 A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974) Rowlands plays a woman in the midst of a nervous breakdown and Peter Falk is her suffering, perplexed hard-hat husband. Nominated for two Academy Awards, Rowlands for Best Actress and Cassavetes for Best Director. "Perhaps the greatest of Cassavetes' films." -- Roger Ebert. "I think we're just reporters, all of us basically. And a story like A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE is not newsworthy really -- it's not Watergate, it's not war. It's a man and woman relationship, which is always interesting to me." -- Cassavetes. - 155 Minutes / Castle Hill Check out Chuck Wilson's L.A. Weekly review: "Mabel (Gena Rowlands) is full to bursting with love for her family and everyone else. So intent is she to fill every day with beauty and wonder that she often slips away from herself, as if her imagination is like one of those cords that connect a floating astronaut to the mother ship. While it's wonderful that she can travel into the undefined world, for her husband, Nick (Peter Falk), there's always the terror that she won't be able to find her way back. A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974) was John Cassavetes' ninth film as a director, and it's his masterpiece. Tightly scripted, yet shot in long, loosely structured takes that allowed the actors to let the emotion of a given moment govern their movement around the set, it has the spontaneous, scary, occasionally out-of-focus texture of real life. While Rowlands' performance is justifiably legendary, Falk is long overdue for acclaim. His Nick is as complex as Mabel; she has forced him to be. By film's end, he's even let himself go a little crazy, as if he's figured out that the best way to hang tight to Mabel is to go with her into the abstract - out there past the borders of the regimented world, where beauty and wonder and love are first created." (Sunset 5; Sat.-Sun., Sept. 22-23, 10 a.m. Monica 4-Plex; Sat.-Sun., Sept. 29-30) |
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