#255: CASSAVETES, John: Opening Night (1977)

JOHN CASSAVETES: FIVE FILMS {Spine #250}

CASSAVETES, John (United States)

Opening Night [1977]

Spine #255
DVD

Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) rehearses for her latest play, about a woman unable to admit that she is aging. When she witnesses the accidental death of an adoring young fan, she begins to confront the personal and professional turmoil she faces in her own life. Featuring a moving performance by Rowlands (and with some scenes shot on stages with live audiences reacting freely to the writing and performing), John Cassavetes' Opening Night exposes the drama of an actress who at great personal cost makes a part her own.

144 minutes
Color

Monaural

1:85:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2004

Director/Writer

John Cassavetes was 48 when he wrote and directed Opening Night.

Other Cassavetes films in the Collection:

#251: Shadows (1959)
#252: Faces (1968)
#1029: Husbands (1970)
#253: A Woman Under The Influence (1974)
#254: The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie (1976)
#721: Love Streams (1984)

The Film

The Second Woman is a terrible play.

Written by Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell, amazing), a 65-year-old woman who’s apparently had previous successes, the play is about a woman, Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) who is coming to grips with the reality of aging.

Of course, the play is terrible because Cassavetes (Maurice Aarons in the film) made it so. We never see the complete play, only snatches of scenes in a New Haven preview before the big Opening Night on Broadway.

Manny Victor (Ben Gazzara) is the befuddled director of the play, transfixed by Myrtle, but unable to get her to simply read her lines — which she seems incapable of doing, because she doesn’t want to be old …

Paul Stewart is David Samuels, the producer of this mess; Zohra Lampert is Dorothy Victor, Manny’s frustrated wife (the scene where she flails around on the bed and pretends to punch Manny — who is on the phone with Myrtle — is one of the highlights of this mostly improvised film), and Laura Johnson is Nancy Stein, a young teenage girl whose small role nevertheless plays an important element of the plot …

Cassavetes makes the most of this disjointed material, especially when a live audience of thousands of dressed-up extras watch the Opening Night in a real theatre.

Film Rating (0-60):

54

The Extras

The Booklet

Sixty-eight page booklet featuring essays by Cassavetes, Dennis Lim, and tributes by Martin Scorsese, Elaine Kagan, and Jonathan Lethem.

Cassevetes:

“Most of the people who like the film are touched by the discussion of age, yet it’s really not about age. It’s one of the problems that actors, or theater people, discuss. Mainly, I think Myrtle’s resentment is deep and very universal, it’s about being pigeonholed. She didn’t have any problem with age when she began that play. I think that her problem was that she felt she didn’t have anything individual to say about this particular subject. She didn’t have any feeling about it, because it was written by an older woman, who challenged her and said, You’re too old, you understand, and pigeonholed her into being in her own group.”

Lims:

“Myrtle’s triumph has less to do with reaffirmed public adoration than with her revitalized faith in art as a way of life. On stage, she defiantly re-animates the self-help cliché of existing ‘in the moment’ and, however briefly, entertains the possibility of pure experience. Myrtle and Maurice’s impromptu back-and-forth is a literally theatrical version of the intimate performative spectacle unique to Cassavetes films — an interaction beyond words and gestures, predicated on the invention of a shared language so hyperbolic and specific and almost inexplicable it counts as a form of love. The moving, sweetly redemptive upshot is that Myrtle’s madness proves contagious. She can’t and won’t distinguish between her life and her art, which obliges those in her presence (those watching her, both inside and outside the movie) to join her in this state of exciting, alarming volatility — a willful confusion that Cassavetes grasped, cherished, and strove to capture like no filmmaker before or since.”

Commentary

None.

Video conversation

Between actors Rowlands and Gazzara.

A nice reminiscence.

Video interview

With DP Al Ruban.

Who doubled as producer.

Audio interview

With Cassavetes by film historians Michel Ciment and Michael Wilson conducted after the film’s release.

Cassavetes is as honest in an interview as he is in his films.

Trailers

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

54 + 35 =

89

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