Gloria: Punk! Punk! Punk!

Title: Gloria (1980)
Dir.: John Cassavetes
Stars: Gena Rowlands, John Adames

Viewed: on DVD (feature only)

This review contains MILD SPOILERS

Admission: although I grew up on old movies, and try very hard to see a constant variety of film from the earliest days to the present, I've never seen a lot of the great '70s classics. Part of that is because my mother was never big on '70s film, and she influenced much of my viewing until I hit college, and part of it is because I tend to be easily tired by or detracted from copious amounts of violence, profanity, and gore. Still another part of it is that I often find '70s films bleak and desperate, without much of a visual hook - many of them tend to look like flat, brown, muddy messes. So recently, I've had to very consciously make myself see some of these pictures, in an attempt to finally recognize that period of cinema for what it was, as opposed to what I merely believe it to be.

It was with this in mind that I rented A Woman Under the Influence a couple of years ago, after repeated suggestion by a friend to try the works of John Cassavetes. I was only partially impressed. The movie came off as good theatre but long-winded film, possibly worsened in this regard by a lacklustre print and the inevitable "look-at-your-watch" factor of a long film on home video. At the time, I wasn't inspired to try any more Cassavetes, but now, having just read Peter Bogdanovich's book of "portraits and conversations," Who the Hell's In It, I figured it was time for another go. Cassavetes is probably the subject in the book I know least about, so...why not?

Bogdanovich went to some length to praise Gloria, and it sounded a little unusual, so I went with that one. (It also helped that the library has it on DVD, although many of the others are on video.) To be honest, I was once again left with the same feeling as before: too long-winded, too dry, not visually interesting enough. This time, though, I don't have the idea it might work better on a big screen: this is a very typical, simple thriller, with a hook that's been done before, and it's presented in a very obvious manner. The only times I came away with the sense of something 'more' were in some of the longer conversations.

The setup isn't much: man rats on the mob, the mob decide to kill him and his family, the family manages to leave their youngest child with a next door neighbor, the next door neighbor happens to be a former mob girl. What follows is the somewhat expected string of scenes with the older, grouchy woman leading a six-year-old boy around New York, running from modern-day gangsters, and calling everyone "punk" or "stupid" or "wise guy," and generally acting like a taller James Cagney with boobs. The kid gets a few witty, precocious lines, and it might've been cute at 30 minutes. At just over two hours it drags endlessly along, and though you get the sense the kid really cares for the woman, the woman never seems to care for the kid until the final reel where they're inevitably reunited in an unrealistically (and unsatisfyingly) happy ending. That meant I really didn't care about the woman, either, and it's pretty hard to follow a movie where the protagonist is as hard and unbending as a rock.

They remade this film in 1999 with Sharon Stone, and I'm reliably informed it was pretty ridiculous. I might've liked that more; ridiculous can be a lot of fun, with the right mood and the right crowd. Boring and obvious are just that - a waste of my time.