Gena Rowlands is Gloria, a friend of the mob in New York City. She lives in a shabby Bronx apartment house and is entertaining the six-year-old son of a neighboring family, John Adames, when the rest of the family -- a miscast Buck Henry as an FBI informant, his succulent Puerto Rican wife, their daughter, and their wizened abuelita -- are blown away by the goon squad. They need to kill Adames too. Those are the rules.
The uncertain and somewhat guilty Rowlands, who hates kids, takes off with him. They are pursued from hotel to hotel, from train station to subway, by hit men. Gloria is a tough babe, though, and is always quickest on the draw, though rarely more than one step ahead of her executioners.
It's hardly an unfamiliar armature. An urban person who has no use for children is suddenly saddled with one and must take care of him or her. In the course of many tribulations, they bond. The now-humanized rogue rides into the sunset with his new companion. Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid" is one of the more entertaining examples.
This film, though, was directed by John Cassavetes, famous for his mostly improvised and impeccably dull slices of life. Please, God -- no more Zorbas.
This is Cassavetes' most structured and conventional movie and, like Orson Welles' "The Stranger," it mostly succeeds in its attempted mixture of poetry and commercialism.
Let me get the weaknesses out of the way. First of all, the Mafia not only want to blow away Buck Henry and his family; they also want the black notebook he's been keeping, the one labeled "MacGuffin." And Henry gives the book to his little BOY and tells him to keep it? Why? Almost all of the dialog sounds written and rehearsed but some is clearly made up on the spot. The impromptu lines come from the kid, which is a shame. It's bad enough that little Adames can't act, but for Cassavetes to urge him to improvise dialog almost turns into child abuse, especially when it comes out like, "Good-bye, you sucker, you little insect." And Buck Henry as the terrified family man about to squeal on the Mafia. How did he get the role? And the climactic scene has Adames running -- in slow motion -- towards an open-armed Rowland while the score tells us this is a happy ending, just in case we missed it.
So much for the bad stuff. The rest is quirky -- and I don't mean that negatively. I'll just give examples from two scenes.
(1) The mob shows up at Buck Henry's apartment and the halls echo with shotgun blasts. (Cassavetes doesn't show us the killings, just the family sitting around waiting to be slaughtered.) Now, in an "ordinary" action movie, the echoes would no sooner have died down than we would hear police sirens in the background. Not here. The hoods take their time poking around Henry's apartment while looking for the little black book. No hurry, folks. The police response time here is geared to reality, not to movie conventions.
(2) Gloria barely manages to sneak out of another apartment house with the kid and the MacGuffin and must make a quick escape before the hit men reach her. In most movies, the pursued runs into the street, yells "Taxi!", and a cab screeches to an immediate halt in front of him. Or maybe there's one already waiting at the curb. Here, she calls out furiously and waves her hand and the taxis whiz by as they do in real life.
Adames is no actor, as I've said, but at least he's not cute in any stereotypical way. And he never cries. The sentimentality is kept within reasonable bounds. Gena Rowlands is aging but still beautiful, even when cheaply made up and wearing sleazy pleated skirts and jackets that look like some kind of polyester or fake silk. She's thoroughly deglamorized, as she should be -- not old, but worn and a little frayed around the edges like a library book that has been checked out often. In the bad old days, Barbara Stanwyck could have waltzed through this part.
Rowlands is from Wisconsin, though, and it shows in her speech. ("Cooled" instead of "cold.") It doesn't sound right when she attempts a New York accent but it doesn't exactly sound wrong either. It's kind of like a comfortable Mid-western pasture that's been littered with garbage and flaps of raggedy paper and planted with graffiti-laden signs.
Boy, did Cassavetes have an eye for locations. Who else would have shot a scene of Newark's Penn Station IN Newark's Penn Station? The place isn't appallingly seedy, nor is it as clean and rococo as Moscow. It has nothing like Grand Central's Oyster Bar. It's simply uninteresting.
I wish -- come to think of it -- that Cassavetes' script had been a little more taut, more thought-out and convincing, where the central relationship between Rowlands and Adames is concerned. The exchanges alternate between spiteful barbs and little understated caresses and are at no point believable.
Still, this is an original work and well worth catching.
The uncertain and somewhat guilty Rowlands, who hates kids, takes off with him. They are pursued from hotel to hotel, from train station to subway, by hit men. Gloria is a tough babe, though, and is always quickest on the draw, though rarely more than one step ahead of her executioners.
It's hardly an unfamiliar armature. An urban person who has no use for children is suddenly saddled with one and must take care of him or her. In the course of many tribulations, they bond. The now-humanized rogue rides into the sunset with his new companion. Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid" is one of the more entertaining examples.
This film, though, was directed by John Cassavetes, famous for his mostly improvised and impeccably dull slices of life. Please, God -- no more Zorbas.
This is Cassavetes' most structured and conventional movie and, like Orson Welles' "The Stranger," it mostly succeeds in its attempted mixture of poetry and commercialism.
Let me get the weaknesses out of the way. First of all, the Mafia not only want to blow away Buck Henry and his family; they also want the black notebook he's been keeping, the one labeled "MacGuffin." And Henry gives the book to his little BOY and tells him to keep it? Why? Almost all of the dialog sounds written and rehearsed but some is clearly made up on the spot. The impromptu lines come from the kid, which is a shame. It's bad enough that little Adames can't act, but for Cassavetes to urge him to improvise dialog almost turns into child abuse, especially when it comes out like, "Good-bye, you sucker, you little insect." And Buck Henry as the terrified family man about to squeal on the Mafia. How did he get the role? And the climactic scene has Adames running -- in slow motion -- towards an open-armed Rowland while the score tells us this is a happy ending, just in case we missed it.
So much for the bad stuff. The rest is quirky -- and I don't mean that negatively. I'll just give examples from two scenes.
(1) The mob shows up at Buck Henry's apartment and the halls echo with shotgun blasts. (Cassavetes doesn't show us the killings, just the family sitting around waiting to be slaughtered.) Now, in an "ordinary" action movie, the echoes would no sooner have died down than we would hear police sirens in the background. Not here. The hoods take their time poking around Henry's apartment while looking for the little black book. No hurry, folks. The police response time here is geared to reality, not to movie conventions.
(2) Gloria barely manages to sneak out of another apartment house with the kid and the MacGuffin and must make a quick escape before the hit men reach her. In most movies, the pursued runs into the street, yells "Taxi!", and a cab screeches to an immediate halt in front of him. Or maybe there's one already waiting at the curb. Here, she calls out furiously and waves her hand and the taxis whiz by as they do in real life.
Adames is no actor, as I've said, but at least he's not cute in any stereotypical way. And he never cries. The sentimentality is kept within reasonable bounds. Gena Rowlands is aging but still beautiful, even when cheaply made up and wearing sleazy pleated skirts and jackets that look like some kind of polyester or fake silk. She's thoroughly deglamorized, as she should be -- not old, but worn and a little frayed around the edges like a library book that has been checked out often. In the bad old days, Barbara Stanwyck could have waltzed through this part.
Rowlands is from Wisconsin, though, and it shows in her speech. ("Cooled" instead of "cold.") It doesn't sound right when she attempts a New York accent but it doesn't exactly sound wrong either. It's kind of like a comfortable Mid-western pasture that's been littered with garbage and flaps of raggedy paper and planted with graffiti-laden signs.
Boy, did Cassavetes have an eye for locations. Who else would have shot a scene of Newark's Penn Station IN Newark's Penn Station? The place isn't appallingly seedy, nor is it as clean and rococo as Moscow. It has nothing like Grand Central's Oyster Bar. It's simply uninteresting.
I wish -- come to think of it -- that Cassavetes' script had been a little more taut, more thought-out and convincing, where the central relationship between Rowlands and Adames is concerned. The exchanges alternate between spiteful barbs and little understated caresses and are at no point believable.
Still, this is an original work and well worth catching.