TOO LATE BLUES C+
USA (103 mi) 1961 d: John Cassavetes
When TOO LATE BLUES was over I thought I would be over too. And then Paramount asked me if I’d like to sign a long-term contract. At that point I realized that success and failure weren’t necessarily success and failure. I had heard so much about people who fail and then get enormous contracts. I never could quite believe it, until it happened to me. Paramount upped my salary to $125,000 a picture. I subsequently learned that [Paramount’s Marty Racklin] had to go to his stockholders and tell them I was a bright guy. He’d built me up, taken a gamble on a guy who wasn’t turning out very well, and he had no real option but to go with me and hope I was smart enough to learn. And I did learn. I learned all the tricks: to get a big office and to ask for anything and everything and insist on it. I told them I wouldn’t do another film unless I wanted to do it and unless I could do it my own way.
—John Cassavetes, from the book ‘Cassavetes on Cassavetes’ by Ray Carney
After the success in Europe of SHADOWS (1959) and a short-lived TV show Johnny Staccato where Cassavetes plays a private eye who sides as a jazz pianist in Greenwich Village (though shot entirely in Los Angeles), Cassavetes was offered a chance to direct his first studio film at Paramount, which the producers (specifically Marty Racklin) felt could target the youth market. While he signed a contract to develop his own script, it was originally conceived by Richard Carr who he met on the TV show, asking if he wouldn’t come up with something, choosing to rework the third of three stories submitted, where Cassavetes wrote the first half with Richard Carr writing the second half. He was unable to make any changes within a month of the shoot, and certainly no revisions on the set, as everything had to be worked out ahead of time for a 6-week shooting schedule. Additionally, Cassavetes wanted Montgomery Clift and Gena Rowlands for the two leads, while the studio insisted upon pop singer Bobby Darin (somewhat stiff in his first dramatic role) and Stella Stevens, a Playmate of the Year just the year before in January 1960, also considered at the time one of the ten most photographed women in the world. Cassavetes also lost the battle to shoot the scenes entirely in New York City’s Greenwich Village jazz scene, with the Studio opting for a nearly entirely interior studio shot film. These little differences of opinion led to a more reserved and suffocating film, as the Hollywood system itself took all the living and breathing life out of the original conception. What remains is a downbeat story of a jazz pianist selling out his friends for his own chance at success, one that mimics Cassavetes own career move from New York to Los Angeles to star in a TV show, with hopes of breaking into the movie industry. While Cassavetes felt the movie got away from him, unable to do any significant rewrites to correct what he felt were script flaws, he was stuck with meeting the 6-week shoot, which meant handing in a movie he wasn’t at all happy with.
Nonetheless, from a Studio’s point of view, even though the film was a critical and box office flop, the fact that the movie was competently completed on time led to their offering him a contract and a raise, which led to his second feature, A Child Is Waiting (1963), where Cassavetes had a meltdown with producer Stanley Kramer, again over the direction of the film, disowning the film when Kramer basically fired him to finish and recut the movie himself. Despite these run-ins, they gave Cassavetes invaluable experience in shooting a motion picture which eventually led to FACES (1968), written and shot in his own way, using his own timetable, starring his wife Gena Rowlands, and is still considered one of the more groundbreaking works in American independent film. TOO LATE BLUES, on the other hand, is purely a product of the Studio system. Ironically released the same year as Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues (1961), starring two American jazz musicians in Paris, Sidney Poitier and Paul Newman, also the music of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington who both make appearances in the film, Cassavetes was originally up for the Paul Newman role, so he was familiar with the script, which bears a few casting and nightclub similarities. Like that film which was all about music, where the lurid romance was secondary, Cassavetes wanted to throw in 17 new jazz pieces into his film, all featured during the nightclub sequences using the musicians that he met on the Johnny Staccato TV show, some of whom are musicians used here, but this was not to be. The opening two and a half minutes of the film may be the most inventive in the entire film, seen here: Bobby Darin in Too Late Blues Part 1 of 12 - YouTube (7:57), similar to his realistic use of children in his next movie, and is one of the few natural scenes in the movie that literally feels unstaged and uninhibited.
Bobby Darin plays a character named Ghost, who leads an undiscovered jazz quintet seen playing in the opening, which includes Seymour Cassel (in only his second picture) on bass, guys who have been working together for years but are still forced into taking whatever gigs come their way. Hanging out in a neighborhood bar afterwards, much of the film is set after hours when the guys are drinking, dancing, playing cards, or goofing off, unfortunately featuring the loud overacting of the Greek bar owner Nick Dennis, who, like many of the cast, were brought over from the TV show, including the sleazy agent (Everett Chambers, a producer on the show), the owner of the recording studio (Val Avery), and the Countess (Marilyn Clark). Ghost’s agent is quickly seen undermining the fragile esteem of the group’s female singer Jess (Stella Stevens), Ghost’s girlfriend, where he’s something of an oily double crosser throughout, always using underhanded tactics to either backstab or showcase his represented talent, who never seem to get a fair shake, but he’s the shady representative of the exclusively financial interests of the music industry, the kind of snake that seems to thrive in the sewer. After a volatile trial number in a recording studio leads to a follow up recording the next day, the guys (and girl) are out celebrating, where a drunk customer (Vince Edwards) gets into a drunken brawl with the boys, challenging and humiliating Ghost in front of his girl, which sends him plunging into self pity, wanting nothing more to do with any of them. In Cassavetes original script, there is a ten-minute dreamlike sequence where Ghost goes out and picks up a girl, spending the night together, but this sequence was cut by the Studio in favor of Jess going home with one of the other members of the band and sleeping with him, effectively ending their relationship.
Devastated by the change of events, Ghost shows up at the studio but walks out on the band, calling them a bunch of amateurs he picked up off the street, making a deal with his agent to find gigs showcasing his talent, where he is sponsored by an older women of means, the Countess, who receives sexual favors in return. This sleazy road to stardom never materializes, sending Ghost back to his roots years later searching for his original band, playing in a dive somewhere in Los Angeles. Also searching for Jess, where Stella Stevens downward spiral is one of the few superbly realized scenes, but one can easily imagine Rowlands and similar drinking scenes with men at the beginning of FACES, he finds her sadly working the customers at the bar of a flophouse, an intensely sad portrait of dreams gone awry, where she doesn’t wish to be reminded of her former life, creating a sense of hopeless melodrama and despair before Ghost hauls her off to confront the band. One by one they reject him, rebuffing his attempts to reconcile their differences, until Jess, off to the side of the stage, starts singing the melody of a song they shared together, bringing them back together again with a reunified sense of optimism and hope as the curtain falls. Once again, this is the Studio imposed upbeat ending, as originally Ghost rejoins the band and starts playing the piano, where the music immediately comes alive as Jess walks out of the club, as he had walked out on her years earlier, where the drive for success has a deep-seeded personal price. One problem with the use of music in this film is the audience can’t tell the difference between the more creative, supposedly original, avant-garde jazz music and the more sell-out, commercial music that audiences tend to prefer listening to. Much of it written by David Raskin, it tends to fall in the middle somewhere of “pseudo-jazz” where there is little distinction drawn between the various styles, which diminishes the theme of an artist selling out for commercial success, as we never really hear what real art sounds like. This is a stark contrast with Paris Blues, for instance, which features Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, where the feverish intensity of live music in jammed nightclubs couldn’t be more exhilarating.
