Gena Rowlands can make protecting a child look both necessary and thoroughly irritating. Her toughness, tenderness and refusal to become agreeable give us good reason to stay, even when the film around her is uneven.
Fi1m perspective
Gena Rowlands carries herself elegantly in Gloria (1980), even when she is being blunt with the boy she has to protect. As Gloria Swenson, she brings the same force to dealing with Phil that she brings to using a gun. We warmed to her impatience: looking after the boy is exhausting, and she makes that feel like something a decent person is allowed to admit. John Cassavetes lets her remain disagreeable without treating her annoyance as a failure of character.
That permission to be difficult runs through a collaboration with Cassavetes that stretched across ten films between 1963 and 1984. In A Woman Under the Influence (1974), her Mabel Longhetti is a wife and mother in distress. In Opening Night (1977), Myrtle Gordon is an actress facing a professional and personal crisis. Her gestures can be large and strange, but she keeps us aware that there is more to the woman than the behaviour on display.
Gloria puts those qualities inside a more commercial thriller, with mixed but worthwhile results. Fred Schuler’s New York photography gives the chase a bustle that suits her briskness, while Bill Conti’s grand score works because she remains so practical beneath it. George C. Villaseñor’s editing gives the opening montage an ease the later pursuit cannot always sustain. The gangsters are thinly drawn and the escape plotting can be a trial; Rowlands makes the awkward partnership worth following, but cannot supply everything the script lacks.
Love Streams (1984) was her final collaboration with Cassavetes, and Another Woman (1988) subsequently gave her a quieter character study. The restraint of the latter is worth remembering before treating the most agitated women as the whole of her work. Nick Cassavetes’s The Notebook (2004) introduced her to a new generation as the older Allie Calhoun. Start with Gloria, but do not expect the gangsters to be as interesting as the woman they are chasing.
Biography
Gena Rowlands was an American actress whose career in film, stage and television spanned nearly seven decades. She is best known for her collaborations with her husband, director John Cassavetes, appearing in ten of his films, including A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980). Both performances earned her Academy Award nominations for Best Actress.
Born Virginia Cathryn Rowlands in Madison, Wisconsin, she trained at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. She received four Emmy Awards and two Golden Globes, and won the Silver Bear for Best Actress for Opening Night (1977). Later roles included appearances in The Notebook (2004) and episodes of Monk (2009) and NCIS (2010). Rowlands died in 2024.
