SPECIAL SCREENINGS : Cassavetes Survey Opens With ‘Shadows,’ His First Feature

“The Films of John Cassavetes,” which the UCLA Film Archive presents today through March 18, will provide the all-too-rare opportunity to see all 11 features that Cassavetes made over a 25-year-period. Cassavetes, who died a year ago at 59, was the quintessential independent film maker, determined to get at the truth of human experience at all costs. His films were rough around the edges, but he got a raw honesty up there on the screen in an era when few others did.

It would be hard for young people today to imagine what it was like seeing Cassavetes’ first feature “Shadows” (1958-59), which launches the retrospective tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Theater, when it was brand-new. Those of us raised on Hollywood make-believe but captivated by foreign films in our college years were not prepared for the impact of the honesty and unvarnished realism of “Shadows” in an American film.

It is a bittersweet story of black youths of varying hues of skin color that evoked the tempo and quality of life for young people in New York at the time. It requires no effort to summon the memory of the pain and anguish of this film nor its gritty evocation of Manhattan streets, harshly lit restaurants and nondescript apartments. Playing with “Shadows” is the first and better of Cassavetes’ two uneven studio productions, “Too Late Blues” (1961), in which Bobby Darin plays a jazz musician tempted to sell out in order to survive.

Just as successfully as he captured the cool life style of young people adrift in the neon and steel jungle of New York in “Shadows,” Cassavetes zeroes in on the bored existence of the affluent middle-aged in Los Angeles suburbia in the equally remarkable “Faces” (1968), which screens Sunday at 7:30.

He focuses on one couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin), whom he follows through a harrowing 48 hours, climaxing in a veritable Walpurgisnacht in which their 14-year marriage comes apart at the seams. The pivotal character, played by Cassavetes’ wife and frequent star, Gena Rowlands, is a high-class prostitute of extraordinary beauty and sensitivity. Other unforgettables in the cast are Seymour Cassel as a goofy yet compassionate peroxided hustler and Dorothy Gulliver as a dumpy, frowzy housewife nakedly direct in her craving for affection.

Playing with it is “A Child Is Waiting” (1963), an unhappy but not wholly ineffective collaboration between Cassavetes and producer Stanley Kramer and starring Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland, who clash over the treatment of the retarded children in their care. For full schedule: (213) 206-FILM, 206-8013.