John Cassavetes

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Love Streams is at once a culmination of the director’s obsessions and his most atypical film. It’s a movie that gives up its mysteries slowly—flirting with theatricality, inserting dream sequences, concluding on a brazenly surreal enigma. Cassavetes stars as Robert Harmon, a tough-guy novelist with unorthodox research methods. Rowlands, magnificent as ever, is Robert’s sister, Sarah Lawson, a divorcée who turns up at his doorstep with two taxis full of luggage and an entire barnyard menagerie. An emotional live wire and by default a social rebel, the embarrassingly demonstrative Sarah is kindred spirit to A Woman Under the Influence’s unhinged housewife Mabel Longhetti and Opening Night’s aging stage star Myrtle Gordon: All are women with a raw-nerved, overwhelming capacity and need for love. The enormously moving interplay between Cassavetes and Rowlands gets at the heart of the performative spectacle unique to his films: an interaction beyond words and gestures, predicated on the invention of a shared language so hyperbolic and specific and almost inexplicable it must be love. Indeed, the movie—as its title suggests—performs an anatomy of its subject. More explicitly metaphysical than the other great Cassavetes films, it nonetheless shares their view of love as a way of life and a form of madness.Read More »

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A troubled production history notwithstanding, BIG TROUBLE remains a lighthearted updating of the classic film noir DOUBLE INDEMNITY. Alan Arkin stars as Leonard Hoffman, an insurance salesman and father of triplets. When it becomes apparent that his dream of sending his three sons to Yale is financially impossible, opportunity presents itself in the form of Blanche (Beverly D’Angelo), sexy wife of Steve Rickey (Peter Falk), who convinces Leonard to trick her husband into signing an obscure life insurance plan that promises a huge payoff if he dies while falling from a train. After the mission is seemingly accomplished, Steve reappears, confusing matters, and thereby sending Leonard’s life into an official tailspin. Director John Cassavetes is credited as the director of BIG TROUBLE; he actually stepped in as a replacement. Although the film is therefore not a unique Cassavetes document, it manages to breeze along, guided by the performances of Falk (a Cassavetes standby) and Arkin, stars of 1979’s THE IN-LAWS. – Marshall FineRead More »

PBS documentary on John Cassavestes featuring comments from Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese, as well as Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara.Read More »

Opening show from the second season of the “Columbo” TV series, starring Peter Falk as Lt. Columbo. Guest star is John Cassavetes as a famous symphony conductor who murders his mistress, an up-and-coming pianist (Anjanette Comer), and tries to make it look like suicide. Needless to say, Columbo unravels the truth in his typical entertaining fashion.

This episode is listed on the IMdB as having been directed (uncredited) by Cassavetes and Falk together with the credited director, Nicholas Colasanto. The same claim is made in Thierry Jousse’s Cassavetes book. Ray Carney, in Cassavetes on Cassavetes, writes, however, that before working together on Elaine May’s Mikey & Nicky,Read More »

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After FACES, Cassavetes embarked on HUSBANDS, in which he starred with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. The film centered around three friends dealing with life and mortality after the death of a mutual friend.
Though neither FACES nor HUSBANDS were very popular with the mainstream moviegoing audience, both were pivotal in the integration of cinema verité traditions in future Hollywood films. This crossover of the experimental and popular was clear in Cassavetes most successful film.Read More »