A film currently doing great business in America is Waitress. It was a huge hit with audiences at the 2006 Sundance festival and has gone on to catch the public fancy. It looks like a contender for the 2008 Oscars. Waitress is the story of a plucky pie-maker, Jenna, who is married to a brute. He beats her. She gets pregnant, and embarks on a wild flirtation with her geeky gynaecologist. For the first time in her life, Jenna’s calling the shots. It’s a touching and defiantly feminist movie. And very funny. The director and co-starring actress, Adrienne Shelly, did not – alas – live to enjoy the success of Waitress. In November 2006, she was found hanging from a shower rod in her Greenwich Village apartment. At first it was thought to be suicide. Forensic investigation established that Shelly had been murdered by an illegal immigrant working in the apartment below. She had ventured to complain about the noise and he killed her. It’s impossible to view Waitress other than through the lens of its maker’s death - a death that casts a tragic and contradictory shadow over the movie’s jauntily upbeat theme. It creates a disturbing aftertaste.
Actor/director John Cassavetes – director maudit, the “father of American independent cinema”, and patron saint of Martin Scorsese - is a case in point. Cassavetes died prematurely, aged 59. The cause was long-term cirrhosis brought on by longer-term alcoholism: “hobnailed liver” as career drunks grimly call it. Here again, the creator’s death by bottle throws a dark and enigmatic shadow over the films he made. And the question: was drink the active ingredient in Cassavetes’ genius? Was it for him what opium was for Coleridge, or amphetamines for Jack Kerouac? Would a sober Cassavetes, an artist who wasn’t (to paraphrase one of his titles) “under the influence”, have been a less great, or an even greater film-maker? Did drink damage his talent, or burnish it?
It’s a conundrum. No one imagines that a brain surgeon who drinks to excess wields the scalpel more deftly in the operating theatre. Nor was it ever argued that George Best’s ball-skills were enhanced by his boozing. But with creative artists, like Cassavetes, it’s different. Try the following test. What do the following three American writers have in common: Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Eugene O’Neill? Answer one is easy. They each won the Nobel prize for literature. Equally easy is answer two: they were all alcoholics. Answer three is fiendishly difficult - what relationship does answer one have to answer two? If O’Neill, for example, had taken and kept the pledge in his youth, would posterity have his posthumous, agonised masterwork, Long Day’s Journey into Night? One is tempted to think not. Neater drama, perhaps: but not greater drama.
Charlie Parker’s wife was once asked by a doctor, when the issue of “doing something” (perhaps even a lobotomy) about the wayward, drug-addicted saxophonist came up: “What do you want, Mrs Parker - a husband or a genius?” The modern audience, with his life’s work in front of it, inescapably draws links between Cassavetes’ drinking and his art. He clearly knew a lot about the condition. He’d been there. He never left there, in a sense. Leaving Las Vegas and The Lost Weekend are celluloid-drunkalogues that won Oscars - but neither depicts with such precision the psychic, sprawling chaos of terminal alcoholism as does Opening Night, Cassavetes’ study of the closing hours of an actress, destroyed by drink (his masterwork, in my view, although, like most of his films, it bombed at the box office). Opening Night showcases his wife (and artistic co-alcoholic) Gena Rowlands. “Shrill, puzzling, depressing and overlong,” is how Variety described the film. Ever listened to a drunk in the last, ramblingly garrulous, stages of their disease?
Like other actor/directors trained in the sub-Stanislavsky “method” school, Cassavetes believed that truth was to be found through intense, fearless introspection into the self. It was messy, necessarily. A lot of garbage came up in the process. But it was the royal road. And alcohol opened the way. The method could also involve a go-for-broke self destructiveness - “to risk everything to express it all”, as a 1999 documentary and homage to Cassavetes put it. Breakdown and breakthrough were sides of the same coin. It connects with the problem that torments every problem drinker: is what emerges, in drunkenness, the real you? Or are you, as the phrase “the demon drink” implies, “not yourself” in your cups? Is the final “veritas” really located “in vino”? Or is drunkenness (too literally often) a dead end?
In the most infuriatingly disorganised of his films, Husbands, Cassavetes tracks three married men - played by Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and himself - who drink and drink and talk and talk until the truth of their lives is vomited out. Along with a lot of vomit. Sigmund Freud himself could not have done the job more efficiently. It’s a film that - like much of Cassavetes’ work - is excessively boring, hard to follow, and extraordinarily illuminating about masculinity and its incorrigible delusions.
Cassavetes’ relationship with his industry was famously non-conformist. He was Hollywood’s drunken child. He hated the tyranny of “screenplay”, “script”, “crews”, and “star system”. For others, it was discipline. For him, it was a cage he needed to break out of. A technician who worked on his early films recalled that Cassavetes didn’t give a damn about “equipment”. One 16mm camera, one light, and any old set would suffice. All he was interested in was “content”. His intermittent work for the mega-studios that dominated postwar cinema (films like Too Late Blues or A Child Is Waiting) invariably ended in tantrums, walk-outs and demands that he be uncredited. Cassavetes’ breakthrough film, Shadows, was partly financed by an appeal he made on talk radio for donations to make a different kind of movie - “a movie about people”. Two thousand dollars rolled in, from “people”, over the next few days. Shadows was indeed different. A semi-improvised, often inaudible, largely narrativeless study of African-American musicians in Greenwich Village, it offended every Hollywood rule and convention.
I saw it in the Hippodrome cinema, in Colchester, in 1960. The film baffled me utterly - but I didn’t pay my one-and-ninepence for that. It was the Charlie Mingus soundtrack I was desperate to hear. Shadows was the first general-release film ever to use an uncompromisingly edgy jazz score. Mingus was a musician who, as did Cassavetes with film, pushed his art to that blurry point where improvisation (creation from the depths of the self) borders on anarchy. “Free form”, the resultant jazz was called. The term could as well be applied to Cassavetes’ movies. Both he and Mingus were connoisseurs of aesthetic dissipation. Both took huge risks with their lives; to express everything.
Shadows was Cassavetes’ first study of Americans traditionally regarded as “outsiders” - or, put another way, not yet fully inside America. Other such studies followed. Cassavetes was a second generation American-Greek, and he had a long and fruitful relationship with the actor Ben Gazzara - one of the first of his profession to parade his immigrant origins with an unchanged, aggressively “wop”, professional name. Long before David Chase (né “de Caesare”), Cassavetes and Gazzara investigated ethnic edginess. At this moment doubtless some PhD student is writing a thesis on The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and The Sopranos. James Gandolfini, I would bet, studied Gazzara’s cold, mannered, inscrutable performance, and learned from it.
As an actor Cassavetes is at his best in his own movies. But what name recognition he enjoyed in his lifetime came from supporting roles in macho romps such as Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (which earned his only Oscar nomination), Rosemary’s Baby, or that small Don Siegel masterpiece The Killers (Ronald Reagan’s last movie, oddly enough). As an actor, Cassavetes contrives to project a doomed or (in collaboration with Polanski) a demonic persona. In Siegel’s film (a loose adaptation of Hemingway’s classic noir short story) he’s the walking-dead victim, Johnny - man in the hangover phase of life - not caring whether he lives or dies. One can, with a little ingenuity, tie in even Cassavetes’ journeyman work on screen with the overall mood of his creative life.
Those who sit through the BFI Southbank’s Cassavetes season will adjourn to the newly refurbished NFT bar and regard their drinks quizzically. Did the stuff make Cassavetes a greater, or a flawed artist? It’s an unanswerable, but unavoidable question. Myself, I lean towards “greater”.
· Opening Night is released next Friday at BFI Southbank and the Barbican. The John Cassavetes Season runs from June 15-30 at BFI Southbank