Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places

Director John Cassavetes broke all the rules, inventing his own and then discarding them as he went along. He improvised and experimented with everything from the cinematography to the performances to the actual financing of the film. He even mortgaged his own home numerous times to subsidize his movies over the years and took on acting jobs purely for monetary reasons. His directorial debut Shadows (1958), with its jerky, hand-held camerawork, vivid location shooting on New York City streets and edgy subject matter involving an interracial romance, is one of the most influential films to emerge from the independent New York City cinema movement of the 1950s. Yet, it was just a warm-up for Cassavetes’s next film, Faces (1968), which was even more provocative and unconventional. 

Continue reading

Pool Days

Sometimes a film comes along that no marketing department can get a handle on and as a result it just gets tossed out there to fend for itself and to find an audience on its own. That was the case with Deep End, released in 1971 by Paramount Pictures to selected art houses and whatever theaters were willing to book it. I saw the film at the Westhampton Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, which was obviously run by an Anglophile because almost any new British film would play there. Of course, Deep End is only British on the surface. It is set in London but the cast includes British and Germany actors and much of the film was shot in Munich, Germany by Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski.

Continue reading