Gena Rowlands Under the Influence

The death of Gena Rowlands last month, at age 94, gave me pause. I had always admired her devotion to her husband, the actor and writer/director John Cassavetes. Married from 1954 until his death in 1989, she was an important part of his work as an indie auteur. Together they collaborated on ten films, two of which (1974’s A Woman Under the Influence and 1980’s Gloria) brought her Oscar nominations for Best Actress. They also raised three children, all of whom now have acting and directing careers of their own. In 2004 she was featured in the popular weepie, The Notebook, as the older version of Rachel McAdams’ character, under the direction of son Nick Cassavetes. But she also performed admirably in the films of others, like Woody Allen’s somber Another Woman and Lasse Hallström’s comedic Something to Talk About. In 2007 her voice elevated the role of the wise Iranian grandmother in the English-language version of Marjane Satrapi’s marvelous animated Persepolis.

 It was heartbreaking to learn that Rowlands lived with Alzheimer’s disease for five years before she died. This news reinforced my vivid memories of Rowlands coping with another mental disorder in A Woman under the Influence. At first it’s not clear that there’s anything wrong with Mabel Longhetti, other than stone-cold fury against her husband Nick (Cassavetes regular Peter Falk). She seems entitled to be aggravated: though a loyal husband and father, Nick  appears (like so many men) to be devoted above all to his work and his work buddies. The well-liked boss of a construction crew, he perhaps can’t help it when the city demands he and his guys labor all night to solve an emergency leak problem, thus forcing him to cancel on a long-planned “date night” with his pretty wife. Still, it’s particularly oblivious of him to show up the next day with his entire crew, expecting that Mabel will host an impromptu lunch party.

 The anger that’s inside Mabel can show up in some surprising ways. When Nick is gone on that overnight emergency, she heads for a local bar, drinks much too much, and picks up a willing stranger. Then, after Nick arrives home with his work gang, she goes overboard as a charming hostess, obsessively flattering and flirting with the guys. But it’s at a children’s backyard party that she seems to come totally unglued, leading to a manic insistence that all the kids exercise their creativity by shedding clothes and manners. This precipitates a chaotic homecoming by Nick, who slaps her, gets into a physical altercation with another parent, and eventually summons a doctor with a large syringe.

 We never see Mabel’s hospitalization, but stick with Nick trying to hold the family (including his own judgmental mother) in check. The film’s final act involves Mabel’s shaky return home, after Nick is finally dissuaded from throwing her a large surprise party. As some critics griped at the time, the movie is long (2 ½ hours) and ultimately bleak. But it takes advantage of Cassavetes’ penchant for keeping the camera locked in place. This makes for extended takes that give us an unflinching view of Mabel’s disintegration, as witnessed by those around her. She’s a woman whose talent for role-playing masks the fact that she doesn’t know who she is. It’s a bold, spontaneous-seeming performance.

 Cassavetes and Rowlands largely financed and distributed this film themselves, shooting on the cheap with faculty and students from the new American Film Institute. That’s why I was gratified to see the names of several of my eventual Roger Corman pals in the crew credits. (Hi, Mike Ferris!) 

  

Lelia Goldoni, Creature of Shadows

Lelia Goldoni has always been one of my favorite names, but I certainly didn’t like seeing it in an obituary column. Yet there it was in last week’s Los Angeles Times, a brief  notice that Lelia had passed away at the Actors Home in Englewood, New Jersey, at the ripe old age of 86. (Could that be possible? Lelia as I knew her was younger—and lovelier—than springtime.)

 I first met Lelia when my own years were not yet in double digits. I was one of the eager young students at Lester Horton’s Dance Theater, back then a citadel of modern dance that happened to be located, as one newspaper article put it, on the “wrong coast.” (Meaning: we were located in West Hollywood., not in New York City.) Lelia was among my teachers, and I also thrilled to see her perform the lead in Horton’s signature dance-drama, Salome. It never occurred to me then that she was not much older than I was. Horton’s used talented teenagers to lead the kids’ classes, and she may have been all of 17. She was also smart, feisty, and gorgeous.

 I left Horton’s at age 10, but my family and I stayed in touch over the years with some of the dancers. The most promising of them tended to go east, in search of new artistic opportunities. That was the path of Alvin Ailey, who went on to found the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre,  showcasing Alvin’s own choreography and evolving into a still-glorious national treasure. In its early days, the Ailey company showcased the dance skills of Carmen de Lavallade, my very first teacher and today the proud recipient of a Kennedy Center honor for her illustrious career in the arts.

 Lelia’s own path was slightly different. She resolutely turned from dance to drama, moving at age 19 back to the city of her birth. In New York she joined a workshop run by actor John Cassavetes.. A class improvisation about an interracial family—one sibling is dark-skinned and two others pass as white—evolved into Cassavetes’ first film project as a director. Called Shadows, it is set in a bohemian neighborhood of Lower Manhattan, among budding musicians and artists. The history of the film is a tangled one: a first version, entirely improvised with somewhat chaotic results, was released in 1958. Cassavetes then reworked the project, formalizing the script and shooting new material, for a 1959 premiere that was hailed as a milestone of American independent cinema. In both versions Lelia played the vibrant but troubled sister, trying out multiple romantic relationships as she ponders where she belongs in the world. (Ironically, she did not share the background of her character, also named Lelia. Unlike her mixed-race screen persona, she herself was ethnically Sicilian all the way.)

 Following Shadows¸ Lelia took minor roles, sometimes in major productions. She’s remembered as Ellen Burstyn’s best buddy in the early scenes of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974). Later, back in L.A. again, she directed a workshop production of a play written by her husband, Rober Rudelson. In the 1980s, after I‘d interviewed her for a magazine piece on the Horton era, she graciously invited me to lunch in her modest but colorfully decorated apartment. When I gazed at a poster for Shadows that highlighted her lovely face, she surprised me by acknowledging, “I was really beautiful then.” She quickly added, “I can say that, because I’m not beautiful now.”

 But Lelia always remained beautiful, for those with eyes to see.