Classic 70s Movie: “A Woman Under the Influence”

An additional post in our Classic 70s Movie series from Kate Hagen.

Movie Title: A Woman Under the Influence

Year: 1974

Writer: Screenplay by John Cassavetes

Lead Actors: Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk

Director: John Cassavetes

IMDB Plot Summary: Mabel, a wife and mother, is loved by her husband Nick but her madness proves to be a problem in the marriage. The film transpires to a positive role of madness in the family, challenging conventional representations of madness in cinema.

Why I Think This Is A Classic 70s Movie: Capitalizing on changing social attitudes including the rise of second-wave feminism, the sexual revolution, and increasing divorce rates, as well as the unprecedented creative freedom available to auteur filmmakers, John Cassavetes crafted a vital film about femininity, marriage, and domestic life with his look at the Longhetti family. The third entry in Cassavetes’ marriage trilogy (following 1968’s Faces and 1971’s Minnie and Moskowitz), and anchored by a breathtaking, fearless performance by Cassavetes’ wife, the Oscar-nominated Gena Rowlands, A Woman Under the Influence is the director’s masterpiece. It garnered Cassavetes his third and final Oscar nomination for Best Director.

The genesis for this film came from Rowlands, who approached Cassavetes about doing a play concerning the trials and tribulations faced by the modern woman. According to Marshall Fine’s biography of Cassavetes, Accidental Genius: “What Cassavetes had written was so intense and emotional that Rowlands knew she couldn’t bear performing in such a play eight times a week.” Cassavetes went on to say “I only knew one thing about Woman when we started: that it was a difficult time for today’s woman to be left alone while somebody goes out and lives. I know when I was not working and Gena was working for me — because I was really in trouble in this business — I stayed home and took care of the baby and I was a pretty good housewife and all that…All those things are more interesting than what they’re making movies out of.” Hollywood, however, was less interested in the idea of a middle-aged woman struggling with the societal confines of being a housewife in a changing America. Cassavetes was told “No one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame.” (TCM)

From Barbara Jean to Bree Daniels, female characters were never more richly nuanced than in the 1970s, and Mabel Longhetti is one of the very best among them. Through Cassavetes’ classic, close handheld photography, we see Mabel process the external world through her carefully cultivated vocal tics and hand gestures. Outside of Mabel, we watch the Longhetti family struggle through mundane domestic scenes that resonate on a deeper level due to painful, pointed familiarity: a shaving razor becomes a lethal weapon, dressing children for bed turns into an all-out family war, a visit from grandma becomes an endurance test. Many scenes in the film, especially in its second half, feel like the home movies of a family in freefall you shouldn’t be watching. While the film is a showcase for Rowlands, Peter Falk also gives a career-performance as her perpetually riled-up husband, Nick Longhetti. If you’ve never thought of Falk as anyone besides Columbo, I encourage you to check out the raw, romantic performance he gives here.

The film explores the shifting dynamics of the American nuclear family, sexual politics of the time (an early scene follows Mabel through Hollywood as she drunkenly picks up a paramour, leading to an incredibly awkward morning-after), and most vitally, mental illness as seen through the eyes of a wife and mother who will never conform to societal standards of how a good wife, mother, and woman should behave. Perhaps the most audacious thing about Woman’s exploration of Mabel’s madness is that in the end, Nick chooses not only to accept his wife’s mental illness, but dares the rest of his family — and thus, the audience — to say that there’s anything wrong with his beloved, delicate Mabel. If she’s crazy, he is too. She’s got problems, some of them unfixable, but Cassavetes lets us know that it’s alright to love her, just as she is.

My Favorite Moment In The Movie: After meeting her children’s school bus (and awkwardly accosting some Angelenos while she waits) Mabel levels with her kids, and tells them: “You know I never did anything in my whole life that was anything except I made you guys.” She then asks them if they ever found her “dopey, or mean,” and her oldest son responds that she’s “smart, and pretty, and nervous,” before Mabel embraces him. This moment humbly conveys the film’s overarching themes about the mental toll of modern motherhood and domesticity. Mabel’s children know that there’s something off about their mother, but they don’t hesitate to embrace her. It’s a brief, simple scene that does a stellar job of capturing the raw stuff of family life.

My Favorite Dialogue In the Movie: If you’re in LA, I highly recommend spending an afternoon at the WGA Library, where I was lucky enough to find this script. It can also be found on the wonderfully exhaustive Cinephile Archive: (http://cinearchive.org/post/89306791955/on-the-set-of-a-woman-under-the-influence)

Due to his loose shooting style, Cassavetes is often mischaracterized as a great improvisational writer and director, when in fact, every bit of his dialogue was carefully crafted on the page. While reading this script, I was struck by the smart, precise excisions Cassavetes made to the dialogue either on set or in post.

My favorite dialogue in the film happens just after an uncomfortable, impromptu spaghetti dinner at the Longhetti home near the end of the first act. Nick brings his construction crew home, unannounced, forcing Mabel to scramble and prepare pasta at 7AM, just after her liaison has ended. Mabel begins acting out at “dinner,” and making moderately inappropriate gestures towards Nick’s friends (“Would you look at this face? This is the most handsome face I’ve ever seen!’) and co-workers. The first few moments of the scene play out in silence, as Mabel acts out her anger through some of her usual gestures, which Nick mocks. The heavy silences and Mabel’s interior life — grudgingly made public here, as Nick forces a response out of her — are just as vital to this scene as the terse dialogue:

MABEL: Nicky, just tell me. Don’t be afraid to hurt my feelings. Tell me what you want me to be, how you want me to be. I can be that. I can be anything. You tell me, Nicky.

So many films about mental illness don’t give their characters any kind of relatable self-awareness, but that’s never the case with Mabel. She knows she doesn’t behave in a way that’s considered acceptable or refined, but as she tells Nick, “I’m a warm person.” As hard-drinking and incendiary as he may have been personally, Cassavetes was a true humanist at heart, and that shows in the love he has not only for Mabel, but for all of his characters, no matter how badly they behave.

Key Things You Should Look For When Watching This Movie: I think that A Woman Under the Influence is the easiest first entry into the Cassavetes filmography, though it is, obviously, quite emotionally taxing.

Aside from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, Woman is the closest Cassavetes ever gets to a conventional three-act structure. After Nick misses a date night with Mabel, she goes out on the town (inciting incident) for some ill-advised adultery. There’s a clear act one turning point (the spaghetti dinner), midpoint (a disastrous children’s party where Mabel performs the dance of the dying swan from Swan Lake), and dark night of the soul (after she returns home from the hospital, and is antagonized by Nick’s mother, played by Katherine Cassavetes) for Mabel that leads to a protracted, emotionally harrowing climax and denouement, which leaves the Longhettis on tenuously happy note.

The films of Cassavetes were always an intimate affair, involving friends and family, and Woman was no different. According to TCM: “Without studio financing…Cassavetes mortgaged his house and approached friends and family to help him. One of these friends was actor Peter Falk. Falk read the script and believed in it so much he put up half a million dollars of his own money. The cast included Rowlands’ and Cassavetes’ mothers, their son Nick, their daughter, Xan, and Matthew Cassel, son of actor Seymour Cassel and Cassavetes’ godson. The crew was a hodge-podge of professionals and students from the American Film Institute.” Cassavetes’ crew included prominent future directors of photography, Frederick Elmes (Blue Velvet) and Caleb Deschanel (Being There).

After the film was completed, Cassavetes could not find a distributor, so he personally booked the film at art houses and college campuses around the country, often discussing the film with Peter Falk afterwards. This was the first time an independent filmmaker self-distributed his own film, without national distributors (TCM). According to IMDB: “Martin Scorsese threatened to pull his film ‘Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’ from the New York Film Festival unless they accepted the A Woman Under the Influence as well.” Rowlands lost the Best Actress Oscar to Ellen Burstyn for her performance in Alice.

The Longhetti home is on Taft Avenue in Hollywood, and there are lots of great LA exteriors throughout. I’ve always wondered what bar Mabel goes to in the film’s first act, and if it still exists.

A noted favorite of Lynne Ramsay (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Morvern Callar) and Derek Cianfrance (The Place Beyond the Pines, Blue Valentine).

In an appearance on The Mike Douglas Show, Richard Dreyfuss claimed that he found the film so harrowing when he first saw it that it caused him to vomit.

Available for streaming on Hulu Plus, and in the Criterion Collection’s fantastic John Cassavetes: Five Films box set.

Thanks, Kate! To show our gratitude for your guest post, here’s a dash of creative juju for you. Whoosh!

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We already have a set of 80s Movies and 90s Movies. This month, we’re working on 70s Movies.

Thanks to all of you for your participation in this project, creating a resource for writers, movies we should all watch to help learn the craft of screenwriting!