming a free-wheeling comedic improvisational farce, Opening Night (1977) - Stage play with the leg trick  YouTube (4:28), like something out of a hilariously inventive vaudeville routine with actors addressing the audience directly with personal asides, “I am not me!...There’s someone posing here as us!”  While it’s always important to recall that Rowlands is really channeling her husband, becoming his alter-ego for both his methods and his madness, OPENING NIGHT shows what happens both on the stage and behind the scenes, capturing the persona of all persons involved in the theater, large and small, where this is a brilliant, in-depth look at the world of performance, art, and the extraordinarily fragile connections between the performers and the audience.  Of interest, the ending was allegedly recut as the preview audience stood up and cheered at what they saw on stage, not the bewildered effect Cassavetes was looking for. 

In this outtake from a 1978 television interview (which was never broadcast), Cassavetes discusses his film Opening Night for a while, and builds into a terrific rant on movies and movie audiences.  This is a great example of Cassavetes’ way with words, his dislike of people who live only for the approval of others, and his anger at the low popularity of his later films (especially Opening Night and Killing of a Chinese Bookie):  John Cassavetes - "Television Sucks!"  YouTube (8:08).

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

THE KILLING OF A CHINESE BOOKIE           A          
USA  (135 mi)  1976   revised in 1978 (108 mi)  d:  John Cassavetes

I won't call [my work] entertainment. 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. Or, if you have thought about them, you haven't had the questions posed this way. [Film is an investigation of life.] What we are. What our responsibilities in life are – if any. What we are looking for; what problems do you have that I may have? What part of life are we both interested in knowing more about?

—John Cassavetes

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Sophistication and his Delovlies will be along in a moment. My name is Cosmo Vitelli; I’m the owner of this joint, I choose the numbers, I direct them, I arrange them. You have any complaints you just come to me and I’ll throw you right out on your ass.

—Cosmo Vitelli (Ben Gazzara)

Following A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and the sense of friction it caused between the controversial Cassavetes working methods and his wife Gena Rowlands, they took a step back from working with each other.  Cassavetes had an affinity for gangster pictures, largely because he had to work in them as an actor in order to support his career as a film director, and he felt the gangster genre could be commercially viable, where he could get out of the film distribution business, a time consuming and all too draining effort.  While the idea for the film came in a discussion with Martin Scorsese, Cassavetes often thought of studio heads as men who associated with gangsters, and that they were dealing with mob money, which he felt filtered into many of the most powerful businesses in America.  Also, one should not overlook the huge success of THE GODFATHER Pt’s 1 and 2 (1972, 74) in the early 70’s, a genre Cassavetes didn’t find terribly interesting, but he found a way to wield a storyline he was excited about into a gangster picture, imagining a nightclub owner owing a huge amount of debt, where he’s talked into killing someone who turns out to be completely different than what he thought, not a low rung bookie but a West coast mob boss.  He got the idea of a strip club from Alain Bernardin’s Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, recently depicted by documentarian Fred Wiseman in Crazy Horse (2011), largely because it was such a personal vision, where Bernardin founded, owned, and operated it, hired the girls, scripted the shows, and choreographed the acts, bringing all the girls into his extended family operation, much like Cassavetes own concept of making films, which are largely family affairs.  In addition, Cassavetes drew upon the knowledge of actor Seymour Cassel and his mother, who was a burlesque dancer, where Cassel spent much of his youth hanging around strippers and old-time Vaudeville acts.  One of Cassavetes’ favorite films was Arthur Penn’s surreal and criminally underrated Mickey One (1965), which features Warren Beatty as a night club comic who goes on a drunken gambling binge and ends up owing some astronomical amount to the mob, apparently so large an amount they won’t even tell him how much, where Beatty spends the rest of the film drifting in and out of his own imagination, a dreamlike, Kafkaesque nightmare where the interior landscape is portrayed as an existential wasteland.  Both films today feel like modernist works, like a Waiting for Godot theatrical production where there's only one guy left talking to himself, stuck in his own Hellish purgatory.     

A film infused with existential angst, first released in 1976 (but recut two years later to a shorter version, which was, for awhile, the only version available), this is an intimate character study of Cosmo Vitelli, a suave and debonair Ben Gazzara, who owns a lurid Los Angeles strip club, the Crazy Horse West, with club singer Mr. Sophistication (Meade Roberts, an American television and movie screenwriter who collaborated with Tennessee Williams on several plays brought to the screen) and a staple of beautiful girls he calls his Delovlies, and has finally paid off all his debts to a lowlife loan shark, with Cassavetes own lifelong producer Al Ruban playing the role as Marty, then recklessly gambles his way back into debt one night to the tune of $23,000.  When faced with the loss of his club, which, in effect, represents his “life,” he settles with the mob, who orders him to kill a Chinese gangster to call it even, where they order a double cross to take him out afterwards.  In a departure from the norm, Cassavetes actually shows action shots, chase scenes, and a hellish life and death meeting of the minds in a seedy looking garage.  The last hour of the film follows Cosmo with a bullet in his side, slowly bleeding to death, like Johnny Depp in Jim Jarmusch’s revisionist acid western DEAD MAN (1995), as he revisits his girl friend Rachel (Azizi Johari), whose mother Betty (Virginia Carrington) kicks him out, not wanting any of that trouble making its way into her home, then his lovely showgirls, who he adores and who are his real family, as his life and its previous secrets pass before his eyes.  This intimate portrait of a man whose world is crumbling, yet never once flinches or misses a day at work, keeping his best face forward so that no one suspects a thing, revolves around his staple of lonely hearts who faithfully get up on stage everyday, talent or not, just to keep the business afloat for Cosmo.  This is a wildly idiosyncratic view of the human psyche, with similarities to Cassavetes’s own circumstances, gambling his own money on what were considered his crazy artistic ventures, offering some unusual views about what it takes to stay in business, expressed with a breath of fresh air, with theatricality and song, with a unique warmth and charm, a human face in the crowd, as Mr. Sophistication brings the film to a close singing the movie’s anthem:  “I can’t give you anything but love, baby.”  There's a lifetime of lost opportunities wrapped into this film, where things could turn out a different way, but people struggle and persevere, and oftentimes redeem themselves, gloriously expressed in a song.  Cassavetes finds the poignant moments.  It’s hard to imagine, but he finds them.

There is some confusion about the two versions of the film, as the movie bombed at the box office, with critics finding it disorganized and unfathomable, causing Cassavetes to rework the film and release it two years later in a shortened version, but also introducing new footage, which was the only version seen thereafter.  Today the film emotes a clarity of vision, with a semi-ragged, offbeat style that generates plenty of suspense, especially as he approaches the killing itself.  Due to the rarity of the original longer version, it became the cut to see.  After the Criterion label released both versions, there is rising support for the 2nd version, as this was not at a studio’s urging, but a newly revised vision from the director himself, not exactly a director’s cut, but perhaps an extension of his original vision, with both versions using as little artificial light as possible, creating a noirish mood, where people are often seen creeping through the dark, then in stunning contrast they’d shoot through color filters on the inside of the club.  Because the camera stays on Cosmo throughout the entire film, and so much is filtered through his eyes, one would think the more time you get to experience Cosmo onscreen, which is the original version, the better idea you have of the complexity of his character, where he continually has to divide his interests, always trying to please others, where the moments spent alone are particularly devastating, where he expresses a profound loneliness.  As Cassavetes sees himself in Cosmo, leading his own rag tag group of fringe characters, the story comes to typify his own experience with Hollywood.  A case can be made that this experience is better expressed without the meandering scenes that tend to get easily sidetracked, where Cosmo is in a world of woe, having to be all things to all people.  In the 2nd version, the editing eliminates any hint of excess, and actually changes many of the sequences, adding a different sense of focus to the film.  In both versions, what’s central to the film remains intact, particularly the meeting scene with the gangsters, who may as well be the producers, which must resemble the hundreds of meetings Cassavetes attended where his ideas were undermined and he was betrayed, where you have to sit around and wait, as they go through this myriad of meetings with others first, and when it’s finally your turn, you’re outnumbered, as it’s eight against one, where you’re so worn out from waiting that whatever your original intent was has been worn down by the weariness and exhaustion of having to sit around, and the executives end up getting their way.  Perhaps where Cosmo differs from the director is in Cosmo’s need to please, where he only felt comfortable as a snappy dresser, always looking sharp, surrounding himself with beautiful girls, and thinking he’s got it made.      

In something of a blistering critique of American capitalism, Cassavetes invites the audience to share in Cosmo’s journey to survive in a cesspool of lies and broken promises, not to mention money and plenty of muscle that prevent you from ever succeeding.  When Seymour Cassel invites Cosmo to their gambling club, they’re looking for a patsy to do the job.  After a bit of gangster rough stuff, believing he has no other choice, Cosmo buckles, as would just about anybody if enough pressure is put on them, and reluctantly agrees to perform the hit, and surprisingly he gets out of it alive, surprising even the mob who figured that would never happen.  He’s rewarded by the mob snuffing him out in a double cross, which is Cassavetes version of how artists are treated in Hollywood.  Cassavetes sees gangsters as all the hired movie executives that prevent artists from doing what they want to do, as petty people that nag at you with details and restrictions, ordering rewrites and other various changes, all detracting from the artist’s original vision.  Even onstage, Mr. Sophistication, a man of elegance and taste sharing a stage with strippers, is forced to deal with booing from the audience, who just want to see the girls, and repeated ridicule and humiliation from his fellow performers, as they can’t believe a guy would take himself so seriously, so they pull various pranks on him, which he doesn’t find so funny.  In this environment, it’s impossible to create anything daring or new, as no one would ever come to see it, much less appreciate it, which was the story of Cassavetes’ career, largely misunderstood during his lifetime, disliked by audiences and critics alike, while anointed both critically and publicly after death to one of the founders of the American independent movement, though he remains something of an outsider, stuck as he is in the art world.  This was certainly not Cassavetes’ choice, but became the only way to survive in an ocean of sharks to get his films in front of the public.  He likely never anticipated the invention of the DVD in the mid 90’s, long after his death in 1989, or the effect of the Criterion label, where more people would view his films after death, and laud his artistry, than they ever would in his lifetime.     

Looking at a few scenes from the film, one sees how the opening sequence has been altered in the two versions, as the original opening starts with an extended scene with the loan shark, Marty, Ben Gazzara in Killing of a Chinese Bookie - Opening 15 min: OneMinFilmSchool  YouTube (13:48), followed by a bar scene with the cabdriver, who is cut out of the 2nd version, while this recut 1978 opening starts with Cosmo walking out of his club, “Things’ll pick up,” shortening the scene with Marty, the killing of a chinese bookie: opening YouTube (1:18), before moving directly to scenes at the club where Cosmo introduces himself.  One of the more interesting scenes is a waitress who asks to audition for Cosmo, Morning audition YouTube (7:12), set to the song “Rainy Fields of Frost and Magic” by Bo Harwood, where his original music leaves a timeless impression, but ends up in a fight between Rachel and the potential new girl, culminating with the classic line, “I’m a club owner.  I deal in girls.”  Here’s a hilarious phone call expressing an incredulous state of mind as Cosmo is about to pull off the hit, but calls the club on a payphone while waiting for his cab, Ben Gazzara Phone Booth scene, Killing of a Chinese Bookie  YouTube (1:39), which leads here The Killing of a Chinese Bookie - bookie gets whacked YouTube (1:27).  Like Henry V, Cosmo gives an encouraging speech to revive his floundering troops, sad about losing Rachel, one of their stars who quits, where this entire rah-rah speech comes with a bullet in his side, Scene from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Ben Gazzara YouTube (4:13).  The final moments are given to Mr. Sophistication, The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie - end scene YouTube (1:55), a picture of futility, where an artist can expect to be humiliated and made a complete fool of, dying a slow death onstage, reminiscent of the Charles Mingus song “The Clown,” Charles Mingus - 04 The Clown - YouTube (12:13), narrated by Jean Shepherd, about a clown who in his efforts to please the audience is forced to endure more and more pain, where the greater the pain, the greater the applause, until eventually the clown dies onstage, to thunderous applause, as they all felt it was part of his act, where the public has always had a hard time distinguishing between illusion and reality, while Cosmo himself is too caught up exuding his own personal warmth and charm, ignoring the obvious reality.    

Husbands

HUSBANDS               A                    

aka:  A Comedy about Life, Death, and Freedom

USA  (140 mi)  1970  d:  John Cassavetes

I can understand that certain people would like a more conventional form, so that they can borrow it, much like a gangster picture...You can ‘read’ it, because it’s something that you know already.  But if you deal with a scene in an unconventional way, it’s very hard for people to get with the film because of their expectations...Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living.  You recognize certain incidents and you go with them.  People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films...They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie.  But that’s boring.  I won’t make shorthand films.  In my films, there’s a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them.  I want to break their patterns.  I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.

—John Cassavetes

Brilliant independent filmmaking at its masterful best, a radical and deeply personal work that exposes the scars of humanity, where a deepening exploration of interpersonal relationships between three men onscreen ultimately led to lifelong friendships afterwards.  Using no blocks, allowing the camera to always follow the actors, where the emotional continuity overrides everything else, the beginning feels like a continuation of Shadows (1959), with the boys jumping around on the streets, playing basketball, having a walking contest on the streets of New York.  Also, the confusion from Shadows about how to get along with girls continues here into their adult lives.  Another wonderful film about friendships, only the boys are grown up now and have lost their innocence and hope.  In fact, they have turned into the corporate men in FACES (1968), only instead of hanging out at the Loser’s Bar, they are living unfulfilled and empty lives on Long Island, called the suburban middle class, but carry their same bad habits, smoking and boozing too much, covering up their own brutality with forced laughter, that without the booze just isn’t so funny at all, as it’s often mean and cruel.  John Cassavetes as Gus, Peter Falk as Archie, and Ben Gazzara as Harry have trouble going home after the funeral of their best friend, each virile and overly masculine actors all terrorized at the idea of turning 40, suddenly confronted with the idea of mortality.  Harry confesses, “Aside from sex, and my wife is very good at it, I’d rather spend time with you guys.”  So they end up at an all-night bar boozing and singing until morning, trying to determine the best performance, where the singer is often praised and kissed heavily, but also subjected to group criticism.  Cassavetes allows this scene to play on at great length, where the amount of alcohol consumed is beyond excessive and at times brutal to watch.  The only other bar scene that paints as intimate a portrait is Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, which takes place entirely inside the Last Chance Saloon, another seedy all-night bar filled with a few scruffy regulars, a raw and emotionally bracing play of pain and disillusionment, exactly as one should feel after the funeral of their best friend.  In each, the heightened state of realism and despair is painfully evident.  Ironically one of Falk’s first roles was the bartender Harry Hope on Broadway with Jason Robards in The Iceman Cometh.  In the UCLA mounted restoration of the film, Gena Rowlands, the executor of the Cassavetes estate, removed ten minutes from the film that she found offensive, including the morning aftermath, the infamous vomiting scene, where Gus and Archie end up puking horribly in the bathroom, joined later by Harry, who feels momentarily left out.  Many viewers will find this scene excessive and overly indulgent, but Cassavetes was a man that insisted art could be found anywhere, even in a bathroom stall.  

Unlike normal people that just go home and sleep it off, these guys stick together throughout, taking Harry home in a cab, apparently to resume his normal life, but he explodes in a violent confrontation with his wife after she tells him “I’m just uncomfortable in front of you —that’s it—it’s nothing personal,” ultimately deciding to run away to London, joined by his two pals who agree “to tuck him in, then come back home.”  Every outdoor scene in London is a typhoon of rain where somebody gets drenched, but they gamble, play craps, find girls, and eventually end up in adjoining suites, each with their own girl.  Again, these are extended scenes, notable for their obvious discomfort, some of which are painfully cringeworthy (especially Archie) when it becomes so evident they’re on the lookout for women, becoming even more difficult once they’ve actually found them.  Gus has an aggressive, tall blond, Mary (Jenny Runacre), wrestling uncomfortably with her in bed while they continually bruise each other physically and emotionally, although Gus constantly tries to hide behind his humor.  Archie, who confesses he is slow in bed, wants to talk endlessly to a young Vietnamese hooker Julie (Noelle Kao) who doesn’t speak a word of English, singing “Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip” ever so softly, then erupts in verbal abuse when the girl tries to aggressively use her tongue when kissing, ultimately declaring his love for her in the morning where she can be seen walking aimlessly in the rain ranting to herself in some indecipherable language.  Harry wants to talk about his wife, and everything Pearl Billingham (Jenny Lee Wright) can do reminds him of his wife (“I feel so goddamned disloyal!), so he ends up with 3 or 4 different women in his room by morning, declaring, “If you go, you’ll be replaced by someone else,” singing “Dancing in the Dark” with them all, joined by Gus, who has found another 6 foot blond, and Archie.  Gus confesses to Archie:  “We've got two lovely wives - - the only problem is to go home and make love to them,” leaving Harry in London to fend for himself while Gus and Archie head back home (interestingly seen smoking on airplanes, while earlier they’re also seen smoking on the trains, both prohibited actions today), but also buying stuffed animals for their children at the airport, nervously arriving back to their perfect suburban homes.  The two friends are next door neighbors, wondering about Harry, “What’s he gonna do without us?”  In a quietly affecting moment, Gus’s 4-year old daughter Xan bursts into tears (as Nick allegedly took her toy away) when she sees him while his 11-year old son Nick yells out to him, “Dad!  Oh boy, you’re in trouble,” as the children carry the bags of stuffed animals and walk out of sight together and supposedly continue the rest of their lives.   

Film critic Pauline Kael, a longtime Cassavetes antagonist, described the film as “infantile and offensive,” Dave Kehr described the Cassavetes’men in HUSBANDS as “pure creatures of emotion,” while Roger Ebert took issue with Time magazine’s rave review, “seldom has Time given a better review to a worse movie.”  The very things people find ugly and overcalculated about Cassavetes are exactly what is unique and refreshing in the movies.  Cassavetes was never about technical filmmaking, so if that's your criteria, you will need to look elsewhere, but he is one of the great humanists in cinema, not in a broad sense, like Renoir, whose films nearly sing with poetic light, but in redefining what's considered believable onscreen, by including what's wrong alongside what's right, both part and parcel of the human condition.  HUSBANDS may be the best at revealing what's so gut-wrenchingly wrong with these three guys, but it's also one of the best character studies and examples of friendship that you’ll ever see onscreen.  The word forgiveness isn't spoken, yet it's continually offered.  This is what Cassavetes does better than anybody.  You may not like it because it's not pretty, and it might make you feel somewhat queasy at times, but being uncomfortable with others as well as ourselves is something we're always striving to overcome.  We never actually succeed, as life is filled with uncomfortable moments, but Cassavetes is simply one the best at meticulously detailing how human we are.  One of the marvels of the film, especially at the end of a grueling two and a half hour film called HUSBANDS, is that they left out the part about actually being husbands, where one would absolutely love to hear what these guys have to say to their wives at the end, but Cassavetes doesn't include that in the film, instead it shows them as philandering morons who are no more grown up than typical teenage kids with their parents away for the weekend, where there’s nothing dishonest about that.  On the contrary, with something close to a 40-50% divorce level, HUSBANDS shows the degree of suffocation and dissatisfaction associated with marriage.  Self-contempt and self-loathing are part and parcel of something we all experience at some point or another.  At least Cassavetes is a guy who tries to get at the root of how self deluded we are as human beings, who buy into this marriage till death do us part concept, and then don't know what we've gotten ourselves into.  These guys are deluded, and at least for the moment, contemptible, especially in the eyes of their wives, where Cassavetes is relentless in showing what little reward they actually get out of this experience, yet in their minds it is magnified to this great trans-Atlantic adventure.  You may not like it, but it's raw and intensely honest.  This is a real male bravado movie, and their hurt feelings and insecurities and enormous inadequacies are plastered all over the screen some 20 feet high for the whole world to see, bravely hiding nothing, revealing everything, in a brilliant choreography of emotional confusion.

The film was initially a 4-hour print that was edited down to just under 3 hours, which when previewed before a live audience produced howls of laughter, where the audience obviously loved it.  But this was not the feeling Cassavetes was looking for, which is more a devastating glimpse of the enveloping sadness, so despite three friends on the cover of Life magazine in May 1969, seen here:  RIP: Ben Gazzara (1930-2012) | AwesomeBMovies.com, which was great publicity, he spent another year re-editing the film before it was finally released December 1970.  The controversial scene in question was the bar scene, shot over the course of three days where they were drinking real beer on the set, where many of the extras didn’t have a clue what they were in for.  Leola Harlow, for instance, a showgirl stripper in real life, was reduced to tears from the male bullying and abuse, evidence of a politically incorrect, misogynist theme that exists throughout the picture, but for Cassavetes, it was all about being challenged to discover new insight into the characters.  Of interest, the song she sings is one the actress actually wrote.  While another, John “Red” Kullers sings “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” which quiets the house with a surprisingly effective rendition of a Depression era song, literally wiping away the tears by the end from the harsh reality of its dour essence.  Before the term became fashionable, what story there is reflects a midlife crisis taking place during the same time as the completely unseen 60’s counterculture, where these guys are too old to be part of the movement, but too young to be part of the generation that they are rebelling against.  They are part of the white middle class and embracing it instead of railing against it, still questioning how to find happiness in life, as the harmony and stability of the world has suddenly shifted on its axis, especially after the death of a friend, and will never be the same.  Perhaps what’s most surprising is how they remain defined by their marriages, as it’s how they view themselves, so when you pull them away from their middle class homes, they’re like ships adrift without an anchor, where they each fail to live up to their own expectations of themselves, where they thought they’d be so liberated and free, yet they’re each sexually constrained, still remaining so attached to their missing wives, where at least according to Peter Falk this film is as much a story about the wives, the three women that you don’t see.  Watching these men, it’s hard to visualize yourself outside the ingrained social dynamic, which has a way of paralyzing all impulses to break away, as longterm monogamous relationships are held together by old-fashioned concepts of faithfulness and fidelity, felt even subconsciously, and in places you least expect to find it.  

34-Minute Clip of JOHN CASSAVETES, PETER FALK AND BEN GAZZARA TAKE OVER 'THE DICK CAVETT SHOW,' 1970   classic Cassavetes promoting techniques

Carol for Another Christmas

CAROL FOR ANOTHER CHRISTMAS – made for TV        B                     

USA  (84 mi)  1964

There’s only one side I’m on, first, last, and always—our side. Don’t you ever forget that. And spread it around. I want all the members of your various domestic and international orders of the bleeding hearts to know precisely where Daniel Grudge stands. Because anytime you, and/or one of your fuzzy-fellowed do-gooders, tries to get me, or friends of mine, or my city, state, or my country, involved in any of your so-called causes, then I intend to be there every time with a body block that’ll throw all of you on your…involved butts…And tonight, especially tonight, I’m in no mood for the brotherhood of man.  —Daniel Grudge (Sterling Hayden)

Wouldn’t you think we could come up with something that could keep a kid from getting killed at the age of 18?

—Ghost of Christmas Past (Steve Lawrence)

Rod Serling’s grim television adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which played one time only on December 28, 1964, just about a year after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, was made to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the United Nations.  The movie stars Sterling Hayden as Daniel Grudge, a successful industrial tycoon, but a staunch conservative who served in the military during World War II, but who’s son was killed in action on Christmas Eve in 1944, an event that has scarred him for life and left him embittered about ever getting involved in other people’s affairs.  Grudge believes every man, woman, and child should rise or fall on their own without any help from anybody else, and frowns upon the benevolent actions of his nephew Fred, Ben Gazzara, calling him a “do-gooder” whose actions only stir up trouble.  When Fred comes to visit him on Christmas Eve to protest Grudge putting an end to a professor exchange program at the university where he works, after a lot of chest pumping promoting isolationism and non-involvement, Grudge shows him the door, lecturing him about the dangers of causes, where problems get blown all out of proportion and suddenly become a catastrophe to the entire world, where he’s become sick of each and every one.  Hayden is excellent in the role as a gruff, but plainly outspoken man who’s apparently seen it all and has had enough of people whining for hand-outs, telling them all to basically “shut the fuck up.”

Joseph L. Mankiewicz was an early triple threat in Hollywood, a successful writer, director, and producer, perhaps best known for the scathing depiction of behind-the-scenes backstabbing and ruthless ambition in show business from ALL ABOUT EVE (1950), where this is his only venture into television, directing with a certain satirical cynicism, where the film is divided into thirds, Christmas Past, Present, and Future, featuring an excellent cast and an exquisite Black and White production design.  There’s no effort to add any element of ghostly apparitions, instead each section is connected by Grudge’s highly personalized interior thoughts.  Thought of more as Christmas Eve reflections, each section weighs heavily on Grudge’s stubborn conscious, where he’s forced to defend himself against imaginary characters that already know his whole life history, including the rationale behind all his thoughts, often making a mockery of his deluded, ivory tower beliefs, as if barricading himself behind a giant fortress will somehow protect him from life’s tragedies.  Steve Lawrence plays Christmas Past as something of a sarcastic hipster, given the misty set design of the barely seen deck of a World War I battleship carrying caskets of the dead from all nations, a temporary purgatory set in the murky fog of one of Eugene O’Neil’s sea plays, given an unworldly effect where Grudge is forced to confront how prevalent death is on the international stage, as the body count continues to grow for any number of all-but-forgotten causes, made worse by an indifferent world that tends to look the other way, where parents continue to senselessly lose children, exactly as he did.  In another scene he walks into a moment from his own past, seeing the devastating aftereffects of Hiroshima, where blind and mutilated children have survived, but what kind of life can they expect? 

Pat Hinkle plays Christmas present, seen gorging alone on a banquet of food, sitting at the head of a long table filled with the delicacies of Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, but with the snap of his fingers, a curtain opens with people starving behind barbed wire, quoting what were at the time present day statistics where 10 million people around the world were displaced persons, where starvation was an accepted part of the human condition.  When Grudge protests, suggesting this display of gluttony right in front of the starving masses was insulting, as humans tend to care, so Hinkle snaps his fingers and they all disappear from sight, asking him if he’s hungry now?  This vivid use of darkness with brief glimpses of light is extremely effective, as most of it takes place in the moral abyss of a black void.  When Grudge walks into the future, he recognizes his own home town reduced to rubble, where among the rabble are the last surviving people on earth.  Lost in a nightmarish Hell on earth, this final section is so darkly disturbing that this may be the reason it was never shown again, as so soon after the Kennedy assassination it’s filled with unpleasant apocalyptic overtones.  Robert Shaw as Christmas Future is overshadowed by the looming presence of communal madness, as personified by Peter Sellers, the appointed leader, a kind of judge and jury, self-styled jester who comes across a bit like a reality TV game show host who thoroughly manipulates what’s left of the masses into a crazed, lynch-mob hysteria, where any and all outsiders are deemed a potentially murderous threat, set in a hallucination-tinged weirdness of post nuclear insanity, a collective state of mind where reason no longer prevails.  This vision of life as we know it evaporating into thin air, where all we’re left with is the ruins of a once thriving world, sends a chilling message of personal responsibility, where it takes more than the colonial empire-building mindset or individual protected self-interests when living globally, as actions have consequences.  While the starkly satiric messages are shrouded in cynicism and gloom, Rod Serling succeeds in creating a Twilight Zone movie, very much resembling the darkly acid tone of what would later become the impending end of the world, Y2K Millennium disaster movies that were all the rage during the end of the 20th century.

Both Sterling Hayden as General Jack Ripper and Peter Sellers in no less than 3 roles, Captain Lionel Mandrake, American President Merkin Miffley, and the infamous Dr. Strangelove, worked together again in their very next film project, Stanley Kubrick’s even more audaciously satiric DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964). 

The Big Lebowski

 

THE BIG LEBOWSKI            A-                   

USA  Great Britain  (117 mi)  1998  d:  Joel Coen

 This isn't 'Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.    —Walter Sobchak (John Goodman)

A zany, constantly inventive, laid back charmer that features witty dialogue, madcap characters, drugs, sex, and plenty of profanity, not to mention terrific use of music that intrudes almost like a Greek chorus as the voice of one’s conscience.  Perhaps the greatest tribute to bowling ever committed to celluloid, this is a film about a perfectly relaxed and ordinary stoner guy, Jeff Bridges known as “The Dude,” who likes to hang out with his friends, drink white Russians and bowl at nights.  However, trouble ensues, interrupting his mellow slacker’s life, when the Dude (aka Jeff Lebowski) gets mistaken for the “big” Lebowski, a high society Lionel Barrymore type who claims to have millions, who apparently owes some gangsters a shitload of money and they’ve come for a collection, showing they mean business by peeing on his rug before they realize it’s a case of mistaken identity.  But clearly irritated by that rug incident, the Dude decides to hit the real Lebowski up for a little replacement rug money, but instead he gets wrapped up in the middle of a kidnapping-gone-wrong caper, as Lebowski’s young porn starlet girlfriend turns up missing.  Wacko Vietnam vet John Goodman plays his best friend Walter, a big man who has an opinion on just about everything, where at least in his view, everything in life is related to Vietnam, usually setting off his hair-trigger temper leading to a stark raving mad rant, but then he tones it back down to fine and mellow.  John Buscemi plays Donny, always late in entering a conversation, where Walter inevitably barks at him:  “Shut the fuck up, Donny.” 

The film is basically a non-stop, run-on conversation between Walter and The Dude, as despite being best friends, they also continually get on each other’s nerves.  There’s actually a cowboy tumbleweed introduction by an offscreen character known as The Stranger (Sam Elliott), who places the setting in Los Angeles and proceeds to deconstruct the whole Raymond Chandler romantic view of the City of Lights, as this dark and constantly frustrating view of the city is meant to be discouraging, where things are never what they seem.  However, from the luminous interior glow of the bowling alleys, you’d think the city cherished bowling as much as they do movie emporiums.  While not a private eye movie, the Dude is thrust into the middle of one volatile situation after another with a myriad of goofball characters that requires a certain amount of self-reflection to continually find his way out of dead ends.  From high flying feminist artist Julianne Moore, real daughter of the “big” Lebowski, who triggers nudist expression, procreation, along with key plot revelations, or John Turturro who has an all-too brief appearance as a trash talking bowler named Jesus Quintana dressed in color coordinated lavender, who goes through sexual gyrations and a good luck kiss as he delivers the ball, to the three Nihilists who are easily the mosty bizarrely dysfunctional kidnapping team, as they continue to demand ransom money even after they’ve lost the kidnapped girl, while suave and debonair Ben Gazzara, porn producer supreme, relies on old-school methods and traditional heavies to get his point across. 

With surrealistic Busby Berkeley bowling dream images that occasionally flood the screen to the music of Kenny Rodgers and the First Edition singing “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” Big Lebowski Dream Part - YouTube (3:18), including a bowling ball-cam that only sees out of the rotating holes as it rolls down the lane, the pace of the film is pure anarchy where anything goes, where the Dude just goes with the flow, ocasionally arguing with Walter over each other’s strange interpretations, but each new set of circumstances is central to the film having the feel of a mysterious road movie, where the Dude’s car gets a workout following one ridiculous journey after another.  Like an apparition, The Stranger shows up in the middle of a bowling sequence, expanding on his narrative observations directly to the camera even as the Dude is embroiled in his next adventure, where he’s heard near the end proclaiming “The Dude abides.”  John Goodman, however, is the true revelation in this film, as he’s just a giant lug of a man who insists on being the Dude’s right hand protection, a guy who lays it all on the line out of true friendship wherever he goes, where he’s just as likely to fuck things up as save the day.  But what matters is that they’re a team, where the ultimate insult is to threaten quitting the bowling team.  To these guys, that’s heresy.  An exquisitely heartfelt live performance of Townes Van Zandt singing “Dead Flowers” Townes van zandt - Dead Flowers - YouTube (4:48) brings down the curtain to the final end credits.  This is the Coens delivering sheer lunacy.