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By PAUL BRENNER
John Cassavetes, like Orson Welles, was a filmmaker who wore his independence
like a purple heart. His films were totally, tenderly, tragically
anti-Hollywood. And yet, also like Welles, as an actor, Cassavetes willingly
embraced the most poisoned and purple Hollywood hackwork. And also like Welles,
Cassavetes as a filmmaker had buried deep in his pineal gland a hope to crack
Hollywood as a commercial director.
For Welles, it was "The Stranger" and "The
Lady From Shanghai." For Cassavetes, "Big Trouble" and "Gloria." But the
maverick status of Welles and Cassavetes rendered them both incapable of
Hollywood filmmaker hackwork and their commercial filmmaking attempts deposited
those films in a limbo world.
Columbia/Tristar Home Entertainment
has now released "Gloria" on DVD for a demonstration of the above. As an
extended chase gangster film, with Gena Rowlands as tough-talking dame Gloria
Swensen ("patterned after Gloria Swanson") on the lam from the mob with an
obnoxious six-year-old kid in tow (he screams at Gloria at one point, "I hate
you, you stupid person. You're a pig."), Cassavetes has his tongue planted
firmly in his cheek. It is certainly Cassavetes's most action-oriented film and
also his funniest. How can it be otherwise with lines like "I've got my gun.
It's nothing to me to blow somebody's brains out. I just hope it's someone I
know." But most of the film is embedded firmly in Cassavetes Land with hotel
room conversational rambles and pent up and explosive emotional outbursts. Only
this time, the outbursts are sometimes accompanied by a gun blast. And
Cassavetes's bemusement shines through every frame. As Gloria shouts, "Hey! Just
don't be phony. I hate that!" |
