Featuring a trio of iconic films from American auteur John Cassavettes’s filmography and the late 70s; in general, these movies will grab you by the shirt collar, but they'll also make a resounding declaration that echoes through the ages.
John Cassavetes, 1974, USA, 155 min
Centre Stage: The Late 70s of John Cassavettes
Nominated for multiple Oscars, Emmys and Golden Globes (and taking home her share of wins), Gena Rowlands is a legend forever. Across her extensive career, she’s worked with Jim Jarmsuch, Paul Mazursky, William Friedkin, Terence Davies — and John Cassavetes, with whom she had one of the greatest ongoing actor-director collaborations in film history.
Charting Rowlands’ transformation as “Mabel” from endearingly kooky to bleakly incoherent and back again, A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is perhaps the most important examination of mental health ever captured onscreen.
Cassavetes observes the ricochets between Mabel’s health and her in-laws’ “influence”— but at the heart of this film is her relationship with her conservative husband (an equally amazing Peter Falk), who struggles in vain to pull Mabel out of her ever-worsening decline. Both tough-as-bricks and delicate, WOMAN goes straight for the throat.
John Cassavetes, 1976, USA, 135 min
Centre Stage: The Late 70s of John Cassavettes
John Cassavetes’ love letter to the art of theater, inside a neo-noir take on the sleazy ‘70s Southland!
In what other film would a waitress from famed post-hippie L.A. restaurant The Source take her morning break next door to audition for Ben Gazzara’s bizarro performance-art strip club? When his high-flying lifestyle owes debts to a sinister syndicate (led by Seymour Cassel and a wonderfully mushy Timothy Carey), he’s given a tough choice: knocking off a Chinese “bookie” or losing his beloved theatre.
Cassavetes renders all of this with a hallucinatory eye, subverting genre conventions with his unsettled rhythms and a sweetly absurdist tone. Likewise, Gazzara perfectly embodies the fractured, contradictory persona of a character as much filled with frailty and vice as he is with ambition and integrity.
John Cassavetes, 1977, USA, 144 min
Centre Stage: The Late 70s of John Cassavettes
In a role equally as fragile and mercurial as A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE’s “Mabel”, Gena Rowlands is OPENING NIGHT’s “Myrtle”: a successful actress going kind of crazy in a play about aging crazily.
John Cassavetes’ hymn to that berserk business of performing, OPENING NIGHT is enhanced by its intense “old Hollywood” pedigree as Ben Gazzara, John Blondell, Paul Stewart and Cassavetes himself are the backing band for Rowlands’ knife-edged soloing.
From the first scene, the narrative is peppered with turn-on-a-dime ambiguity. Whole swathes of action take place “onstage” in front of a real-life audience watching the in-character cast — with a permeable membrane between stage and “reality” so tangible it hurts.