Gena Rowlands is best known for the remarkable films she made with her husband John Cassavetes. Although she appeared (uncredited) in Shadows (1959)—Cassavetes’ astonishing debut—and had a supporting role in A Child is Waiting (1963), it was not until Faces (1968) that their collaboration began in earnest. Gena’s is the first face we see after that film’s post-title sequence: closer than close-up, looking straight into the camera, and every inch a movie star. The grain and gauge of the film is like one of Warhol’s Factory movies—unvarnished, black & white, 16mm—but Rowlands’ face, presence and beauty evokes 1950s Hollywood glamour. She once told a journalist that without Cassavetes her career “might very possibly have been doing Pillow Talk…” But Rowlands was always closer to Bette Davis (her idol) or Gloria Grahame than to Doris Day: the glamour came with an edge. What Rowlands said of Davis applies equally to her: “she was tough in the right way.”
Like many New York-based actors, particularly in the early 1950s, she came up through live television in such programmes—or telecasts—as Studio One and Robert Montgomery Presents. But it was on Broadway, in Paddy Chayefsky’s ‘Middle of the Night’ (1956), where she made her name. Cast as ‘the girl’ opposite Edward G. Robinson, her performance received critical raves as well as attention from Hollywood and a contract with MGM: The High Cost of Loving (1958); Lonely Are the Brave (1962); The Spiral Road (1962); in Sinatra’s orbit in Tony Rome (1967); and Machine Gun McCain (1968), with Cassavetes in the lead role. But then from 1968 to 1984, she acted almost exclusively in her husband’s films: Minnie and Moscowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980), and Love Streams (1984). With the exception of the generic Gloria, all of them could be described as “home movies”, albeit on an elevated artistic scale—even Minnie & Moscowitz, which puts its own heady spin on the “screwball comedy”, feels “personal” if not downright autobiographical.
The sense that this singular body of work was very much a family affair is intensified by the way the films were made. Cassavetes and Rowlands mortgaged their home to fund each project; friends, family and associates were cast in significant roles; in-laws’ houses were commandeered as locations; and at the heart of this enterprise—Gena Rowlands’ galvanic presence. To see her in her prime is to realize how much her influence has been absorbed by other filmmakers and actors. Pedro Almodovar had her (and Bette Davis) in mind when he made All About My Mother (1999)—the film directly references Opening Night as well as All About Eve (1950). Blue Jasmine (2013) and Cate Blanchett’s ‘woman on the verge’ had traces of Rowlands’ Mabel Longhetti—but then Woody Allen had worked with Rowlands on Another Woman (1988), where Sven Nykvist’s camera drew on the expressive power of her face. After Cassavetes’ death in 1989, she began to work more regularly for other directors: Jim Jarmusch’s Night On Earth (1991), Terence Davies’ The Neon Bible (1995), and then for her son Nick Cassavetes, Unhook the Stars (1996), She’s So Lovely (1997), and The Notebook (2004). She lent her voice to the English-language version of Persopolis (2007), and further family support—this time for her daughter, Zoe Cassavetes—to Broken English (2007). But it is the films that Cassavetes wrote for Rowlands which will be remembered and that cry out for an Almodovar-inspired rubric: All About Gena.
—Mick McAloon
Running From The Reels 