Cinema 1544: The As-Official-As-It-Gets Site

For this week’s film, Kevin was inspired by the appearance of Ben Gazzara in last time’s short and decided to show John Cassavetes‘ Gazzara vehicle The Killing Of A Chinese Bookie…but then he doubled back and decided to go with the full-on Cassavetes double feature, and to start it off instead with the 1980 more-commercial Gloria, starring none other than his wife Gena Rowlands.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, because it appears from IMDB that she was in at least 8 of his films, and he only made 12.

So anyway, what was this movie about?

Well, it all opens violently enough.  Buck Henry plays a New York City mob accountant who has turned state’s evidence.  Apparently, the mob has figured this out, and Buck knows that he’s done for.  Unfortunately, so is his family, and the mob has decided to make the hit at his apartment so they can clean up the wife, the daughter, and the son too.  The mob is downstairs, and Buck is preparing to try a desperate stand.  This is when irritating neighbor Gloria shows up trying to “borrow” some coffee that we know she’s never going to return.  Well, although the daughter refuses to abandon her family, Buck does manage to pawn his son Phil off on the unsuspecting new foster parent.  Minutes later, the sound of gunfire rings out down the hall, and Phil is an orphan and an only child.

Holly Golightly has got nothing on Gloria

We can be pretty sure that Gloria is an unworthy person to take care of a kid, not only because she’s completely willing to drop him off at the nearest bus stop while she goes to a bar and has a beer at 10 AM, but also because when she packs up some clothes to bail from the apartment with him, she ends up dropping her cat and never going back for him.  The cat has exited the film and is now alone on the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen, hoping not to run into the Warriors.  Criminal.

Three snubnoses

So Gloria doesn’t like the kid.  To be fair, Phil doesn’t like Gloria either, and he keeps screaming at her that he wants to go back to his family, whom he knows to be dead.  Well, I mean, I guess that Gloria does keep trying to lie to him and tell him it’s all a bad dream.  I don’t think he bought it, but I’m not sure where she thought it was going to get her, either.  I mean, unless it was a ploy to give her enough time to abandon the kid like he was a white and orange cat.

Same Same

Anyway, Gloria goes to the bank and takes out all of the money that she has secreted away in a safe deposit box.  She’s got a lot of money.  Like a lot.  And unfortunately, through some extremely poor planning, the entire stash of it is in $100 bills, which are hard enough to get anybody to take in 2023 – so imagine what it must be like to run around the tough neighborhoods of New York City in 1980 trying to get taxicabs to make change.

Same Same But Different

We learn a few things throughout the film.  One is that it’s literally impossible to get lost in New York City if the mob is after you.  Get on the bus?  There’s the mob.  Go to the train station?  There’s the mob.  Go to the airport?  There’s the mob!  Go to a restaurant?  Guess who?  Hotels, motels, taxis, walking down the street, hell even going to your old boyfriend’s pad that you apparently still have a key to – anywhere you go, the mob is there for you.

Actually the same shot from another angle

So it’s a good thing that Gloria is a hot shot with a gun.  She’s also got a complicating secret – she’s a mob moll!  This does come out reasonably early in the film, but it doesn’t really make any sense.  For all of her felinocidal tendencies, she seems to be far too uncommitted to the murder of innocent children to really have been able to get caught up in that life in the first place.   Especially considering that her boyfriend apparently was, like, super high up.  He sure seems to be the boss.  I don’t know how organizations (ahem – “families”) like that are structured so maybe he wasn’t the top dude, but I think maybe he was supposed to be the #1.

The last thing a kitten ever sees

Anyway for most of the film Gloria and Phil pretty much hate each other.  Like, he’ll run away and she’ll be like “good riddance” but then she’ll go looking for him anyway, or he’ll come back or whatever.  He’s like a bad penny.  Or maybe like a bad C-note.

The last thing two kittens ever see

At one point, Phil even runs away to go hang out with some kids on a stoop.  Gloria tracks him down in a cab, and when he sees her, he flees into another kid’s house with him – but it turns out that the kid’s dad is in the mob because I guess you can’t escape the mob in New York City.  Well, Gloria follows him inside and there’s a decent bloodbath and she rescues the completely unappreciative Phil who still seems not to recognize the pickle he’s in.

The last thing a man whose head is trapped in a painting ever sees

Anyhow, it turns out that the deceased Buck Henry has bequeathed unto his son a book he had kept that held the evidence of, well, whatever he was allegedly supposed to give up in court.  Gloria keeps trying to call in a favor with her ex to have him take the book in exchange for giving up on killing the kid, because she’s definitely going soft for the whole “mom” stuff.

The last thing somebody watching this movie ever sees

Well, Gloria finally manages to get an appointment at her ex-boyfriend’s place.  She doesn’t expect to survive it, so she tells the kid to hang out in the flop house they’re staying at for a few hours, and if she doesn’t come back he should stuff a wad of Benjamins in his sock and catch a train to Pittsburgh.  Yes, yes.  The mob can track down anybody at any time, unless it’s a kid running around paying for everything 100 Happy Meals at a time.  We leave Gloria in a seemingly hopeless gunfight and follow double-orphan Phil to Pittsburgh where he catches a taxi ride to the nearest cemetery, only for Gloria to show up in an old lady costume just minutes later.  This is relatively unlikely, as they hadn’t picked a meet-up spot in Pittsburgh.  But, I suppose that since Gloria had taken him to a different cemetery earlier that it was an OK guess?  Also, why is she in a disguise?  Also, if she needs the disguise, why does she let Phil just take her wig off during their film-ending spin hug?  I don’t know.  It doesn’t make any sense.  Forget it Jake, it’s Pittsburgh.  The End.

So…I guess that compared to the other Cassavetes film I’ve seen (Faces), this is a…good?…movie?  It has a plot, I guess.  It’s a silly plot and the mob is far too incompetent in, I don’t know, capturing Gloria and Phil considering the 327 times they find them.  The whole I-hate-you, I-hate-you-not, I-hate-you, I-hate-you-not thing is pretty tedious, especially since we all know how many petals that flower has to start with.  And to be honest, the kid that plays Phil is horrible.  Couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag if you put a $100 bill on a fishing line and dangled it in front of the opening.

OK, so Kevin really likes this film, so I have to at least try to respect it.  He says that the scenes shot in the streets of New York really do capture the essence of the time and place – a time and place that he knows well, and I’ll admit that appears to be true.  But it wasn’t enough for me to ever want to watch this film again.