033 - A Woman Under the Influence, 1974, United States. Dir. John Cassavetes.

Thursday, February 2, 2017

033 - A Woman Under the Influence, 1974, United States.  Dir. John Cassavetes.

This movie begins with a baptism.

Or so we thought.  It is actually a group of construction workers wading in the river.

To the sounds of hopeful music.

Nick loves his wife Mabel.

He plans a date night with her.  He fights for it.  When the water main breaks and his supervisor makes him stay all night, he fights for it.  He argues with his boss.  He mopes all night thinking about it.  His construction worker friends see it.  He calls her and tries to explain.

The next morning he hurries home to see her.

What he does not know is that she went out last night, without him, lonely, walking the streets, entering a bar, and picked up a man.  The man, Garson Cross, spent the night with her, on the pull-out couch in the dining room, where she and her husband also sleep.

She might not know it either.

The next morning she sees Cross and calls him Nick.  She has repressed the memory.  She believes she slept with her husband.  Cross is gone before Nick comes home.  He never finds out.

When he does come home, his construction buddies come with him, and they all eat together.  She entertains the men.  They sing.  Does she get too friendly?

Nick blows his top.  His mother calls to tell him about her ailments.  He cannot take it.  He sends everyone out.  Mabel is crushed.  He assures her she has done nothing wrong.  She has just been acting strangely.

She has a birthday party and invites the neighbor kids over.  She presses a dad, Harold Jensen, to stay.  She scares him with her behavior.

When Nick and his mother come home, the house is in chaos. Children are running around with and without clothes.  He blows his top.  He throws out Harold Jensen.  He calls the doctor.

When Doctor Zepp comes over (He makes house calls!), she grows suspicious.

Nobody here needs a doctor.  I had the hiccups, but I took care of 'em.

Do you take pills?

Does morphine count? . . . Vitamins!  I take vitamin pills. . . . Uppers, downers, inners, outers.

Her mother-in-law brings up alcohol.

They all fight.

Nick finally places her in an institution.

He is so high-strung that he blows his top at the construction site.  He shoves one man over the side of a steep hill, and we hear later that he "broke every bone in his body."

He tries to spend time with his children.  He wants to get to know them.  He picks them up from school.  He takes them to the beach.  He lets them drink his beer.

Things are not going greatly.

Life is hard.

This is the third movie we have seen in our list so far this year that deals with mental illness or mental breakdown.

The first was Repulsion (1965, Roman Polanski).  The second was Bigger Than Life (1956, Nicholas Ray).

John Cassavetes made it clear that he was not making her crazy.

She is frustrated, pressed in, trapped.  And it takes its toll on her.

It takes its toll on him as well.  Several times throughout the film he loses his temper just when things seem to be going OK.  They love each other deeply, but they are struggling with the pressures of life.

And it is not yet clear who is going to win.  Them?  Or the pressures?

Mabel is played by John Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands.  In all they made eight films together.  He wrote the script for her as a play, but she was concerned about going to such extreme places emotionally night after night.  So he converted it to a screenplay.

You may know Gena Rowlands from the movie The Notebook (2004), where she plays James Garner's wife Allie, who suffers from dementia.  She herself wrote the story of their love in a notebook, with the note, "Read this to me, and I will come back to you."  He does.  She does.

The love expressed in that movie is not unlike the love expressed in this movie, made thirty years before.  No matter what happens to your mind, I will stay with you.  Even if you forget me, I will stay with you.  And I will love you.

It is fitting that The Notebook was directed by John Cassavetes' and Gena Rowlands' son, Nick Cassavetes.

In all, Nick has directed his mother in four movies, including Unhook the Stars (1996), She's So Lovely (1997), and Yellow (2012).  Meanwhile, her daughter Zoe has directed her in one, Broken English (2007).  What a family.

You may also know Gena Rowlands from Woody Allen's 1988 film Another Woman, where she overhears a psychiatrist's sessions through the walls of her own apartment, and how those sessions change her own life.  You can clearly see the influence of Cassavetes in Woody Allen's work.

Mabel's husband Nick is played by Peter Falk.

If Peter Falk is in it, we want to watch it.  He is an actor's actor's actor.  He had been on Columbo for a few years by then, and John Cassavetes had appeared in an episode a couple years earlier, and they had become friends.

Peter Falk wanted the movie to be made, so when no studios agreed to make it, he put up half-a-million dollars of his own money to get it made.  That says something about how much people loved John Cassavetes and believed in him.

The supporting players turn in strong performances.

George Dunn as Garson Cross is natural and believable.  He does not seem to be acting.  You hear ambient noises in the bar.

And Cassavetes keeps it in the family.

Gena Rowlands' mother, Lady Rowlands, plays her mother, and John Cassavetes' mother, Katherine Cassavetes, plays Peter Falk's mother.

One of the children, Angelo, is played by Matthew Labyorteaux, who would go on to star as Laura Ingalls' adopted brother Albert in Little House on the Prairie.

This film is touching.

The music is moving.

The action can be heart-breaking.

Their love is healing.

And the love persists.

To the end.