Happy Labor Day!

Every year around this time I commemorate the Labor Day institution that is now long gone: The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon. It was a crass but compelling display of emotion, sentimentality, and show-biz glitz. Much has been said about the host, Jerry Lewis, but this year in particular there has been much talk, yet again, about his uncompleted The Day The Clown Cried. 

In that spirit, I want to share once again the discovery that I was led to by my friend, superior cineaste Paul Gallagher, who was giving me copies of films by the late, great Jacques Rozier (whom I've paid tribute to before here on this blog and on the Funhouse TV show twice). One of the documentaries he gave me was a TV project Rozier helmed called Vive Le Cinema (1972). It was a TV pilot that would have different hosts interviewing performers, filmmakers, and others who worked in the world of moviemaking.

There were three episodes of the series, according to the IMDB, but the one that draws our attention was Rozier's pilot, hosted by none other than Jeanne Moreau, who interviewed a number of French filmmakers and actors, including Philipe De Broca, Barbet Schroeder, and Bulle Ogier.

The two Americans in the line-up immediately drew my attention, though — the second was the giant of cinema, Orson Welles, in full conversational flourish with Jeanne as they ate a dinner and Orson told her anecdotes of his youth and of some of the projects he would like to make with her (including Isak Dinesen's "The Farm," which was eventually made as Out of Africa.)

The first American interviewed was Jerry Lewis, just as he was embarking on The Day The Clown Cried. He discusses it with Moreau, shows her the storyboards and design drawings and discusses the film's cast and storyline with her. 

I present this lost snippet of Lewis-iana here with subtitles, which I myself typed into my editing program, since Lewis and Moreau speak in English, but his words are overdubbed by a French translation and the subtitles produced by the AI program that offer subs for movies is wildly off-base at times. 

I hope you enjoy this bit of "lost" (read: hidden) footage. The Orson interview is here. (Note: I subtitled that one myself as well. As I presented it, I sadly had to cut about five minutes of it, but the rest of it filled up a whole Media Funhouse episode at 28 minutes).

 

Seminal to the world of Seventies maverick moviemaking: Deceased Artiste Gena Rowlands

Gena Rowlands was the very heart of John Cassavetes' cinema. She played other great roles on stage, screen, and on TV, but the six films she made with her first husband (she has had a second husband since 2012) will always be her defining works. 

Wim Wenders has said that she is one of the few actresses who could believably cry on-camera (on the level of Setsuko Hara, from the Ozu films), and she certainly could deliver dialogue like no one else. Of the six films, Woman Under the Influence is rightly considered her best-ever film performance. She physically inhabited the roles Cassavetes created for her, but it was also the dialogue that he wrote for her (which he allowed her to change, since he said she knew her characters better than he did) that lingers so long after the film is over. 

Rowlands in Faces.

Here in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Cassavetes has her talk about movies "lying" to their women viewers by presenting ideal men, men that don't exist, and giving women ideas on how to live. True to Cassavetes' style, he cuts the monologue before it properly concludes, but by then the message has been delivered (one that he will toy with himself later in the film — this speech is a "key" to the whole picture and its charming but highly unlikely happy ending).

And again, Gena proved to be (despite all of our love for Gazzara, Falk, Lynn Carlin, Ben Carruthers, and Seymour Cassel) the most essential performer in the most essential Cassavetes films.

 

Woman Under the Influence (1974) is indeed Cassavetes’ masterwork, and despite his pared-down visuals, the reason the film hits so hard is because of the lead performances by Rowlands and Falk. Several scenes in the film linger in the memory, but one that cannot be forgotten is the one where Rowlands’ character Mabel is having a breakdown in front of her family (including her really nasty stepmother, played by Cassavetes’ real-life mother) and her doctor. 

The scene is grueling because of our affection for these characters, but also because Falk’s character thinks he can snap her out of her condition and discovers that isn’t possible. Some viewers have found the scene difficult to sit through, and it is. But it’s the essence of Cassavetes’ art that we live through the happy moments in the characters’ lives and also must go through some of their worst moments. 

This particular clip is just the beginning of the breakdown sequence. I definitely suggest watching the entire movie if you can deal with truly “adult” cinema — having nothing to do with sex and everything to do with maturity.

 

One other moment that is utterly unforgettable from the Cassavetes films starring Rowlands is this bit from Love Streams (1984), in which Rowlands’ psychiatrist is chastising her for her denial that the love between herself and her husband has ended. Seymour Cassel plays the husband; thus Love Streams seems to be a sort-of sequel to Minnie and Moskowitz where the happy ending of the preceding film (“movies set you up,” remember?) is belied by the later unhappiness of the quirky couple. 

The psychiatrist in this scene is intent on getting Rowlands’ character to move on from her dead-end love for her husband. In a perfect Cassavetes blend, his questions seem amusing (telling her to get sex, “I don’t care with whom….”). But her insistence that love is a stream that doesn’t end is heartbreaking for the very reason that we’ve *all* felt that way about someone who no longer felt that way about us. It’s the universality of the characters’ dilemmas in Cassavetes’ films that makes them both so familiar and often somewhat uncomfortable. (But oh so human.)

 

The sequence above is echoed in a later moment in the film — set up as a dream sequence — in which an even more extreme balance is struck between humor and heartbreak, as Rowlands’ character bets her husband and daughter that they will love her again if she can make them laugh. She tries out all kinds of novelty-store comic toys on them, and the husband and daughter do not react. Cassavetes’ cinema of “discomfort” is so emotionally driven that even when it is fantasy-based, it is exceedingly familiar. 

Those are the three scenes that show Rowlands off to best advantage (with the caveat that the clip from Woman above is actually only the early part of what is a much longer, more intense scene). As a bonus I will include a sliver here from my phone interview, presented on the Funhouse TV show, with Rowlands and Seymour Cassel, on the occasion of the first release of Shadows and Faces on home video.