I have noticed that people who were loved or felt they were loved seemed to lead fuller, happier lives. All of my own work in theater and film has been concerned with varying themes of this love.
Change continues as the woman comes forward, attempting sociability. But, in the end, normal feelings of affection are too difficult to return to. The woman has been permanently disabled by the long discontinuance of feelings of love.
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Shadows started out as an improvisation on this scene in Cassavetes’s New York acting workshop. Talk-show host Jean Shepherd happened to be visiting and was so impressed that he invited Cassavetes onto his late-night show, Night People, during which Cassavetes brashly proposed that interested listeners send in one dollar apiece to finance a film; $2,500 was collected within a week. After raising additional funds, Cassavetes shot a free-form, hour-long feature that was screened three times at midnight, for no admission, to about 2,000 people, and that was declared a masterpiece of the “New American Cinema” by critic Jonas Mekas. But Cassavetes failed to find a distributor, so he shot eight additional scenes and edited a new 85-minute version that had more conventional continuity and narrative structure; it opened in 1961 and is the only version of Shadows that survives today (though Mekas, for one, regards it as inferior to the original). The two versions cost a total of $40,000, and together they launched a revolution in American independent film that is still going on.
Lured to Hollywood by a studio contract, Cassavetes directed two more pictures with mixed results, Too Late Blues (1961) and A Child Is Waiting (1963); the second of these was so altered by producer Stanley Kramer that Cassavetes virtually disowned it. Returning to maverick independence with a vengeance, he next made Faces (1968), the success of which led to two more studio deals (Husbands and Minnie and Moskowitz) over which he had full control and final cut. They were followed by three features he distributed himself: A Woman Under the Influence (1975), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976, rereleased in a shorter version in 1978), and Opening Night (1978); only the first of these was a commercial success–the other two were resounding commercial failures and barely circulated. Then came two features done for other companies, Gloria (1980) and Love Streams (1984), which did somewhat better, but not well enough to finance any more pictures. (An abortive experience taking over the direction of Big Trouble [1986], a comedy that was already in production and was subsequently recut by the producer, doesn’t really qualify as part of the Cassavetes oeuvre.) The remainder of Cassavetes’s “independent” activity was his small-scale theater work in Los Angeles: East/West Game, which he wrote and directed in 1980; three more plays in 1981, two of which were written by Ted Allan (including Love Streams, the basis of Cassavetes’s last film); and A Woman of Mystery in 1987.
The central location of Faces–the home of a middle-class couple in a state of crisis–was the house that Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands, and their children lived in; it was used again as the central location in Love Streams. No effort seems to have been made to redecorate or refurnish it to suit the tastes of the middle-class couple in Faces, and nothing about it–neither the art and signed photographs framed on the walls nor the books on the shelves–rings true for these characters. Such indifference to setting is not a virtue, but given the film’s concentration on the actors’ faces, it can’t really be considered a serious flaw; Cassavetes clearly regarded it as irrelevant or at least secondary.
If, however, we consider the stranglehold that “political correctness” of various persuasions currently has on the media–fostering attitudes that would probably make a movie like Shadows impossible to finance today–I think Cassavetes’s work warrants a closer look. The complete absence of villains and the touching celebration of various kinds of human sweetness and affection–exemplified by such wonderful characters as Hugh’s manager (Rupert Crosse) in Shadows, a disco hustler (Seymour Cassel) in Faces, and even Cosmo Vitelli in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie–has a great deal to do with what keeps his films vital and powerful. If Cassavetes’s radical humanism challenges some of our cherished notions about appropriate role models, perhaps that challenge makes it even more valuable in the long run. For all their hectoring anti-intellectualism, his movies are frequently object lessons in how we might behave more decently and caringly toward one another. (I first discovered Shadows when I was a high school senior who had been reading J.D. Salinger’s Glass family stories, and it struck me then–as it does today, having seen Shadows perhaps a dozen times since–that the interactions between the siblings in Cassavetes’s story are far warmer than those between Salinger’s family of elitists, whose love always seemed predicated on principles of snobbish exclusion.)
The martyrdom of Cassavetes–like that of Welles before him–seems to be the obligatory price exacted in this country for working outside the methods and assumptions of the industry. (Both directors, significantly, have received much more recognition for their independent efforts abroad than in this country.) This martyrdom also has something to do with the “scandal” of caring more about the work itself than about the financial reward to be gained from it. What probably elicited the most scorn in Hollywood, where both men lived, was their willingness to subsidize their own low-budget productions with the money made from their more routine work as actors–something both were usually forced to do in order to make movies at all.
