Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (64 page)

FEBRUARY 10, 1989

hey called John Cassavetes a cinema verite director in one of the obituaries. That's French for the "cinema of truth," the kind of documentary moviemaking where the director stands back and doesn't interfere while things happen naturally. John Cassavetes never made a cinema verite film in his life. He was always in there up to his neck, swimming upstream against life and shouting instructions to those in his wake. If you want a French phrase to describe his work, try cinema desordre-the cinema of messiness. But don't take that as a criticism. Cassavetes made films that gloriously celebrated the untidiness of life, at a time when everybody else was making neat, slick formula pictures.

Most people, if they knew him at all, knew him as a movie star. He was an army deserter in Edge of the City, and Mia Farrow's husband in Rosemary's Baby, and he got an Oscar nomination for The Dirty Dozen, and in Two-Minute Warning he was a cop trying to stop a sniper at a football game, and he was in The Fury and The Tempest, always as a wry, intense actor who put a spin on every scene, who seemed to be enjoying some private irony.

But it was as a director that Cassavetes invested his heart and soul, and he told people he made the commercial movies just to raise money to make his own movies. He starred in some of them, too-most notably in Love Streams (1984), which could almost be viewed as his own obituary-and in others he starred his friends Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, or Seymour Cassel. And over and over again he used his wife, Gena Rowlands, who won two Oscar nominations for her work in his films.

When Cassavetes died February 2 at the age of fifty-nine, the news did not come as a surprise. He had been gravely ill with liver disease for at least four years, and when they dedicated this year's Park City (Utah) USA Film Festival to him in late January, they already knew he wouldn't be able to attend. But in a sense he was there anyway, in spirit, because the USA festival is dedicated to independent American filmmaking, and there were those who said John Cassavetes had practically invented the movement.

His first film, named Shadows, was released in 1961 and caused a sensation. It was shot in 16 mm on a tiny budget on the streets of New York, and it was about characters who looked and talked like real people, and whose lives were disorganized and chaotic and filled with surprises. They did not inhabit well-planned plots, and Cassavetes's camera did not regard them with meticulous camera movements. His filmmaking style in those days was spontaneous and jerky, hand-held, and if Shadows would look a little forced today, at the time it felt like a bombshell.

Shadows helped create the "underground" film movement. Other movies were made in the same spirit-Shirley Clarke's The Connection, Adolfas Mekas's Hallelujah the Hills-and after a flirtation with the Hollywood studio system that produced the unsuccessful Too Late Blues and A Child Is Waiting in 1963, Cassavetes went back to acting and regrouped his forces for Faces (1968), his great anarchic comedy about a couple (Rowlands and John Marley) trapped in a cheerless marriage, and an eccentric misfit (Cassel) who offered them freedom.

Faces was his biggest hit, and it also defined the style for the rest of his films. He would show us talkative, neurotic people trapped in unworkable situations, and watch them growing increasingly desperate as they tried to figure their way out of them. He would not enmesh them in plots. He would let them freewheel with all the craziness and spontaneity of the real world, and we would have to pay attention because they were capable of doing literally anything-like real people.

Consider, for example, Love Streams, in which Cassavetes plays an alcoholic writer holed up in a house in the Hollywood Hills. He writes bad novels about bad women, while hookers march through his life. He doesn't have to leave home for trouble; it finds him there, and in one extraordinary sequence his former wife turns up at the door, says "This is your son," and deposits a small boy. The Cassavetes character has no idea what to do with a small boy, but he knows what to do with a buddy, and so he pours the kid a beer, complains to him about women, and takes him to Vegas for the weekend. Later in the same movie, the writer's sister (Gena Rowlands) turns up with two horses, a goat, a duck, some chickens, a dog, and a parrot. She had, it turns out, stopped at a pet store on her way, and thought it was a shame all of those animals were being imprisoned.

Cassavetes's most conventional film with Rowlands was probably Gloria (1980), in which she played the former mistress of a mobster, who takes a young boy under her wing after the mob wipes out his family. They go on the run together, developing a funny, offbeat relationship along the way.

That was one of the movies Rowlands got an Oscar nomination for. The other one was A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which also won Cassavetes a nomination for direction. It was an intense, off-center, wacky melodrama about a construction gang boss (Peter Falk) whose wife (Rowlands) is cracking up. The movie takes place before and after she spends six months in a mental institution, and its secret is that the Falk character is at least as crazy as his wife. The movie contains the wild, impulsive scenes for which Cassavetes became famous-especially one in which the manic Falk, torn by grief and confusion, bundles his frightened children into a truck for a compulsory "day at the beach" that is an exercise in misery.

It is always a miracle when an independent production, financed by the director or by a loose consortium of investors, gets made at all. Sometimes Cassavetes was able to make films, but unable to get them released. I think one of his best films is The Killing o fa Chinese Bookie (1976), with Ben Gazzara as the cynical operator of a strip club on Sunset Strip. He passes his time dating the strippers and playing poker, until he gets in trouble with the mob and is told that he must kill a Chinese bookie or he will be killed himself. He is not clever enough to avoid the assignment, and the question is whether he will be brave enough to perform it. This film has fallen through some kind of crack in the distribution system and is seldom seen. And another film, Opening Night, starred Gena Rowlands as an actress and was finished in 1978 but not seen until the 1988 New York Film Festival.

In all of Cassavetes's films there are sudden, unexpected bursts of humor-as when Cassel is discovered in bed with Rowlands in Faces, and flees from the bed and through the window and down the garage roof and across the lawn in one unbroken shot. Or the scene in A Woman Under the Influence where a construction worker somehow dumps a plate of spaghetti in his lap (and the scene is not slapstick; it has a point to it). Cassavetes made one pure comedy, however, the enchanting Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), with Cassel as a goofy car hiker and Rowlands as an intellectual who falls in love with him because he can make her smile.

But always there beside the humor, and sometimes contained in it, are the painful moments of truth-honest, sometimes brutal soliloquies in which the characters mercilessly dissect their own lives, and those around them. John Marley had a scene like that in Faces, in which he confronted the emptiness of his life, and Gazzara found a sequence in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie in which he confesses his mistakes to a woman who may love him. In A Woman Under the Influence there is an extraordinary confrontation between the husband and wife in which all of the pain and endurance of their marriage is on the screen. And in Love Streams, the movie during which Cassavetes first began to fall ill, there are moments in which his character seems to be looking into a mirror instead of a camera.

All of Cassavetes's films contained an exuberance of life. They were about passionate, disorganized people who had worked their way into trouble but had not lost the ability to hope or laugh. They had a certain shapelessness to them-a messiness that made them more interesting, because you could never guess (as you can with most Hollywood films) what "had" to happen next. Cassavetes must have never taken one of those deadening professional scriptwriting classes in which everything is reduced to a formula. He started with off-the-wall characters, and was curious to see what fixes they would get themselves into. This approach did not always work (I thought Husbands, in 1969, was a rambling and indulgent exercise in improvisation, with Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara allowing themselves to get away with murder). But when it did work, it was so spontaneous, so open to surprise, that it made conventional films feel like machines.

I met Cassavetes a couple of times, and then I understood his films in a better way. They were like he was, filled with energy and passion and big hopes and nagging fears, and hounded by the carping of those too small to follow in his tracks. Now that he is gone, his films will have to speak for him, and few directors have left behind work that duplicates more exactly the pleasure of being in their company.

1989

It's still the same old story, A fight for love and glory ...

n the night of November 9, 1988, Ted Turner presented a colorized version of Casablanca on cable television. And that was one of the saddest days in the history of the movies. It was sad because it demonstrated that there is no movie which Turner would spare, no classic however great which is safe from the vulgarity of his computerized graffiti gangs.

Bergman: Do you remember Paris?

Bogart: I remember every detail. The Germans woregray. You wore blue. And so they knew to color her dress blue, and also her eyes, and probably the wallpaper behind her and maybe a few other items here and there. And what would Bogart wear? Brown? That wouldn't show up very well against the grays of the clothing in the original picture. Maybe he could wear blue, too. Jimmy Cagney did, in the colorized version of Yankee Doodle Dandy. A bright sky blue, which we all know was probably the basic color in George M. Cohan's wardrobe.

There are few issues in the area of film preservation that arouse more anger than the issue of colorization. That is because it is an issue involving taste, and, to put it bluntly, anyone who can accept the idea of the colorization of black-and-white films has bad taste. The issue involved is so clear, and the artistic sin of colorization is so fundamentally wrong, that colorization provides a pass-fail examination. If you "like" colorized movies, it is doubtful that you know why movies are made, or why you watch them.