Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Big Trouble

Big Trouble (1986)
Starring Alan Arkin, Peter Falk, Beverly D'Angelo, Robert Stack, Charles Durning

Big Trouble feels like a defeat. It's the defeat of an extremely independent personality who made films that he wanted to make, not caring about building a large audience. With Big Trouble, Cassavetes gives in to the studios and it seems poetically appropriate that he died after making this film. The picture is an unofficial follow up to Arthur Hiller's The In-Laws (1979), and Hiller was originally attached to direct until fights with the studio caused him to leave. Bring in Cassavetes (such a bizarre choice, but I suspect his friendship with Peter Falk played a part) and you have a film that is shredded so brutally in the editing bay by the studio that any humor that might have been gleaned from its piss poor script is lost.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Love Streams

Love Streams (1984)
Starring John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel

As I've talked about before, Cassavetes focuses a lot on the psychological fragility of his characters. Often his main characters feel like Kerouac characters, they live life to self-destructive extremes, exploding like roman candles and inevitably fizzling when they can't handle things. In Love Streams, he spends the first half of the film exploring two separate figures that fit this bill, then bringing them together for the last sad, heartbreaking hour. And, as with so many of his films, Gena Rowlands is the force of nature that powers things forward. Cassavetes also holds his own and looks much older than his appearance in 1977's Opening Night. While I don't know the details, it wouldn't surprise me if this was when his health problems were starting.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Gloria

Gloria (1980)
Starring Gena Rowlands, Buck Henry, Julie Carmen, John Adames

One of the few aspects of Cassavetes' films that kept his work from falling into self-indulgent tripe was his muse and wife, Gena Rowlands. Rowlands regularly grounds the films she appears in with performances that challenge typical ideas about women. She's just one of those actresses that its a joy to sit back and watch work. And here, in Gloria, she was given a larger commercial venue to display her skill. And it was thanks to Rowlands that Cassavetes directed this film in the first place. Cassavetes has originally just written the screenplay and sold it to Columbia Pictures, after which Rowlands was cast in the lead. She highly recommended her husband to direct his own script and he was hired.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Opening Night

Opening Night (1977)
Starring Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, John Cassavetes, Joan Blondell

Some times you just want to punch Cassavetes in the face. His actors always give their all, but Cassavetes, as director, has a very hard time focusing his films. I'd hate for it to be my conditioning by contemporary cinema to be keyed into a storytelling formula, I have to say I enjoy a lot of the less plot focused directors of the independent cinema (Terence Malick comes to mind). However, Cassavetes has a big problems shaping his films into some thing at all. Its like a sculptor who keeps changing their mind as they chip away at large stone monolith, and the end product is more like the rock he started with than an enjoyable film. Rowlands is great, she always is, but in the end the film is a few moments of genius mired in a pit of dragging.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976)
Starring Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, Timothy Carey

Cassavetes was doing for cinematography and story pacing what Mamet attempts to do with language: try to make it so real it can be almost unbearable some times. Stories are not told in beats and there are no real "plots". Cassavetes is interested in character studies, without any real arcs. Just a slice of this characters life, and in his later works the slice included a definitive moment. Here Cassavetes is reunited with Ben Gazzara whom he last worked with on Husbands. Gazzara is giving an understated performance to match the understated filmmaking of Cassavetes. When I watched this film I went with the Director's Cut, released in 1978 and preferred by Cassavetes himself. The original cut was 134 minutes compared to the DC's 108 minutes. When it comes to Cassavetes more is not necessarily better because he is always allowing his camera and scenes to meander until they figure out where they want to go.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - A Woman Under the Influence

A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Starring Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk

Every film since 1959's Shadows feels like a warm up act for this masterpiece. Cassavetes frequently played with the themes of infidelity and crumbling marriages, as well as featuring characters whose grip on sanity was weak to say the least. Once again we have Cassavetes' wife, Gena Rowlands as the female lead and alongside her is Peter Falk as the harried husband. Both actors bring the naturalism that Cassavetes strove to have in all his films. This is a film born out of emotional truth, given a framework and allowed to grow and stretch in the directions it finds comfortable. There's a lot changing aesthetically in Cassavetes' work at this point, bits of artifice are becoming more apparent, most notably a soundtracks that doesn't come from music in the environment. The dialogue is delivered with a real tongue though, people stutter, people start into a sentence only to abandon it half way through. In the same way Altman created naturalistic satires, Cassavetes was defining the naturalistic slice of life drama.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Minnie and Moskowitz

Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Starring Seymour Cassel, Gena Rowlands, John Cassavetes, Timothy Carey, Val Avery

The first time I ever remember being aware of Seymour Cassel was in Wes Anderson's Rushmore. When I look back, I realize it was one of those instances where an actor has an incredibly distinguished career in film, but, because its not mainstream cinema, you don't discover them until they appear in a contemporary movie. In Anderson's films Cassel is so muted, always a background player, with not much to do. In Cassavetes' Faces, Cassel plays a young hipster, and this is that same character a few years down the road, a little older, but still full of energy and oddity. This is also the first (but definitely not last) film where we get to talk about Gena Rowlands, Cassavetes wive and figurehead of independent cinema in her own right. This is a film where we start to see the cinéma vérité elements pushed away for just a little bit more structure.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Husbands

Husbands (1970)
Starring Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes

Husbands is a very flawed, self-indulgent picture. And it is hard to talk about without bringing up the only Cassavetes film I had seen before this spotlight, Faces. So for this review we will look at where Faces gets right what Husbands fails on. Just like Shadows, both Husbands and Faces adopt the cinéma vérité style, though only Faces really lives up to the tenets of the form. Where Faces is an honest examination of the horrible cruelties couples visit upon each other, Husbands is a self-indulgent mess with occasional moments of brilliance that are snuffed out by moments that drag on without purpose for too long.

Director in Focus: John Cassavetes - Shadows

Shadows (1959, dir. John Cassavetes)

So the new director I will be focusing on till the end of September will be John Cassavetes. I suspect his face will be more familiar to audiences than the films he made. Cassavetes is most well known for the role of Guy in Roman Polanksi's Rosemary's Baby. Amongst film nerds, like myself, we know him as the father of American independent cinema. He was the type of rebel filmmaker that you hear about, but whom many independent filmmakers fail to live up to. In this first film. Shadows he used jazz as an influence; the picture was scored with jazz music and instead of a tightly written script, he allowed scenes and dialogue to be improvised. In particular, he shrugged off all public filming laws and would run out on the sidewalk, shoot until they saw cops, then run and hide. The result was a film that caused many walkouts when it was screened for the public, but is on par with the French New Wave films being simultaneously made across the world.