Cassavetes wore emotions on screen

July 4, 2001

BY ROGER EBERT FILM CRITIC

The films of John Cassavetes come in a deluge of words and emotions, of grand and sad gestures, of characters who want to love and don't know how. His people are often balanced between the terror and exhilaration of manic-depression. Since he uses the same friends and family members again and again, since he sometimes uses his homes as locations, there often is a feeling that he's cutting close to the bone: His movies are the autobiography of his emotions.

It has been 12 years since Cassavetes died, and now his films can be seen more clearly. When he was in full flood, his work alternated with his professional acting jobs, and they clouded the picture. Starting Friday through month's end, the Gene Siskel Film Center is presenting nine of his works--in 35mm prints--and the form of his achievement is clear to see.

He was the most important of the modern American independent filmmakers, the one whose ''Shadows'' (1959) clearly demonstrated that one man could make a personal movie without the albatross of the studio system. It is no accident that indie filmmakers have named their own most important award after him. Cassavetes worked both inside and outside the system. He was a bankable star who pulled down big paychecks for his work in such films as ''Rosemary's Baby,'' ''Two Minute Warning,'' ''The Fury,'' ''Brass Target'' and ''The Dirty Dozen.''

He used those jobs to finance his own films, and his friend and frequent star Seymour Cassel told me that if Cassavetes had been able to finance his work any other way, he might never have acted again. Cassavetes' characters love to talk, to smoke, to drink. They hate to sleep. They fear silence. They seek love, but it is not sex they crave--it's total acceptance and security; they rarely find it, and when they do, it is in passages of giddy, manic relief that cannot last. Many of the key roles in Cassavetes' films are played by his wife, Gena Rowlands, and it was his great good fortune to find a collaborator who seemed to share a telepathic sympathy for his aims. In many of his films, the autobiographical character is not the male lead, but the female lead, played by Rowlands.

Cassavetes loved a rough, spontaneous feel to his films. His cinematographers would report that a ''perfect'' shot was not perfect for Cassavetes, who would order it shot again, jostle the camera with his elbow to make a movement jerky, and only then be satisfied with it. He wanted you to feel like a voyeur caught up in the tumult of the character's emotions.

Here are the films being shown

• ''Shadows'' (1959), the first film he directed, the story of a doomed interracial romance on New York's beatnik fringe.

• ''A Child Is Waiting'' (1962), produced during Cassavetes' unsuccessful flirtation with the Hollywood studio system, stars Rowlands, Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland.

• ''Faces'' (1968), the landmark film that won Oscar nominations for Cassavetes' screenplay and for the acting of Cassel and Lynn Carlin—she as an unhappy housewife (married to John Marley), he as a lover she takes in desperation.

• ''Husbands'' (1970), Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara play three buddies who, on the death of a friend, go on an extended binge of drinking and sex, as if hurling their recklessness in the face of mortality.

• ''A Woman Under the Influence'' (1974), with Rowlands and Falk in the story of a woman who desperately wants to please (''Tell me who you want me to be!''). Rowlands got her first Oscar nomination for the role, in which the Falk character has her institutionalized even though he may be as crazy as she is.

• Gazzara in ''The Killing of a Chinese Bookie'' (1976), Cassavetes' unseen sleeper, which got little distribution when it was first released, but has gathered a reputation as one of his best and funniest. Gazzara plays the operator of a strip club on Sunset Boulevard whose problems with the mob force him into the unwanted role of hit man.

• ''Opening Night'' (1979), with Rowlands as an alcoholic actress facing a stage premiere with dread and emotional panic; the rich cast includes Cassavetes, Gazzara and Joan Blondell as a veteran actress.

• A new print of ''Gloria'' (1980), which won Rowlands the second of her best actress nominations. She plays a mob-connected woman who takes the kid of a mob victim under her wing and tries to protect him.

• ''Love Streams'' (1984), a new print of Cassavetes' last substantial film (some say his greatest), with Rowlands and Cassavetes as sister and brother. Cassavetes desperately dates and beds a series of bemused or puzzled women, while Rowlands has something halfway between a breakdown and a breakthrough.

This is a reworked version of a story first published in 1998.