John Cassavetes had a great frightening smile. It spread across his face like a werewolf’s cackle, and it made his eyes light up in a way that suggested delight putting a hammerlock on frenzy. Movie audiences of the late ’60s knew that crazy smile well. They could see it (and Cassavetes) in big popular hits like 1967’s “The Dirty Dozen,” where he played a psychopath in Major Lee Marvin’s outlaw unit, or 1968’s “Rosemary’s Baby,” where he played an actor who sells his soul (and wife, Mia Farrow) to the devil. And they could recognize Cassavetes’ screen persona: the urban wise guy or wild man, eyes wary, mouth sometimes snarling, voice whiny or explosive — bitter, funny, crackling with a slightly contemptuous good humor.
But those same audiences mostly missed the other side of Cassavetes — who is being celebrated starting Friday with a nine-film retrospective at The Music Box Theatre — the more personal, profound and brilliant self-revelation he practiced in the nine great films he wrote and directed between 1959-61 (“Shadows”) and 1984 (“Love Streams”). Some of those movies were major critical successes (notably “Shadows,” 1968’s “Faces” and “1974’s “A Woman Under the Influence”). Some were critical and audience flops that have been rarely seen since their first release. Almost all were independently made, sometimes with Cassavetes’ earnings as an actor. They tended to star people in his circle: his wife (Gena Rowlands), his friends (Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, Seymour Cassell) and, less often, himself.
All of the movies were controversial, as likely to be hated as loved by the volatile audiences who saw them. And Cassavetes, who knew very well the extent to which his films riled or provoked audiences, always seemed to take pleasure in those reactions. He encouraged volatility. He reveled in argument. He got a charge out of turbulence and anger.
An awful irony: One of the most significant, personal and brilliant of all postwar American movie directors, and one of the most universally admired among international filmmakers and critics, Cassavetes the director mostly languished in relative obscurity here, even as he hit the big time as an actor.
Great artists and filmmakers aren’t always rightly recognized in their own time. And one prime example of that lamentable truth is Cassavetes. If you have never seen his most famous films, now is the time to catch them. And the time to see also the more obscure movies — like 1971’s “Minnie and Moskowitz,” 1976’s “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” 1977’s “Opening Night” or “Love Streams” — which reveal their perverse maker and his maverick art just as inspiringly.
The Music Box series — which includes four new prints (of “Love Streams,” “Moskowitz,” “Gloria” and “Husbands”) — addresses that wrong. It includes every one of Cassavetes’ most personal works, eliminating only three Cassavetes-directed movies: more conventional studio films, which he tended to dismiss himself (“Too Late Blues,” “A Child is Waiting” and his last picture, 1985’s “Big Trouble”). And, as you wade into those nine other films, the classics — for the first time, or, preferably, after seeing them more than once — you can immediately catch the distinctive tone of his voice, the angle of his vision.
You can see his world and how it worked — with the sudden shocking clarity of light flooding over a darkened stage, blazing though a shattered window.
Cassavetes was famous for improvising scenes with his casts — though he liked to insist that, in his films, the words were written and the emotion improvised. His camera style typically suggested a cinema verite documentary, loose and energetic. He used both those techniques because he wanted, among other things, a sense of the roughness and fullness of life. He wanted to eliminate easy conclusions and communications; to, instead, mess things up, show what isn’t usually shown. Cassavetes’ movies were about people who are not exactly ordinary but who were very different from the types one sees in movies, then or now. They were the real people, the same kind whose very gestures and speech, the Stanislavski-influenced Method actors of the postwar Actors’ Studio school (Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean, Paul Newman, Kim Stanley and the others) were trained to capture.
But Cassavetes’ characters were something else as well.
They were workingman’s wives and Hollywood writers, Manhattan jazz intellectuals and middle-aged businessmen, gangsters and prostitutes, strip-club owners and famous stage actresses. They were usually involved somehow in entertainment or show business and, if they weren’t, they yearned to be. They were always performing. And sometimes that lust to perform became their tragedy.
They drank. They raged, they screamed. They verbally battered at and insulted each other. They wept. They broke down. They laughed. They searched for things and people they could never find. They gave up. They drank some more. They stared quietly at the wreckage all around them. They tried to talk to each other and mostly failed — except when they told jokes or seized on a joke that wasn’t quite there. They were all, in a way, clowns, show people. And they were very recognizably 20th Century American types — though they went much farther than people usually go, even in movies. Or, for that matter, even in life.
Those Cassavetes people — Mabel Longhetti, the trapped, passionate housewife of “A Woman Under the Influence,” Cosmo Vitelli, the doomed Sunset Strip club owner of “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” Robert Harmon the sybarite writer of “Love Streams,” Hugh the frustrated jazz musician in “Shadows” — all belong to a recognizable region: wildly unpredictable yet believable. And, when we watch them, letting our usual expectations take a breather, we can see startling things, amazing connections. Francois Truffaut once said that Jean Renoir made the most alive films in the history of cinema. But, these days, I think that praise might apply just as well to Cassavetes. There is hardly a moment in any of his best movies that doesn’t burn, burst and crackle with life.
And, watching them, so do we.
Following is the schedule for The Music Box’s Cassavetes series. Each film is rated (star) (star) (star) (star), except for “Minnie and Moskowitz” ( (star) (star) (star) 1/2) and “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” ( (star) (star) (star) 1/2). If you choose to go to only one, it should be “A Woman Under the Influence.”
– “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974). A construction worker’s wife, misunderstood and isolated, is assumed to be mad. With Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk. Friday
– “Love Streams” (1984). A Hollywood writer who cannot love confronts his sister, who loves too strongly. With Cassavetes, Rowlands and Seymour Cassell. Saturday
– “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971). The wild L.A. romance of a museum curator and a parking lot attendant. With Rowlands and Cassell. Sunday
– “Gloria” (1980). A murdered mob accountant’s young son goes on the lam in Manhattan, protected by an ex-mob hooker. With Rowlands and Juan Adams.Sunday
– “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie” (1976). An L.A. strip-club owner, ordered by casino owners to pay his gambling debts by killing a Chinese bookie, discovers he has been set up. With Ben Gazzara, Cassell and Timothy Carey. Monday
– “Opening Night” (1977). A longtime Broadway stage star experiences stage fright and bad dreams on the road. With Rowlands, Gazzara, Cassavetes and Joan Blondell. Tuesday
– “Faces” (1968). A night-to-day portrait of Hollywood show-biz infidelities and their unhappy consequences. With John Marley, Lynn Carlin, Rowlands and Cassell. Wednesday
– “Shadows” (1959). A light-skinned African-American sister and brother — and the brother’s carousing buddies — explore the jazz world, interracial love and Manhattan’s hipster culture. With Ben Carruthers, Lelia Goldoni and Rupert Crosse. Wednesday
– “Husbands” (1970). Three longtime friends and suburban New York family men, jarred by a friend’s death, go on a three-day binge that lands them in London. With Gazzara, Falk and Cassavetes. Thursday
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The Music Box Theatre is at 3733 N. Southport Ave.; 773-871-6604.
