Gloria (1980)

dir: John Cassavetes

1980

See, this is what happened: a classic actress called Gena Rowlands died a few months ago. Well, it was actually August 2024, but who’s counting. When she passed, having reached her 90s but having endured nearly a decade of dementia, and I read all the tributes to her I thought to myself “Self, she sounds like she was a great actress and a tremendous woman – you should watch some films she was in so you can have a slightly informed opinion and to honour her.”

In everything they said about the actress, most often reference was made that she was married to John Cassavetes, legendary independent filmmaker, and starred in most of his films before he died of the demon drink in 1989. Nine years before that fateful day, he made this here flick Gloria.

Guess what – it stars Gena Rowlands. Guess what else – it might have been made in 1979/1980, but it looks and feels and smells like something from the 1960s. It is the ‘old’ New York, where entire suburbs are ethnic enclaves, and there are more mobsters all over the place than there are cops.

In another example of how different this flick is from a) contemporary flicks or b) other flicks from that era, the opening ten minutes of this flick is the credits, superimposed over some abstract expressionist paintings, while smooth jazz plays on the soundtrack. It’s a leisurely ten minutes.

And it’s far more chill than the rest of the film. Having never watched, as far as I know, a Cassavetes film before, I soon realised that there was probably a good reason for that: based on this flick and its opening half hour or so, Cassavetes filmed and directed and edited everything for the purpose of exhausting the audience. I was so tense even before anything bad happened that I had to stop watching it and take multiple breaks, and that’s just down to all the yelling and the editing.

It’s not an accomplishment to stress me out. I have a very low stress threshold. I suspect that directors like John Cassavetes and probably Alex Perry Ross and Tyler Perry and pretty much anyone with Perry in their names knows that all they have to do is get people to act stressed and agitated continuously for a set period of time on camera and I’ll end up have a fit, fainting or throwing up, sometimes all at once.

The set up is this: A brassy broad played immaculately by Gena Rowlands lives next to a family. I am guessing that the family is meant to be Puerto Rican, even though the ‘husband’ is played by that famous Hispanic actor Buck Henry.

I’m joking, Buck Henry, most famous for screenwriting stuff like The Graduate and for creating Get Smart, was about as Puerto Rican as I am.

As far as I could work out over all the screaming, Buck Henry’s character is an accountant for the mafia, and the mafia are all going to come after him because he has a book, which has all these mafia numbers and letters and presumably secret symbols and stuff in it.

So the mafia are coming to slaughter them all, not just the accountant, but his wife and kids too, just for efficiency’s sake. Gloria doesn’t want to have anything to do with any of this, and maybe doesn’t even like them because they’re Puerto Rican, but she ends up taking the youngest boy into her apartment before the slaughtering starts.

Goons. Mafia goons turn up. The classic types. Not The Godfather types, not the Prohibition types with hats and long coats and Tommy guns, nah, the very portly types dressed mostly in polyester who look like they have to eat an entire salami a day in order to stay in the best shape of their lives, if that shape is Grimace from McDonalds. How these jackasses climb the stairs without having well deserved coronaries is a mystery never solved by the movie.

But, like anything inevitable, they eventually get there and brutally murder the family, thankfully outside of our line of sight. But it’s still brutal, shotguns and stuff.

So. Gloria, who is of a certain age (I think I calculated that she was a touch younger than I am now when she made this flick) struggles long and hard with the fact that she just doesn’t want to look after Phil (John Adames), and, having watched his performance, I can’t really blame her. He’s an obnoxious kid. I’m not at all implying that he deserved to die with his family, but not feeding him to the mafia goons means that Gloria is capable of heroic restraint.

Gloria herself seems to be more than just a tough cookie, and, considering how well she seems to know the goons who infest the city, it’s strongly implied that she worked for them in some capacity (I’m kind of dancing around the fact that I think that the flick implies, after a late stage revelation that she was a mob boss’s mistress, that she was probably a sex worker for many years, but I could just be imagining that). What is pretty clear, to use a contemporary term that one would never have used back then, but which would have seemed entirely appropriate, is that Gloria has zero fucks left to give. She isn’t afraid of the goons after her or the kid, she isn’t afraid that she won’t be able to threaten or even shoot her way out of any given situation. The one thing that we’re not sure of for most of this flick, despite being so familiar (now) with the trope of the reluctant badass who looks after an obnoxious kid against their will until they bond and learn important things about each other. Is whether she’s going to kill the kid herself or give him over directly because she gets sick of his bullshit.

There is a scene in the flick where this tiny little fucker is trying to order Gloria around, repeatedly telling her, to echo his terrible father’s last words, that he is the man, and as such, Gloria has to do what he says.

I mean, hearing anyone bellowing “I’m The MAN, I’M THE MAN!!” is annoying, whether it’s coming from a wannabe MMA fighter or some fledgling rapper, but from a seven-year-old it’s charming/annoying/justification for abandonment. To her credit, though, Gloria doesn’t shoot him on the spot.

She does spend, at a conservative estimate, 99% of the film rolling her eyes at the bullshit the kid says or that the mafia goons tell her, or exasperated at turns of events, or just plain irritated. And she is no less glorious because of it.

It is a tremendous performance, an absolute powerhouse performance in a flick that isn’t that great, to be honest. No-one else seems as real or alive as she does, surrounded as she is by people that come off as amateurs, and in settings and décor / set designs / just random New York and New Jersey slums they found that just look diseased and decrepit, and somewhat flimsy in comparison.

It is great looking at old New York though. There’s a lot of footage on streets, through bodegas and crummy businesses, as Gloria and Phil run hither and thither, and they’re the only ones that know they’re in a movie. Quite a few times shocked people stare at the camera or at the actors, so they’re clearly not extras. Whatever way people think of certain areas of New York now, there were clear racial lines when this flick was made, and it’s a tension that is carried within the flick. Gloria does say some racist things to and at Phil, and I guess we’re meant to cut the actor the same slack we cut Clint Eastwood when he makes his cosy flicks about how you should be able to call people racial slurs as long as you’re old and your heart’s in the right place.

But she does come through for the kid, in the end. I don’t know how, I don’t know why, because I thought the point of not being able to go against the mob and survive is that even if you killed a bunch of them, as Gloria deliciously does, all the others have to come after you as well to make sure no-one else gets any bright ideas. It’s the central idea of organised crime.

And yet she finds a way, God love her. She is just so magnificent in this flick. I will have to seek out everything else she did, because she is amazing. She owns every scene she’s in, she dominates every conversation with just with a raised eyebrow, and she strides through New York itself like the colossus that she is / was. And there’s a power to the way she dresses and comports herself, which is why even her wardrobe plays a strong part in getting her character across.

Considering the character’s past, and the role (we assume) she played within the mob, she reached her point where she said “no fucking more”, and built up her life around it. So her clothing no longer represents someone who dresses to please the eye of the mob boss beholder or his goons, she dresses like a stylish diplomat or ambassador, but not one who grew up with inherited wealth – after all, she hard earned every goddamn cent of her goddamn money.

And it shines through in her attitude towards men, towards Phil and his idiotic expectations, and to a world that seems too hostile to let her and the kid survive, but she’s way too forceful to bend to the world’s design. Thus instead it bends to her will, which kind of explains or at least justifies the unlikely but still welcome happy ending that they somehow conjure up.

It may be a bit of a curio, it’s certainly not a masterpiece of a flick (it’s way too flabby, way too long, way too many scenes of them just running here, running there, taking cabs, taking buses), but it does have one of her greatest performances, surely (after all, I’ve only seen one film of hers thus far, so by default…)

7 times she should have killed them all out of 10

--
“You let a woman beat you, huh? You tiny little nothing.” – why yes, there are many scenes where she emasculates goons before killing them, why do you ask? - Gloria