Watch Trailer	1959 Shadows Shadows was John Cassavetes' first directorial effort. Like his later critically acclaimed films Faces and Husbands, Cassavetes fills the screen with probing, unflattering closeups. Unlike his other films, however, Shadows zips along at 87 minutes, avoiding the pitfall of putting the director's nonfans to sleep. The film is a straightforward account of a biracial romance (a far less common film subject in 1960 than today). Light-skinned African-American Lelia Goldoni falls in love with a white man Anthony Ray, who spurns her when he meets the rest of her family. Far from subtle, Shadows benefits from the undisciplined energy of its direction and the excellence of its individual performances. Costing a scant $40,000 (less than the average half hour TV episode of the era), Shadows won the Critic's Award at the Cannes Film Festival and led to more expensive studio assignments for John Cassavetes.
	1961 Too Late Blues After his pioneering independent film Shadows (1960), actor/writer/director John Cassavetes made his major studio directorial debut with this gritty, low-key drama about jazz musicians. Bobby Darin plays John "Ghost" Walefield, a pianist who scuffles from gig to gig with his band, trying to keep body and soul together without betraying his muse. Ghost's agent Benny (Everett Chambers) introduces him to Jess (Stella Stevens), a would-be singer who looks beautiful, even though her voice is fair at best. Ghost falls hard for her and agrees to put her in the band, though it's hard to say if he believes in her musical talent or just wants her companionship. Ghost and his band score a record deal thanks to Jess' presence, but after a humiliating fight in a pool hall and Ghost's discovery that Jess occasionally turns tricks to pay the rent, he puts his integrity up for sale, fires his band, and starts spending his time with a rich woman who likes to hang out with musicians -- and is willing to pay for the privilege. A number of real-life jazz greats appear onscreen and on the soundtrack, including Slim Gaillard, Benny Carter, and Shelly Manne\; the role of Ghost was originally written for Montgomery Clift, who was forced to back out at the last minute, leading to Bobby Darin's casting.
	1963 A Child Is Waiting Produced by Stanley Kramer, A Child is Waiting is set in an institution for the mentally handicapped, with many actual residents playing supporting and bit roles. Doctor Burt Lancaster and instructor Judy Garland often find themselves at odds over teaching methods, with Garland preferring an intense one-on-one approach with her students. Bruce Ritchey, a non-developmentally challenged youth, plays the retarded son of Gena Rowlands and Steven Hill, whose intellectual and social progress becomes the focal point of the film. The most uplifting sequence in A Child is Waiting takes place during a play staged by the genuinely handicapped children for their parents; while director John Cassavetes gilds the lily with close-ups of the teary-eyed audience, the kids themselves are earnest, engaging, and totally devoid of self-pity. According to Stanley Kramer, Judy Garland left her best work in this film on the cutting room floor; whenever completing a scene in which she'd exercised professional restraint, she'd insist upon a retake, then resort to the sobbing and breast-beating that her fans had come to expect.
Watch Trailer	1968 Faces Faces is right: this definitive John Cassavetes film consists almost exclusively of tight, uncomfortable close-ups. It takes place in the fourteenth year of the marriage of Richard (John Marley) and Maria (Lynn Carlin). Neither husband nor wife is content with the conditions that prevail; Maria joins her friends looking for romantic satisfaction elsewhere, while Richard secures the services of a prostitute (Gena Rowlands). Maria herself has a one-night stand with a hippie (Seymour Cassel), but this is no more satisfying than her dead-end marriage. If you think that Faces is an exhausting experience in its current 130-minute length, imagine what it looked like in Cassavetes' original six-hour cut. Alternately clumsy and profound, it is nonetheless a work of deep sincerity, as recognized by the Venice Film Festival, which bestowed no fewer than five awards on the film, and it perfectly exemplifies Cassavetes' improvisational, cinéma vérité style and searching explorations of modern relationships.
	1970 Husbands John Cassavetes wrote and directed this look at three middle-aged men thrown into a midlife crisis when one of their mutual friends dies. Harry (Ben Gazzara), Archie (Peter Falk) and Gus (John Cassavetes) attend the funeral of their buddy David Rowlands (Stuart Jackson); all three are starting to feel the pressures of their advancing years, while Harry is having serious problems with his marriage. After the funeral, the three men decide that they need to get away from it all for a while, and they spend the next two days getting drunk, shooting hoops, playing cards, sleeping on the subway, and pretending that they're teenagers again. After 48 hours of irresponsibility, Archie and Gus decide that fun is fun but it's time to go home. But when Harry goes back to his wife, they have a huge argument; Harry storms out and decides to fly to England, persuading Archie and Gus to tag along. They get dressed up, visit a casino, and pick up beautiful women, but while Archie and Gus, as before, look at this as a brief vacation from their lives as loyal husbands and fathers, Harry doesn't want to go home, even though he seems more troubled by his infidelity than do his two friends. Cassavetes' first directorial project after his critical breakthrough with Faces, featuring intense, largely improvised performances by two of his most consistent collaborators, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk, Husbands was originally released in a cut running 154 minutes, but was trimmed to 138 minutes for general release.
Watch Trailer	1971 Minnie and Moskowitz Can a straight-laced woman find happiness with a scruffy hippie who has a bad habit of getting beaten up? Minnie Moore (Gena Rowlands) was a prom queen in high school but has become disillusioned with life now that she is a divorcée who has just turned 40. Her marriage ended badly, and her current relationship with her boyfriend Jim (John Cassavetes), who is inconveniently married to another woman, is hardly going any better. Jim treats Minnie with little respect, but she tries to calmly soldier on with her work as a curator at a museum. When Jim's wife threatens to commit suicide if he doesn't break off his affair with Minnie, he agrees to stop seeing her. He goes to museum where Minnie works, bringing along his two children to serve as witnesses, and he tells her that they're through. Emotionally shattered by this experience, Minnie blankly and uncomprehendingly accepts a blind date with a loud-mouthed boor named Zelmo Swift (Val Avery), who proposes marriage only an hour after they've met. Angered by her lack of enthusiasm for this proposal, Zelmo angrily follows Minnie to a nearby parking lot, where the attendant, Seymour Moskowitz (Seymour Cassel), comes to her rescue, though he hardly emerges victorious in battle. Shaggy-haired and steadfastly bohemian Seymour has just arrived in Los Angeles from New York City looking to make some changes, and after a few minutes with Minnie, he's convinced that he's met the love of his life. Minnie isn't buying it, but she eventually agrees to go out on a date with him, and before long, these two polar opposites find that they're attracted to each other after all. A typically low-budget labor of love from writer/director/actor John Cassavetes, Minnie and Moskowitz features John's wife Gena Rowlands as Minnie, his mother Katherine Cassavetes as Seymour's mom, his brother-in-law David Rowlands as a minister, and several of his children in a party sequence; John's friend and frequent collaborator Timothy Carey also appears in a small role.
	1974 A Woman Under the Influence John Cassavetes' harrowing masterpiece charts the emotional meltdown of a suburban housewife and its effects on her blue-collar Italian family. Gena Rowlands stars as Mabel Longhetti, a mother of three whose husband Nick (Peter Falk) works as a construction worker; a mismatched couple like so many others in Cassavetes films, the Longhettis seem to be complete opposites: she's impetuous, extroverted, and fragile, while he's controlling, distant, and hard-bitten. Their differences underscore a series of domestic dramas, culminating in a nervous breakdown that sends Mabel to a psychiatric hospital for six months, only to return to a home environment on even thinner ice than before. The improvisational style central to Cassavetes' vision is at its most acute throughout A Woman Under the Influence. Like its title heroine, the film threatens to veer out of control at any time, its shape and scope defined not by narrative but by the emotional upheaval at its center. Embracing the full spectrum of the Longhettis' relationship, from seismic bursts of high drama to small, even trivial moments of domestic tedium, its long scenes relentlessly probe every nook and cranny of the family's life, drawing out each moment for maximum emotional impact; the film is by turns beautiful and ugly, illuminating and frustrating, and it features a performance by Rowlands as heartwrenching and unforgettable as any ever committed to celluloid.
	1976 The Killing of a Chinese Bookie John Cassavetes takes a contemporary film noir turn (which he would return to in Gloria) after exploring domestic melodrama in A Woman Under the Influence with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. Ben Gazzara plays Cosmo Vitelli, the owner of a sleazy Los Angeles strip joint, who loses $20,000 at a mob gambling club owned by a small time gangster (Seymour Cassel). Since Cosmo doesn't have the $20,000, he is forced to murder a Chinese bookie in order to clear his debt to the mob. What Cosmo doesn't know is he's part of a set-up. The bookie is actually a West Coast mob boss protected around the clock by bodyguards. The mobsters figure that Cosmo will be killed in an impossible hit and they can take over his nightclub. But Cosmo proves luckier than the mobsters think -- he manages to kill his target, and now the mobsters have to track down Cosmo and kill him. Initially, at 133 minutes, the movie was subsequently re-edited by Cassavetes to 109 minutes.
Analysis	1977 Opening Night John Cassavetes' Opening Night stars Gena Rowlands (Mrs. Cassavetes) as end-of-tether Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon. She is about to open in a play written by her old friend Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell), but a series of pre-show setbacks and disasters threaten to destroy not only the production but Myrtle's sanity. The actress is especially rattled when one of her staunchest fans dies in an accident. In the face of bleak reality, just how important is the old "show must go on" ethic? Supporting Gena Rowlands are such veterans of the New York-Hollywood shuttle as Ben Gazzara, Zohra Lampert, Paul Stewart, James Karen, and several friends and relatives of the principals.
	1980 Gloria Gloria (Gena Rowlands), a self-involved woman in her forties who was once a mobster's mistress, is asked to look after Philip (Juan Adames), the son of her Mafia-connected Puerto Rican neighbors. This temporary set-up becomes permanent when the neighbors are killed in a mob hit. Philip has in his possession a diary containing a record of illegal Mafia activities; thus the boy is as good as dead unless Gloria takes decisive action. With Philip in tow, Gloria leads the hit men on a frantic chase around Manhattan, and during the various gunfire exchanges, more than holds her own. Offering to exchange the diary for the boy's life, Gloria is rebuffed by the vendetta-driven assassins. Where once she was content squirreling herself away in her lonely apartment, Gloria now must face a lifetime on the run. Directed on a more commercial level than was customary for John Cassavetes (with a subversive streak of self-parody in the bargain), Gloria served as an excellent showcase for Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands. The film won the Golden Lion Award at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.
Watch Trailer	1984 Love Streams In this emotional roller coaster ride, Robert Harmon (John Cassavetes) is a street-wise, sometimes obnoxious writer currently working on a book about the seamier side of buying/selling love, and Sarah Lawson (Gena Rowlands) is an emotive wife and mother struggling through a divorce and custody battle. When Sarah lands on Robert's doorstep with her suitcases, it seems at first that she has returned to her husband. Robert has several women staying at his place (research sources!), but when his real ex-wife arrives with their young son, he sends the women packing. Sarah, it turns out, is Robert's sister. As the two work out their own live's hurdles -- Robert, the unaccustomed father with his 8-year-old son, and Sarah, trying to cope with her custody battle and its results -- their way of handling adversity and personal burdens becomes the real subtext of the film. This film won the Golden Bear Award at the 1984 Berlin Film Festival.
	1986 Big Trouble It took nearly two years after its completion for Big Trouble to reach the big screen. Peter Falk and Alan Arkin are respectively cast as a shady wheeler-dealer and an uptight family man. Strapped for the cash necessary to send his son to Yale, Arkin reluctantly enters into a murder scheme with Beverly D'Angelo. She is married to Falk, who, though he hasn't got long to live due to a heart ailment, may very well spend every penny D'Angelo has before he expires. Arkin is persuaded to kill Falk before this happens, then split the money with D'Angelo. To Arkin's amazement he finds himself the victim of a carefully prepared confidence scam engineered by Falk and D'Angelo. Now that he has a hold over Arkin, Falk gets the poor fellow mixed up in yet another "perfect crime".

"The most difficult thing in the world is to reveal yourself, to express what you have to. As an artist, I feel that we must try many things - but above all we must dare to fail. You must be willing to risk everything to really express it all."