John Cassavetes (1980)

Once I’d jotted down a few thoughts after seeing Gloria, I read the BFI programme note and what had seemed puzzling about the film made sense.  An excerpt from Tom Charity’s John Cassavetes: Lifeworks (2001), the note mentions Cassavetes wrote the piece ‘to sell, strictly to sell’ and with no desire to direct the movie.   Hollywood’s surprising insistence that he should do so proved impossible to resist, after the consecutive commercial failures of The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976) and Opening Night (1977).  Gloria, the story of a middle-aged gangster’s moll and a young boy, trying to get away from mobsters pursuing the child (who may or may not be in possession of crucial information), amounts to a piece unusual in the Cassavetes oeuvre.  It’s conventionally constructed and, in the end, conventionally sentimental.

The tenth of the twelve features he directed, Gloria has a splendid opening titles sequence.  The credits are worked into vividly coloured paintings, with a strong Mexican flavour, by Romare Bearden.  These visuals, accompanied by Bill Conti’s surging, emotive score, culminate in a city skyline at night, which then dissolves into the real thing:  New York City.  The early scenes build up a disturbing energy.   Jeri Dawn (Julie Carmen), a young Hispanic woman, is on a bus, on her way home to the Bronx, after doing grocery shopping.  When the bus lurches, Jeri loses her balance and falls over with her cargo:  the other passengers shriek with alarm as if something much worse has occurred – and as people do when this kind of thing really does happen.  Jeri’s fine and quickly picks herself up but the moment soon feels like a harbinger of true horror.

As Jeri enters her apartment building, she sees a sinister-looking man and fears the worst.  Her husband Jack (Buck Henry), an accountant for a New York mafia family, has turned FBI informant.  There’s now a contract out on him and his family.  When Gloria Swenson (Gena Rowlands), her friend and neighbour, arrives at their apartment, wanting to cadge some coffee, Jeri begs her to take care of the Dawns’ two children, teenager Joan (Jessica Castillo) and her six-year-old brother Phil (John Adames).  Gloria isn’t keen but, within a few screen minutes, Jeri, Jack, Joan and Jeri’s mother (Lupe Garnica) have all been murdered, and Gloria is protecting Phil in her own apartment – though neither of them is happy with the arrangement.

Throughout Gloria, Cassavetes’ movement of the camera round his home city is dynamic.  (Fred Schuler was the DP.)  The sense of people on the run is animated simply and strongly:  there are plenty of sequences in which Gloria and Phil really do move at speed.  The action also consistently conveys the fractious heat of New York summer but this impressive packaging sharpens awareness of what a familiar storyline it surrounds.  When the desperate Jeri asks her to take care of the children, Gloria replies that she doesn’t like kids – ‘Especially your kids’, she adds with a caustic humour that clashes with the genuine panic and urgency built up in the early scenes.  This is the starting point of tough broad Gloria’s inevitable progress towards becoming like-a-mother to the orphaned child – a progress punctuated by repeated irritable exchanges between them, by serial separations and reunions which, though entertaining enough, are essentially mechanical.

In the main roles, Gena Rowlands is so forcefully hard-bitten and John Adames so sheerly unusual that they elevate the material.  Rowlands is as affecting as she’s economical when Gloria, suppressing tears, leaves Phil in their hotel room and heads for her climactic confrontation with the mob boss who was once her lover (Basilio Franchina) and his henchmen.  Rowlands appeared in a total of nine Cassavetes films and starred in five of the last seven.  He wrote this part for his wife even though he didn’t expect to direct her in it.  Cassavetes may have felt Rowlands applied an authenticating Midas touch to the character – plenty of critics certainly felt that.  This viewer could never forget that Gloria (whose surname is the actual birth name of Gloria Swanson) was a movie type – I’d say a stereotype rather than an archetype.

‘She’s tough … but she sides with the little guy’, declared the theatrical release poster for Gloria in 1980.  While Rowlands received a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her work, John Adames shared the Razzie for Worst Supporting Actor – tough for an eight-year-old, and unfair.  (Even if he was in distinguished company:  the co-recipient of the award was Laurence Olivier for his hilarious performance in The Jazz Singer.)  Adames isn’t a natural actor (he’s not performed on screen since), which makes him a surprising choice for a big role in a Cassavetes picture, but he’s a distinctive presence.  In spite of Gena Rowlands’ matter-of-factness, the double meanings in Gloria’s remarks about falling in love and sleeping with Phil have a cute and mildly queasy quality but eccentric John Adames has a winning intentness and determination.  ‘You’re the man’, Jack Dawn tells Phil as he entrusts his ledger (‘the Bible’) to his young son shortly before hitmen descend on the apartment.  Adames makes curious, complete sense of this label:  he’s a homunculus.

Although physically convincing, the hoods are part of the formulaic side of Gloria.  The playing of them (by, among several others, Tom Noonan, J C Quinn and Sonny Landham) is one-dimensional – there’s no sign here of the hyper-naturalism of a typical Cassavetes ensemble.  This could be intentional – keeping the bad guys at a cartoonish level makes it easier to take Gloria’s firing as many bullets into them as she does.  Even so, the more interesting contributions come in cameos – John Pavelko as a grey-faced bank teller, a succession of cab drivers (Shanton Granger, Santos Morales, Walter Jukes, Janet Ruben, Jerry Jaffe).  Bill Conti’s score sustains the Hispanic aspect of the story by incorporating the famous melody from the second movement of the Rodrigo guitar concerto.  It gives the narrative a lift but also reminds us this is music we’ve heard before – just as we’ve seen before people-discovering-their-humanity movies like Gloria.

2 August 2019