DVD of the Week: “Too Late Blues”

John Cassavetes may have faced constraints and conflicts when he tried to direct movies for Hollywood producers, but his first studio film, “Too Late Blues,” from 1961 (which I discuss in this clip), makes those very clashes and compromises their subject. It’s set in the world of another commercial and popular art form, jazz, and stars the pop singer Bobby Darin as John (Ghost) Wakefield, a pianist and composer of vision and talent who is unwilling to tailor his art to the marketplace, despite the predatory exhortations of his agent, Benny (Everett Chambers), who, unable to bend the musician, tries to break him. There’s a love story, too, involving another one of Benny’s clients—a singer, Jess Polanski (Stella Stevens), whose artistry is matched by her fragility. Cassavetes gives her one of the film’s great virtuoso pieces, a long tracking shot of her alone in her apartment with Ghost, in which she gives her all—indeed, more than she should. Their volatile mix of emotions and overlapping virtues and vices make for a wild and harrowing ride. I’ve long thought that there’s something Beckett-like in the incantatory force of Cassavetes’s dialogue and images, as well as in his blend of degradation and exaltation (the scene that concludes the clip above is a clear example). In this film, the existential urgency of that tone becomes apparent. Cassavetes’s subject isn’t the failure to communicate, it’s the failure to exist. Visions and emotions trapped within, unable to grow organically and find their form in the world, drive a person to a sort of blind kinetic madness—and that madness, in turn, becomes the form. Thus, art and life converge, and the proof of a fruitful bond is the endurance and the infliction of pain.