DVD of the Week: Opening Night

In the clip above, I discuss John Cassavetes’s “Opening Night,” from 1977, starring Gena Rowlands (his wife). Along with George Cukor’s 1954 version of “A Star Is Born,” starring Judy Garland, it’s one of the greatest films about actors’ furious, self-revealing, and potentially self-destructive art—which renders all the more remarkable the anecdote with which Ray Carney opens his chapter on the film in his seminal work “Cassavetes on Cassavetes.” Carney reports:

In late 1974, Barbra Streisand was deeply moved by a screening of “A Woman Under the Influence.” She asked Cassavetes if he would consider directing her in her planned remake of “A Star Is Born.”

Carney also tells of Cassavetes spending his own money, and going into debt, to make—and to release—the film, which he put into theatres, first in Los Angeles, and then, in March, 1978, in New York. Carney writes, “Most of the major New York newspapers and magazines did not send a reviewer to the press screening or run a review.” He adds, parenthetically, that “neither The New York Times, The New Yorker nor New York Magazine ran a word about ‘Opening Night’ during the entire time Cassavetes was in the city to set up the screenings nor during the film’s release.”

Say what you will about the proliferation of film writing online, but it’s much less conceivable today, in the age of the savvy blogger, that a film of such importance could go virtually unnoticed. Even if major print publications were to ignore such a film at first, the proliferation of word online is far likelier to get around—and then to get back to someone at a newspaper or a magazine and, at the very least, to shame a responsible critic into paying attention.

The movie tells a simple story—about a theatre company that is preparing for the New Haven preview of a play prior to its New York run. It’s centered on the play’s star, Myrtle Gordon (Rowlands), and her crisis in playing the role—written by an elderly playwright (the streetwise early-thirties star Joan Blondell)—of an aging woman. Her relationship with her co-star (Cassavetes) has burned out; she’s middle-aged and alone; and she finds that she can no longer bear to separate her life from her art, to say lines and perform actions and feign emotions that are not her own. Her practical response is to commandeer the play from the stage and to transform it into an improvisational, fourth-wall-breaking workshop. Much of the movie takes place onstage or backstage, and the main conflict pits Myrtle against the playwright, whose own creation is being dismantled.

For all the exacting opacity of Cassavetes’s incantatory, Beckett-like texts (and Cassavetes is indeed a singular screenwriter), the performer’s relation to it isn’t abstract, but takes the form of an adversarial relationship with the writer. Though there isn’t a movie camera anywhere to be seen—and Cassavetes, with his tightly sculpted, uninhibitedly intimate images, is a master of the camera—“Opening Night” captures with astonishment and boundless admiration the uninhibited ferocity of the art that brings life onto the screen. (In fact, Cassavetes had originally planned to take the role of the play’s director.) It’s one of the greatest tributes ever paid by a director to an actress.