Cassavetes Left His Imprint on a Generation of Film Makers

To absorb the news that John Cassavetes died on Friday is difficult enough. Although there had been word that he was seriously ill for more than a year, the vitality that poured off every one of his films seemed to deny it. It was as though somehow his ferocious intensity could intimidate even a life-sapping disease.

But to hear of his death, having just watched 11 of his 12 films, chronologically from “Shadows” to “Love Streams,” and his central performances in three more, is shattering. At the United States Film Festival at Utah’s Park City, which just ended and which is supposedly a display of the best of independent film makers, Cassavetes was still that best, as, arguably, he had been for 31 years and as festivalgoers could discover for themselves from a trenchantly annotated retrospective, programmed and presided over by Michael Ventura.

This is not to say that time, or our own assimilation of the jangly, baggy-kneed technique Cassavetes brought to the screen with “Shadows” has lessened his power to enrage and exasperate. At Park City, people were still clucking and leaving screenings regularly, as outraged as ever. You suspect that Cassavetes would have chortled, watching them go; to have radically altered the face and the speech of film, yet never to have become predictable and certainly never old-shoe, is the sort of stubborn virtue he cherished.

Cassavetes has clearly been the sand in the film-making oyster, not only on his home turf but abroad, since the first and to the end. It’s not hard to trace his influence on writer-directors like Elaine May or Paul Mazursky, on the early Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, or on all of Warhol, but his ripple effect was broader than that. Ventura goes to some pains to explain how Fellini, Antonioni, Bergman and even Kurosawa altered their styles after the sensation that “Shadows”’ caused in London 31 years ago. You could certainly argue that Fassbinder, Herzog and Wenders owe more than a little to Cassavetes’ assault on film-making conventions.

Cassavetes’ subject, always, was love; his gaze was resolutely interior, his attitude unswervingly humane. His milieu is the middle class; when he detoured out of it slightly to examine the home and the business life of gangsters (“The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” “Gloria”) it was a middle-level echelon of gangster. No dons for him; he rarely got above the level of the dogged foot soldier.

While Hollywood kept its gaze on the flutteringly young and has slid into sickening superficiality because of it, Cassavetes was one of the first American directors to people his screen with men and women frankly over 30, with a little mileage under their belt, a little something more behind their eyes.

Although almost no American director has seemed as young as he matured (look at the difference between Cassavetes at 59 and his contemporary, Mazursky), Cassavetes let his subject matter mature along with him. Perhaps it’s this that has made the films seem to date as little as they have. There is the sense that so little has changed among these supposed “grown-ups”: that the battles by wives not to slide into the force fields generated by their own husbands and children is still as acute as it was in “A Woman Under the Influence.” That the jargon and the rituals with which we try to obliterate our disillusion is no less horrifying now than it was in “Faces.”

Because he had such a proficient pair of alter egos, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk, and such a collection of memorable or electrifying male characters--Seymour Cassel (in “Faces,” “Love Streams,” “Minnie and Moskowitz”), John Marley (“Faces”), Bobby Darin (“Too Late Blues”)--some think of Cassavetes as a maker of man’s movies. Dead wrong.

He has hardly one film without a complex woman whose sense of intrigue lingers long after we are out of the theater: Lelia Goldoni, mercurially seductive, ravishingly pretty in “Shadows”; Lynn Carlin as an unworldly, out-of-practice seductress in “Faces”; the depths of Stella Stevens in the uneven but under-appreciated “Too Late Blues”; Azizi Johari, alternately assured and vulnerable in “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie”; Joan Blondell, allowed to be as smart as she really was in “Opening Night,” and Gena Rowlands in everything.

Possibly Cassavetes was as insightful as he was about the needs, the flaws, the strengths of his women characters because of the beautiful enigmatic force he had at home in Rowlands. There’s a lovely anecdote about her reticence and their mutual chemistry: After they had been married for years, Cassavetes came home unexpectedly to find his wife, whom he had no reason to believe knew anything about music, at the piano, playing movingly and obviously with years of training.

The reactions were volcanic: Cassavetes was absolutely furious that she’d kept such a part of herself from him; Rowlands became royally enraged that he dared be angry. They didn’t speak for two weeks.

Certainly, there is no considering Cassavetes without his extraordinary muse--”the most complexly gifted actress of her generation,” in Ventura’s words. If Humphrey Bogart had described her, he would certainly have called her “a great broad,” his highest praise. Watching her change, unfold, deepen, step into the richness and complexities only hinted at in their first films together is another way of looking at Cassavetes’ work as a whole, as a true love stream in which ebb and flow are an expected part of the natural process. Nevertheless, our loss seems incalculable.