Director under the influence

John Cassavetes's face may be familiar from his acting roles, but it's for his pioneering work as a director, and for inventing…

John Cassavetes's face may be familiar from his acting roles, but it's for his pioneering work as a director, and for inventing the indie movie, that he will be remembered, writes Donald Clarke

In 1968 John Cassavetes, subject of an upcoming retrospective at the Irish Film Institute, took a starring role in Roman Polanski's peerless horror film, Rosemary's Baby. The picture found Cassavetes playing an actor who makes an awful deal with Satan as a way of forwarding his career. In the decades that followed, many critics found echoes of Cassavetes's own dilemmas in that character's behaviour. Here was a man who played undemanding roles in questionable pictures to help finance his real job as a director of loose, compulsive classics such as Shadows, A Woman Under the Influence and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie.

That sounds a little like a Faustian pact, does it not? Well, there is something in that parallel. But Cassavetes, an actor of the method school, did, while resting from cinematic sainthood, manage to appear in such fine films as The Dirty Dozen, The Killers and Rosemary's Baby itself. Unlike Orson Welles, another great maverick of American cinema, he bravely avoided the temptation to give his voice to Transformers: The Movie or appear on television advertising fortified wines. Plenty of actors would, one suspects, have gladly traded their careers for his.

For all that, John Cassavetes will best be remembered as a singular director of unparalleled influence. It is hard to write about American cinema - or about that part of it that leans towards naturalism - without feeling Cassavetes's ghost lurking at your shoulder. Italian directors of the neorealist era had long ago worked out strategies for drawing naturalistic performances from actors, but, with Shadows, his 1959 debut, Cassavetes injected an entirely fresh form of organised chaos into American cinema. Just as significantly, he devised practices for financing and developing dramatic features outside the mainstream that still inspire less conventional film-makers today.

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Indeed, you might say that John Cassavetes invented American independent cinema.

Born in 1929 to a Greek father who made and lost a fortune, Cassavetes was raised in Long Island and studied acting at the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. Upon graduation in 1950, the charismatically aquiline performer secured roles as a leather-jacketed rebel in various television plays, before deciding to establish his own drama workshop in Manhattan. One night, while discussing his work on a radio talk show, he suggested that listeners interested in promoting an alternative to Hollywood film-making might like to send him a donation. Adding the $20,000 he received to a similar sum raised from showbusiness pals, he set out to develop the film that became Shadows.

Following the adventures of two brothers and their sister as they slope around those parts of Manhattan still at home to beat culture, Shadows, adapted from an improvisation devised by the director's theatre group, emerged in the same year as Jean-Luc Godard's À Bout de Souffle. Yet, while the Frenchman's film helped launch the nouvelle vague, Cassavetes, having been lured to Hollywood for two odd studio projects in the early 1960s, had to wait another nine years before directing a film that properly showcased his singular sensibility.

FACES, CO-STARRING GENA Rowlands, his wife and frequent collaborator, emerged in 1968 and - though such commercial language would appal him - defined the Cassavetes brand as it would exist for decades to come. A like-minded company of actors, occasionally improvising on the director's own script, delivers a film of unsettling rawness and disturbing emotional honesty.

Once again, the picture's release coincided with the appearance of another that would define a movement to come. While Faces was screening in art house cinemas, Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde, a film heavily influenced by the nouvelle vague, was cultivating a significant popular following.

In the years that followed, Penn and other youngish film-makers - Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Martin Scorsese - would introduce some of the techniques Cassavetes had developed into the mainstream (or somewhere near it).

Indeed it is quite impossible to imagine Scorsese's Mean Streets happening without the example set by honest John. But, while Marty and Francis went on to enjoy the embrace of major studios, Cassavetes remained stubbornly outside the system.

Cassavetes's ability to continue functioning as an outsider - there was no independent "sector" at this stage - is the main reason for his canonisation by today's cinematic gunslingers. He may, in 1980, have made the fine Gloria under the Columbia Pictures standard, but he never quite surrendered his soul to the conglomerates. Even when constructing a picture within genre conventions, he made a point of focusing on peripheral elements of the story that would, in a more conventional director's hands, be trimmed back as far as possible.

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, a 1976 masterpiece starring frequent collaborator Ben Gazzara, reads, on paper, like a hard-boiled noir thriller concerning a broken man's descent into violence. But the film spends more time detailing the small things in its sad protagonist's day than it does dealing with gunfights and fisticuffs.

No wonder Cassavetes and Hollywood never quite got on.

All that good stuff acknowledged, it cannot be denied that a large part of the Cassavetes mystique flows from the air of unshakeable hipster cool that hung around him. There is, it is true, a fair degree of vomiting, lying and general domestic misery in his pictures. A Woman Under the Influence, in particular, features a particularly gruelling depiction of ordinary madness. But right from the beginning, by layering a Charlie Mingus jazz score over Shadows, Cassavetes revealed that he had a taste for a bohemian class of glamour. The Killing of a Chinese Bookie may have revelled in seediness, but it was the seediness of LA's Sunset Strip, not of, say, Cleveland or Pittsburgh. Cassavetes, Gazzara and Peter Falk do bad things in Husbands from 1970, but they never look less than cool while doing them.

THEN THERE IS the matter of Cassavetes's drinking. Prof John Sutherland, himself a recovering alcoholic, recently dared to suggest that the director's consumption of booze, which caused his death from cirrhosis at just 59, might have been a contributing factor to his genius.

"Did the stuff make him a greater or lesser artist?" Sutherland mused in the Guardian. "It's an unanswerable, but unavoidable question. Myself, I lean towards greater."

What seems in little doubt is that his reputation for consuming whiskey as others consume oxygen helped solidify his image as an archetypal tortured artist. The crowds flocking to Jim Morrison's grave would be greatly diminished if, rather than killing himself with controlled substances, the singer had walked in front of a bus. There is little romance to the notion of the poet who, huddled in his garret, drinks orange squash rather than absinthe.

None of which - the glamour, the delicious abuse - should distract us from recognising that John Cassavetes really was a genius of the highest order. Without him, the films of Richard Linklater, Jim Jarmusch and Martin Scorsese would have looked very different. John Carney, the Irish director of Once, currently receiving hysterically positive reviews in the United States, will take any opportunity to acknowledge the other John C's influence.

Cassavetes has also, it is true, inspired a lot of pretentious twits with unstoppable inclinations towards empty, banal dialogue. Never mind. George Orwell may have enabled Channel 4's Big Brother. That doesn't mean it was his fault.

The John Cassavetes retrospective begins at the Irish Film Institute on July 7; www.ifi.ie