Master filmmaker John Cassavetes

Under His Influence – by Phillip Lopate
Review of ‘Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented American Independent Film' by Marshall Fine

SEVENTEEN years after his death in 1989, John Cassavetes's stock continues to rise. Revered worldwide as one of the dominant models for personal filmmaking, his pictures are reissued in fancy DVD boxed sets, shown in retrospectives and taught in universities. Yet during his lifetime his work was often dismissed as confused and self-indulgent. Of all major American directors, it has probably taken him longest to gain his critical due.

Marshall Fine, film and TV critic for Star magazine, has written the first genuine biography of this increasingly influential figure. An avowed devotee, Fine set out "to kindle the same kind of excitement and curiosity about Cassavetes' work in readers" that he felt, and he has accomplished his goal with "Accidental Genius," an absorbing, well-researched book. "My approach has always been journalistic, piecing together a story," writes Fine, whose prose style, in truth, rarely rises above the journalistically serviceable. But the material is riveting, the story moves briskly, and the real triumph lies in its central portrait. Cassavetes comes alive on the page, his restless spirit captured in all its contradictoriness.

Fortunately, Fine is no hagiographer. We see many instances of Cassavetes acting like a jerk, or at cross-purposes: an egalitarian who led others by manic charisma; a provocateur who disliked violence and nudity on screen; a proponent of the uneasy who recut his films when preview audiences responded enthusiastically, yet whose favorite director was the crowd-pleasing Frank Capra; a generous helper to beginners, who often hurt himself by insulting studio higher-ups; a wise soul and an immature prankster.

Cassavetes was himself an actor of fine, if narrow, intensities, so it figures he would evolve an actor-centered cinema. He began acting, he admitted, to capture girls' attention and to compensate for his small stature. He idolized James Cagney "because he was short - and tough." Starting out with juvenile delinquent roles, Cassavetes graduated, during the heyday of live television in the 50's, to brooding male leads in the Brando-Dean mold. He also won the heart of the gorgeous, talented actress Gena Rowlands , who married him and formed with him a lifelong artistic partnership.

Stymied by conventional film and theater practices, he began improvising scenes with young actors; the result was his first directed film, "Shadows" (1959), a work of raw, lyrical charm. From that start, he created the template that would produce "Faces," "Husbands," "Opening Night" and the five other movies that carried his personal vision. What Fine says about his masterpiece, "A Woman Under the Influence," could apply equally to the others: "It is an uncompromising film that refuses to go where the audience would like. It has the untidiness and illogic of real life, with people acting against their own best interests, hurting the ones they love and immediately regretting it." Such films were hard to finance, and Cassavetes broke the first Hollywood rule - never use your own money - by mortgaging his house, funneling his acting fees into his productions and even distributing them himself.

The book is particularly strong on Cassavetes's work methods. He was, it turns out, "a human script factory," always writing or dictating another screenplay. Cassavetes resented being saddled with the "improvisation" label when so much of his work was scripted; but it was partly his fault. He muddied the waters by confessing how he loved to make use of accidents and surprises. Still, he maintained that the only improvised parts were the impromptu movements, like crossing a room, in the midst of line deliveries.

To keep the acting free and open, Cassavetes insisted on not blocking or lighting elaborately beforehand. The camera had to adjust to the actors, necessitating a hand-held, semi-documentary style. Film critics' initial resistance to him may have reflected their formalist preference for the carefully composed shot, as in Ford and Antonioni. Cassavetes had hit upon a new kind of destabilized, fluid image, and if his films do have ravishing visual passages, they come from the camera serendipitously following actors' natural rhythms. This darting camerawork supported his vision of life as a shifting, bewildering affair; it also meant that the actors had to stay in the moment, never knowing when the camera was on them.

People had to be moved out of their comfort zones to elicit moments of true feeling. Peter Falk , who took awhile getting used to Cassavetes's methods, reported, "On 'Husbands,' he'd run in front of the camera, put a banana up your behind - he'd do anything." All this rests on the questionable assumption that what is most off-balance or unfamiliar is most authentic. There are revelations in Cassavetes's films that show with startling clarity the map of human confusion, but there are also scenes where actors fumble and bluster through embarrassing shtick.

Being a booster, the author can't seriously engage any arguments against Cassavetes's artistry. Each film is recounted scene by scene - space that might have been better spent in balanced criticism. Then again, he has not meant to do a critical biography. If the personal treatment of the formative years tends to devolve later into a march through directorial projects, it may be because Cassavetes came to pour everything of substance into his work. A man of enormous stamina, he could go for days on nothing but cigarettes, coffee and booze; in the end, he died of cirrhosis of the liver. It was an inadvertent suicide on the part of a man who once said, "I'm a great believer in spontaneity because I think planning is the most destructive thing in the world."

Fine justly credits Cassavetes with creating a cinema of emotion; breaking new ground in his focus on middle-class suburban lives; altering the spatial frame; and changing the way films were financed and distributed, by going outside the studio system. I wish he hadn't harped on the idea that Cassavetes "invented American independent film," which may be true, but is a mixed compliment, given the mediocrity of most indies. I prefer to think this director's chief legacy was an astonishing set of films that invite a different relationship to being in the moment, and in which the mystery of human behavior dictates that anything can happen at any time to anyone.

(Phillip Lopate's film criticism was collected in "Totally, Tenderly, Tragically," and his anthology "American Movie Critics" will be published in March.)