Sic Transit Gloria

THE MAN ON THE SCREEN is an accountant for the Mafia. He has been skimming money off the top and is now understandably panicked, for he has been caught. There are men downstairs, strangers--this much he knows from his wife. In all probability these men have come to kill him and his whole family. Suddenly, the doorbell rings--it is Gloria, the next-door neighbor, who has run out of coffee. The accountant, who has run out of time, gives her instead his son, and a ledger. Gloria goes back to her apartment with the boy, and the Mob comes and murders the accountant, his wife, and his daughter.

There is nothing at all extraordinary about this scene, which has the bad flat feel of a Spanish language sitcom, and I mention it only because of the murder at the end. It is a non-murder; director Cassavetes chooses to show us a window being blown out by a shotgun blast into the sunlit air, and no more. No blood, no violence, and that is a disappointment. Of course there is nothing intrinsically good about violence in the cinema, and those who would tell us that there is come off as silly as those who would picket The Warriors. The point is that the use of violent action demands justification from the rest of the movie, in some way, and that one way of justifying violence is to make a great movie; by killing some people the audience cares about, in an early scene like this, the director can in effect throw down the gauntlet to himself. Cassavetes is not a squeamish director--he has no qualms about killing off bad guys, and more than once. But he chooses to bail out in this scene, and from that point on it is clear what kind of movie this is going to be.

IN SHORT, Gloria is a sappy PG movie about a gun moll with a heart of gold--a two-hour meditation on a cliche. There is very little more than that: something, perhaps, like "love wins in the end," "little people can beat the system," or "women can beat men at their won game." There are all sorts of self-conscious messages in Gloria, tacked on like flyers on a kiosk. All of them are upbeat; isn't that what people want?

It reminds me of a story a friend of mine tells. He was writing for a Southern paper of some pretensions. He was interested in writing stories with a political twist, and had some success in getting them published, but never on Sunday. When he asked an editor about this, he was told, "You write too many 'bummers.' People don't want to read bummers on Sunday." The editor went on to show him a copy of a model story for the Sunday page. It was a report of a woman with a retarded child. The woman owned an ice cream store, and every Sunday, before opening the store, she and the child would have a huge ice cream fight. They they would clean up the mess and open for business.

There, in a way, you have Gloria, and the mentality, real or imagined, that produced it. Add the cast, distinguished only by their lack of distinction, and you have a recipe for disaster. Cassavetes built his directorial reputation on the way he worked with actors, and particularly on his creative use of improvisation. But the liabilities of letting bad actors improvise are obvious. It's sort of like building a zoo without walls--you end up with shit all over the place.

John Adames plays the accountant's six-year-old son, Phil, though he looks throughout as if he's auditioning for the Little League version of Fame. This little fellow has taken too many acting classes, and seen too many movies--he imitates everyone from James Coco to Jack Palance, Adames is the first victim of Cassavettes' improvisational approach; let off the leash, he begins to babble:

I am the man

I am the man

I am the man

I do anything I can

I am the man

I am the man

To which Gloria (Gena Rowlands) responds, "Hey." Hey, indeed.

Rowlands does a creditable job, considering the vacuum she's thrown into; throughout, she evinces talent and intelligence, if only by looking trapped. It only makes it worse that what she's trapped by is her husband. For if Cassavetes can blame his failure on his rotten actors (excepting Rowlands), so can they blame the film's failure on Cassavetes. Without actors, Cassavetes is thrown back upon his own technical resources, and he hasn't a leg to stand on. Camera work is repetitive and unimaginative. When he wants to evoke an urban mood, he gives us mass transit; there are more buses and cabs and subways in this movie than you would want to count. Oh, yeah, and a saxophone: urban, right? Cassavetes also wrote the script, and like many scripts written by ex-actors it is bad, plagued by longeurs of dialogue between a kid who's too young to be interesting and a woman who lacks even that excuse. And a lot of "tough talk": "Okay you bananas" or an exchange like this: "Gimme a beer." "Any particular kind?" "Cold."

CASSAVETES DOES ACHIEVE an interesting portrait of the mob-as-business; hit men get stuck in traffic, murder becomes a routine between neighbors. It's a way of looking at organized crime that we've seen before, and Cassavetes still pulls it off, which is a neat little trick. Still, most of the finer things Cassavettes tries to achieve have already been done better, in Martin Scorcese's Taxi Driver and Peter Bogdanovich's unacknowledged masterpiece, Saint Jack.

Gloria fails in almost every way, and it is for lack of trying. Maybe Cassavetes is just trying to make a lot of money; but when you get to the point where venality is the benefit of the doubt, you are on very shaky artistic ground indeed. There are those people who love to see children on the screen, and they will love Gloria--they will see John Adames and leave the theater saying, "Oh, he's so cute." He's not so cute. Often, he is grotesque.