Hollywood was never sure what to make of him. He, on the other hand, knew what to make of them. He thought they were parasites, loathsome, money-grubbing creatures lacking in creativity, caring and insight. I expect that many of the big boys hated Cassavetes. To simply call him direct would be a serious understatement. He could annihilate if he felt the need and he often felt the need. The Hollywood hierarchy was not interested in financing his personal films but were less discerning in having him direct and act in a few of their studio projects. Cassavetes, too, cut them some slack in signing up to do the acting. The truth is he needed the money to finance his projects. That didn't mean he was a charming fellow to work with in an acting capacity. There were those times that if he appeared charming, he was about to pounce.
Passion may be the cornerstone to understanding this complicated man. His Greek heritage rendered him being nothing less than passionate in everything he did and a number of things he chose not to do.
Born in New York in 1929, he spent most of his first seven years in Greece. By the time he returned to the U.S., he could not speak English. In high school he took part in acting, the school newspaper and football. He was regarded as a wise-ass who had a definite soft side. Friendships and loyalty were important to him. As a teenager he told he skeptical father that he wanted to be an actor because he wanted to portray human emotions truthfully. That notion showed up in his writing and directing as well as his acting.
After he spent some time bumming around Florida with his pals, he returned to New York and enrolled in the American Academy of Dramatic Arts because some friends had done so. It is at the school that he met his future and only wife, Gena Rowlands. She had to leave the school after only a year and they lost track of one another for a time. He had been performing in stock productions that took him away from New York but they met up again. Her passion for acting seemed to match his and if they weren't doing it, they were incessantly talking about it. They came to realize they shared ideals and ideas and goals. In 1954 they married.
Along with recognizing his role in U.S. cinema verité, I appreciate most of all that he kept Rowlands working for so many years. I think she is chiefly why I like Cassavetes as a director. He gave us her in her most famous roles and I thank him. I am also a lover of independent films, far more so than the big studio productions and I, like him, am into cinema that allows for examining human emotions. His films were rarely plot-driven and instead focused on character, mood and theme. I am so there. Hey, so far so good, eh?
What I did like about them is that along with Rowlands he employed friends like Peter Falk, Ben Gazzara, Seymour Cassel, assorted relatives and a gaggle of non-professionals. For all intents and purposes, they were a stock company and Cassavetes adored them. He was without a doubt the actors' director. Always opinionated, frequently exasperating and more than willing to fight for his opinion, he nonetheless included his actors in the creative process.
I must add here that I adored this man's acting. He glorified that intense, bad-boy image and I seemed to stop eating my popcorn when he was on screen. When I say this I am mainly referring to films that were not his indies but some of those make the cut as well.
He and Rowlands decided Hollywood was for them. They had their dreams and while they wondered how they would come true and when, they did not consider if. This was a man with a singleness of purpose and not easily swayed. Hollywood, batten down the hatches.
He worked mainly in live television and in several of the top anthology-type dramas. The electricity that poured out of him surely made viewers say who is that guy? Not too surprisingly his earliest film roles were as thugs of one sort of another in The Night Holds Terror (1955), Crime in the Streets (1956) and as Robert Taylor's incorrigible kid brother in the western, Saddle the Wind (1958).
When I saw him in 1957 in Edge of the City, I was in my early teens and wanting some bad-boy actor to be my successor to James Dean. I eventually got over my anti-hero-worship part but he never slipped from my list of favorite actors.
I always thought he had a great, expressive face. His smiles didn't want to... they usually looked half-hearted. His dark eyes could bore into you. He made me uncomfortable in my theater seat and today in my easy chair. His characters got seriously angry. When they were done with someone, they were done. One trembled thinking of what could be next. After he stopped raging, the other person was generally too stunned to speak immediately. He may have been 5'7" in real life but he sure felt larger on that screen. When one realized that he was, in fact, not a large man and yet he still barked like he did, with a reckless abandonment of sorts, he seemed downright ferocious. I loved it.
Edge of the City gave Cassavetes a high-profile role as a rare good guy but one that is, nonetheless troubled... in this case as an Army deserter. He hides out as a longshoreman who befriends a fellow worker, Sidney Poitier, who is being harassed by a bigot boss. Heart-felt performances from both actors helped raise their visibility.
While making the film, he had a brief contract at MGM and also had a quickie at Paramount. No one, least of all Cassavetes himself, would deny that he could be difficult. Ask Rowlands. He butted heads with everyone and clearly thought, among other things, that he could do it better. He thought most of them were people with no vision and that was something he could not abide. He was also a man who could not keep things to himself. Hollywood always disliked forthrightness from its underlings.
No one who has ever written about John Cassavetes has done so without using the word improvisation. People who aren't fond of his indie work will usually say it's just too improvisational for them, that it seems they turn the cameras on and people just speak about any bloody thing that enters their heads. It's true that he started an improvisational workshop in 1956 and apparently it's also true that his first-time directing one of his indies, Shadows (1959), was, in fact, completely improvised. But according to Rowlands and others, it was the one and only time that Cassavetes and Company worked without a script. Tacked on, however, has often been this: while working with a script, it may have been based, here and there, on some recorded improvisation.
Shadows is by far the least interesting of all his directorial efforts... and that's being kind. I seem to recall walking out on it. It looked and felt like someone else's home movie that I was being forced to watch. It didn't help that it concerned the Beat Generation of the 1950s with people sitting around bongo-laden coffee houses and staring. Like totally weird, man... and Cassavetes captured every exciting moment.
On the strength of his Edge of the City role, no doubt, he was hired for a television series, Johnny Staccato, about a jazz musician who hires out as a private dick. Some folks thought that was a perfect role for him. Alas, it lasted a mere five episodes.
Cassavetes likely browbeat the studio heads and lesser heads about wanting to direct and Too Late Blues (1961) was his first mainstream assignment. Since Cassavetes also cowrote the script, it tried hard not to be so mainstream. His lead character, played by singer Bobby Darin, was a musician whose life is complicated by his inability to compromise. Hmmmm. Despite a nice Stella Stevens performance and a good first half, by the halfway point it wandered too far off base.
A Child Is Waiting is memorable on several levels. One, it was the first time Cassavetes would be directing his wife who had a supporting role. It would feature Judy Garland in her first dramatic role after Judgment at Nuremberg, two years earlier. And top-billed would be Burt Lancaster. Not bad. Cassavetes was very touched by the story line that concerned the first boarding school for developmentally-challenged children. He became enraged that producer Stanley Kramer wanted to shift the focus from the kids to adults' stories. In general he resented studio interference on this film and Too Late Blues. He apparently got into a full-view shouting match with Garland over her portrayal and Lancaster, listening to it, sided with Garland. Cassavetes was fired from the picture before it was completed. Out of the ashes, however, comes a fine film.
His directing chores had convinced him that that was the trajectory he wanted his career to take. Acting no longer held the promise it once did but he realized more than ever that he had to make some money to finance the kinds of films he wanted to make. He accepted acting jobs with a vengeance. Mostly he acted on television and one of those assignments was in a role as one of The Killers (1964), which was considered too violent for the little screen so it went to the big one. It is perhaps better known as Ronald Reagan's last movie.
Cassavetes' next two are his most famous acting films... Oscar-nominated as the mobster in The Dirty Dozen (1967 and as Mia Farrow's suspicious husband in Rosemary's Baby (1968). He got enough loot to direct his wife in Faces (1968).
I suspect Husbands (1970) was a special project for Cassavetes because he not only wrote, directed and costarred in it, but his BFFs, Gazzara and Falk, shared the title roles. The death of a pal prompts three friends to go on a 48-hour binge of booze, broads and bravado that gets more and more tedious as it goes on. Some judicious editing might have helped. This was his first 35mm, color film. The following year brought us Minnie and Moskowitz, his first comedy. Starring Rowlands and Seymour Cassel as a most improbable couple, it showed some promise.
Throughout the 70s he accepted acting assignments in films that were beneath him (Capone, Two-Minute Warning, The Fury, The Brass Target) but as always, he needed the loot to make his indies... the next four of which are my favorite films that he directed.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974) is arguably perhaps his finest gig as a writer-director, featuring a grueling look at mental illness. At the top of the many accolades the film received is the finest, most multi-layered Gena Rowlands performance ever delivered... and that's saying a mouthful. Mr. and Mrs. Cassavetes both received Oscar nominations.
The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) feels almost mainstream. Dark, murky and exciting, Gazzara happily came aboard as a strip club owner with a serious gambling addiction. In exchange for his own life, he agrees to perform a killing for the mob.
Opening Night (1977) and Gloria (1980) were both great successes for Cassavetes and Rowlands. In the former she is an emotionally wounded Broadway actress whose grip on her opening night is weakened when a fan dies trying to see her. Gazzara plays her director and Cassavetes her leading man. The only criticism I had of the movie was its interminable length. It's back to the mob for Gloria and a young boy who has incriminating evidence that they will kill to retrieve. It was a fine thriller from start to finish.
The best film that Cassavetes and Rowlands starred in that he did not direct is Tempest (1982). I absolutely adored it but we'll discuss it later when we get into the 1980s.
Love Streams (1984) could be called a love story but it is an unusual one. It involved a brother and sister who reunite after a long estrangement and try to come to terms with their intertwined lives along with their messed-up personal lives. It would be the last time he would star with and direct his luminous wife. It's worth seeing for that fact alone.
Big Trouble (1985) was his final big-screen directing job, although, in a rare circumstance, he did not write it. It doesn't feel like a Cassavetes film, as much as anything because it's a comedy. It is also a takeoff on a more famous work, Double Indemnity, and it just didn't work. There was comfort with Falk heading the cast while Alan Arkin, Beverly D'Angelo, Robert Stack and Charles Durning were new to the Cassavetes stable.
I imagine life with John Cassavetes was not easy. He was always so wired... all that Greek passion that he couldn't seem to cap. It undoubtedly led to high blood pressure and other maladies. His creativity gave way to late-night writing and packs of cigarettes and booze. Relaxation was likely still a work in progress when he died at age 59 in Los Angeles in 1989. The cause was listed as cirrhosis of the liver.
His films, while bearing a distinct directorial stamp, never much entertained me, at least not in the usual sense. And for that I was always troubled. Unfortunately they were usually too downbeat, far too slow, enveloped in erratic pacing and structure, with an air of longueur hovering over them. I may have gone to most of his films willingly but I often struggled with staying. No matter what else film-makers do or try to say and regardless of how different they choose to be, they must never forget that most of us buy tickets to be entertained. As a writer, he engaged in a stream of consciousness style of writing, as I see it, and while that's fine sometimes, beware of presenting it so agonizingly slow. The camera does not need to linger on a forlorn face for a full minute. Every fade out does not have to take forever and end in a fuzzy screen.
One could pretty much count on his films being angst-ridden. He
thrived, it seemed, on gloom, misfortune, loss, downward spirals... really most anything but upbeat. Even that is fine with me. But Cassavetes seemed to not want to just tell you about those things but beat one over the head with them. His films needed balance and restraint and always, always, scissors.
He truly was a marvelous director with and for actors. His films are littered with wonderful performances and could always be recommended for that reason.
I love good character development and I loved his wanting to shine a light on the human condition. In that I hope to honor him. I also without question recognize him as a true auteur. He left his imprint on the Hollywood map as a director and writer and a maverick. I expect his work is likely an entire course in a film school. He was also a damned good actor. Hollywood history has treated him kindly.
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A good 70s film
Two interesting reviews. I love the picture at the end of John's.
ReplyDeleteGlad you appreciated both together like that. I was hoping someone would. I loved that pic, too.
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