CRACKED ACTOR: GENA ROWLANDS
Column
CRACKED ACTOR: GENA ROWLANDS
Opening Night (1977)
Column
BY
Christian Lorentzen
A look at personalities, iconic and obscure, who lit up the screen.
Opening Night opens at Metrograph on Saturday, April 20, as part of Bad Actress.
“Believe you me, if it didn’t take men to make babies, I wouldn’t have anything to do with any of you.” Gena Rowlands says this line to Kirk Douglas in a heated scene in the middle of the 1962 Western Lonely Are the Brave. Western isn’t quite the right word for the picture, which is about a West that is no longer frontier country. There are fences, powerlines, highways, big rigs, jet planes overhead, even a helicopter. Douglas plays a freelance cowhand who roams the desert, now pocked with mid-size cities, without proper identification. He’s also a veteran of the Korean War. Douglas, both actor and character, is an anachronism: a lonesome rider out of the 19th century lost in a land of pavement and electrification; a star from Classic Hollywood, whose styles and genres were on the wane, whether or not the filmmakers were aware of it (though I think they were). His nemesis, the sheriff played by Walter Matthau, is a lawman of the emerging bureaucratic present, not an improviser of justice on the range. Between them is Rowlands’s Jerry, the wife of Douglas’s best pal (Michael Kane) and mother of their young son, a woman from the East, not a pioneer, someone with recourse to newfangled kitchen gadgets, not really meant for the West or at least not the Old West, a place Douglas is convinced still exists, a desert into which he and Jerry and his buddy can escape after he breaks him out of jail, where he has been incarcerated for giving aid to illegal migrants, then a crime worthy of a two-year sentence, apparently, and one he is willing to serve in order to return to his family with the blessing of the law.
Lonely Are the Brave is a finely made film—exciting, charismatically acted, and with beautiful landscapes, it winds into a suspenseful and even humorous chase. There’s a terrific bar fight between Douglas and Bill Rasich, an actor missing his right arm, in which Douglas, to be honorable, must punch with only his left fist. (He loses, and goes to jail, part of his scheme to break his friend out.) Yet it’s the brief presence of Rowlands, who gets second billing but only two scenes, that marks the movie as a document of a country and an artform in transition.
Lonely are the Brave (1962)
Against the charismatic Douglas in scoundrel-ish good-guy mode, Rowlands is quivering with an array of conflicting, seemingly pent-up emotions that the scene allows expression. The burden of the abandoned woman, the motherly protectiveness, the rage at male troublesomeness, the caring urge to save them nonetheless, a tender nostalgia for ill-fated romance (she and the cowhand were sweet on each other before she married his friend)—all of these feelings cross her face while Douglas appears in another episode in the transhistorical adventures of Kirk Douglas (a mostly rousing if often mono rather than stereo serial of which I which I will admit to being a completist).
And then came the torrent. The wild spontaneity of Rowlands’s performances in the pictures she starred in directed by her husband John Cassavetes—Faces (1968), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980)—is matched by her metronomic oscillations between joy (or something like it: love, pleasure, hope, relief) and suffering—you at times feel you’re witnessing a 20th-century American version of the Stations of the Cross. What is the meaning of the pain Rowlands’s characters endure? Is it something timeless or is it the postwar streetscapes, bars, cafeterias, theaters, apartments, and houses the films dance, skid, bump, and crash through?
Take them in reverse order of agony. A Woman under the Influence—is alcohol the problem or life itself—life as the wife of a hard-working, not reliably present or gentle man, as the mother of three small children? The film begins with an episode of heavy drinking that leads to worse and it ends in with an episode of self-harm after a return from a mental hospital and electroshock treatment. It’s hard to think of either Cassavetes’s scenario or Rowlands’s performance as at all clinical, rather an impressionistic rendering of madness, a fantasy of breakdown, all the concentrated sorrow of a lifetime coming through in Rowlands’s cheeks and eyes. Cassavetes wrote it as a play, but she told him it would be too intense a role to perform eight times a week.
A Woman Under the Influence (1974)
Opening Night takes up acting itself to tell a ghost story. “When I was 18 I felt like I could do anything. All my emotions were there on the surface,” Rowlands says in an early voiceover, as she takes a bow from the stage of a preview of a new play in New Haven (shot unsubtly, with mountains, in California). Within a few minutes, a young and beautiful fan of hers (Tanya Roberts, later a star of television’s Falcon Crest), one who resembles her, is struck and killed by a car after trying desperately to get an autograph as she pulls away in a limo with her producer, playwright, and co-stars. Is this a psychological or supernatural tale? Is the ghost real, at least to the actress she haunts, or is it an alcoholic hallucination? My hunch is the former. If you’re worried about getting old or playing parts that will convince audiences that you are no longer young, stay away from mirrors. It’s a real hazard for actors.
With Faces Rowlands had the choice of the two female lead roles. She chose that of the other woman, the prostitute, Jeannie Rapp, because she was pregnant and thought it would be less strenuous than the role of the wife, Maria Forst, which was taken by Lynn Carlin, who also happened to be pregnant. Ironic then that here there’s no doubt that the theme is excessive drinking, drinking yourself into bed with the wrong person, drinking yourself onto the floor, drinking yourself into oblivion, drinking to the point where you might not be able to say, “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers.” Though there are tears in her eyes in her last scene, Jeannie gets off easy: she’s not unconscious on the floor.
Minnie and Moscowitz is a romantic comedy that involves several physical assaults, some involving multiple contestants, all of them bruising Rowlands’s Minnie. But here she is allowed to relax, to speak quietly about her loneliness, even if there’s no easing into love with Seymour Cassell’s Moscowitz when it comes. The film’s final scene depicts the happiness of family life, three generations laughing and at play around picnic tables. How much chaos did it take to bring them there?
Faces (1968)
So too the reunion of little boy and surrogate mother at the end of Gloria, a genre picture about a paid-off gangster’s moll who protects the son of a murdered mob accountant, fleeing enforcers and killing a few of them on a romp around Manhattan and the Bronx. She and the boy bicker as if playing a parody of Minnie and Moscowitz. Glory was a screenplay Cassavetes sold to Universal and was only hired to direct once Rowlands was cast in the lead and requested him. It seems like something fitter for Sidney Lumet (who remade it two decades later with Sharon Stone in the title role). Here Rowlands gets to wield a pistol and play Dirty Harry with the wise guys. (She was similarly hardboiled in the 1969 spaghetti gangster flick Machine Gun McCain in a cameo opposite Cassavetes as his former partner in crime, though there she puts a gun to her own head to save her man and herself from torture and disfigurement.) Gloria delivers the most fun of the Cassavetes/Rowlands collaborations and is the least characteristic.
With the exception of Faces, in which everybody ends up alive even if the married couple is occupying separate floors of their house, all of these films have what you could call happy endings. The couple of A Woman Under the Influence go to bed together. The titular opening night is, against the odds, a hit. Something like family happiness is granted to both Minnie and Gloria. In composite, the Rowlands persona of the Cassavetes achieves a nobility in her suffering, in the volatility of her emotions, in the expression of a depth of feeling a given scenario can only gesture at. For all their reputed realism, these films are fairy tales, and Rowlands is the fountain of their cracked enchantment.
Christian Lorentzen is a critic and theater actor currently residing in Albania. He writes on Substack.
Opening Night (1977)
