I would recommend “A Woman Under The Influence” first. It’s a pretty good summary of what Cassavetes is about. It also has some incredible performances.
Oh and you can skip Gloria :).
All I’ve seen is Faces, but it’s 5/5.
A recent thread regarding this can be found here with more information.
Gloria
Shadows / Minnie and Moskowitz,
A Woman Under the Influence
Opening Night
Husbands
Love Streams
Faces
Gloria was my first Cassavetes (and my childhood memory must have missed him as an actor since I probably saw Rosemary’s Baby and The Dirty Dozen as a kid). And even though it was his most “commercial” feature, I do recall detecting something so different in it than your usual gangster picture.
Even if you don’t like them the first time or don’t like them later, you might change your mind as you revisit them in your later years.
I thought Shadows and Minnie and Moskowitz and Opening Night were weaker works but when I revisited them years later, I was very wrong.
They somehow work in places that you didn’t think worked before. John’s work seems to have that effect. They somehow “change” or “grow” with you or maybe it’s more honest to say, you “grow” with them.
I’m looking forward to viewing Faces in my 40s and 50s.
Whatever you decide to start with, do not start with “Killing of a Chinese Bookie”. That was my first Cassavetes and it almost turned me off to him completely. Thank God I saw “A Woman Under the Influence” shortly afterward, or else I would have never gotten into him at all and would have missed out on one of the greatest bodies of work of all time.
So, to answer your question: “A Woman Under the Influence” would be a good place to start. “Faces” also wouldn’t make a bad starting point.
Why skip Gloria?
Gena was great and John made the film – is there problem with the film?
Anyone else see the irony of a cinephile diss-ing the film b/c it is commercial?
Artists need to be barefoot and chained to the kitchen stove i guess…..
I thought Gloria had some really atrocious performances. Some people might disagree but the little boy managed to detract from my viewing experience in every way. I was literally praying for the mobster to succeed on the hit after the first 45 minutes. He’s not the only one..Buck Henry was pretty bad too. It’s too bad because the premise is really interesting and Gena was good but there were just too many serious flaws with this one.
You were detracted by the kid?
So the part was poorly written or was the kid a cowboy recalcitrant?
Cassavetes didn’t even notice while directing – wow- this casts a real cloud over his directing and writing abilities….lol
Hey to each his own. I thought the kid’s part wasn’t poorly written as much as it was just extremely poorly acted and annoying. The kid even picked up a Razzie for that stinker of a performance and didn’t work in film again so…
the part was written that way – why?
what did that character inform us about Gena’s character?
Gloria is a stinker, and was only made by Cassavetes as a favour to Gena and for the money. His heart was not in it.
Too Late Blues and A Child is Waiting are commercial films also, but they’re a lot better than Gloria.
Not many people mention these two films, actually, but I’d recommend trying Too Late Blues as a way to get into Cassavetes. If you can find a copy!
The kid was atrocious in Gloria, no excuses. He just was. How Cassavetes didn’t realise this is anyone’s guess but i don’t think his heart was in it anyway.
Weren’’t you wondering why Gloria didn’t just “off” the kid?
what did it say about her character?
geesh…
Fraser- Orr – what didn’t you like about the film?
FACES!!!!!!
Rob: It’s a “plot” movie. None of the insight of Cassavetes’ other films can be brought out because the scenes need to serve the story, so it’s difficult to find any insight into human nature.
Fraser-Orr: Yes, human nature is secondary but it is there in the relationship between Gloria and the brat or within Gloria if not between the two characters.
“Weren’’t you wondering why Gloria didn’t just “off” the kid?
what did it say about her character?”
Surely they could have made the same ‘point’ with a less annoying kid though eh? ;-)
OP:
Watch Shadows, then Faces, then A Woman Under the Influence, then The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.
Gloria is fine! I’ve seen more annoying actors than that kid… it’s one of his late films that are not so GREAT (Big Trouble), and that’s when he got sick and the doctor told him he only had a couple of months to live – and then he made Love Streams! That’s what I started with… and it was great! Cassavetes is genious!
By the way there’s a pretty cool series with him staring a piano player who’s also a detective. Kind of a noir thing! ‘’Johnny Staccato’’ – doeas anyone has ony idea where can I get it?
I would start with A Woman Under the Influence
then I would see The Killing of a Chinese Bookie followed by these in this exact order
Opening Night
Love Streams
Husbands
Gloria
Shadows
Faces
This would be a cool way to watch Cassavettes’ films
and just for fun although not a Cassavettes’ film per se I would watch Mickey and Nicky and Machine Gun McCain, BOTH of these have Peter Falk and John Cassavettes.
One of the most rewarding things you can do is watch a Cassavetes film, then read the corresponding chapter soon after in Cassavetes on Cassavetes
It really is like sitting down with the master himself…..
Christopher
“Johnny Staccato” can be got in LA. Eddie Brandt’s has it on VHS.
Bobby, thnaks for the reply! I’m from Croatia… L.A. is a bit far away for me :)…
Well Eddie (is it a shop or a person) could be smart and transfer it to DVD! It’s a very easy thing to do… I found the VHS online to buy and I would but I don’t have anything to play it! Technology is just ruining everything
Cool. Zagreb or somewhere in Dalmatia?
Eddie Brandt’s Saturday Matinee is a video/dvd shop for the type of people who are on this website. They specialize in rare and hard-to-find movies and tv shows. I haven’t been there in years, so I don’t know if they were ever planning to digitize their huge videotape collection, but it seems to me that they should.
If you want it bad you can always buy the vhs online, then take it to a transfer house somewhere in Zagreb to get it burned onto dvd. Maybe the academy, or the Croatian film clubs association. Someone, somewhere has a vhs player hooked up to a dvd player. They’d probably do it for you if you just leave a dub for them.
You can get the premiere episode of Staccato on DVD on Universal’s “Brilliant But Canceled” DVD
I have only seen “Husbands”, but its one of the greatest films I have ever seen. Need to get my hands on more!
I just got through seeing FACES (1968) for the first time.
I cannot tell you how much I hated this film. But I’ll try:
Take 10 ultra-square, uneducated, middle-aged heterosexuals of sub-average intelligence, get them stinking, stinking, stinking drunk…. then turn a camera on them? And see what happens?
Christ, I’d rather watch Andy Warhol’s EMPIRE…. all 12 hours of it, than labor through this unsavory dog’s breakfast again. At least the Warhol “home movies” had some camp and wit and absurd panache to them. FACES is the antithesis of Wit.
The movie GUMMO is an idiotic home movie, but I loved it because it showed me something new. FACES reminds me of my own supremely dysfunctional parents in the 1960’s… getting drunk and acting like fucking farm animals afterwards. Was ANYBODY sober at ALL in the making of FACES? A single soul?
Not only would I not spend five minutes with any of these people…… I would positively run screaming in the opposite direction were any of them to come my way.
Cassavetes must be laughing in his grave, knowing that he’s deluded a whole swath of people into thinking that this ugly, pedestrian, endless home movie is somehow “art”.
Hey, I know the 60’s were about “trying things”, as Sir Paul has said, but let’s chalk FACES up as an experiment………… that didn’t work.
Note to young aspiring filmmakers here on MUBI: Just because something is “natural” or “real” or “unrehearsed” …. does not make it art at all. Please, for the love of Art, do not delude yourself into thinking that this might be so. True art has some thought behind it; but not a synapse was fired in the making of this film. Cassavetes could not frame a beautiful frame if his life depended on it. Drunken babble is NOT a script, no way no how. At least Bukowski’s drunkards were funny. The neanderthals in QUEST FOR FIRE engaged in more scintillating dialogue than the “characters” of this farm-animal farrago, this mishmosh.
THE EMPEROR WEARS NO CLOTHES, kids. Cassavetes—-Yes, I get it!——- is trying to stage his own little 60’s flavored protest to the American studio system. “Oooh, it’s ‘underground’, bay-bay!” But the big studios had learned a little something about composition, story, timing and beauty that one ditches at one’s peril. This masturbatory home-movie is not a worthy “threat” to any studio achievements or sensibilities (like EASY RIDER, of the same year, was ). . Tommy Wiseau makes a better, more absorbing movie.
Wim Wenders’s 1970’s flicks bore the shit out of you, sure, but Wenders knows he’s doing it, that’s part of his aesthetic. Cassavetes bores the shit out of you……. but really imagines he’s showing you something. This is like a bourgeois, boozy, bloated version of Tod Browning’s FREAKS.
I need a shower to wash this stain out of my psyche. To paraphrase Python: This film has images in it which I’ll remember for a lunchtime.
and you can (bump) this
Lol! Awesome post David.
Two things:
1) You weren’t just bored or turned off by this movie, you actually really, really hated it. It’s gotten under your skin somehow.
2) You can recognize people from your own life in this film, and you don’t like the way they’re acting.
Question: Do these two facts have anything to do with each other?
Also, though it goes without saying, beautiful framing, scintillating dialog and intelligent characters do not make a great film.
Rainer Golden
For all the films I have watched, I have yet to delve into Cassavetes. I am looking to remedy this. Any recommendations?