The glories of Rowlands and Fiorentino

The opening of cinemas hasn’t blunted my desire to visit them, I’m happy to say. Following seeing Zola (Janicza Bravo) with a “live audience” two weeks ago I may go to see Summer of Soul (Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson) this weekend. Of course, ha, I will be on the lookout as to how many people deliberately leave their pre-booked seats to create even more social distancing from other audience members.

When I get a Criterion Channel email notifying that a whack of films will be leaving the site by the end of the month I jump to attention. Finally, this will force me to watch films I might have otherwise lackadaisically ignored despite how extremely good they are. It’s computer screen vs big screen syndrome. Such was last night when I watched yet another great John Cassavetes film, Minnie and Moskowitz (1971) starring Gena Rowlands (photo right) and Detroit-born Seymour Cassel. Cassavetes is one of my favorite directors, who died way too soon. And Rowlands – I just looove her – one of my fave actresses. And like Bogart and Becall they were married, a romance made in cinematic heaven. This is a quirky story about two, uh, rather quirky individuals who meet and fall in love. But what’s striking is Rowlands. I’ve never seen her so young. She’s beautiful, of course, but so young her face hasn’t filled out with the expressive cheeks, the look she’s normally associated with…. My second feature was Fred Zinnemann’s 1950 The Men starring Marlo Brando. It’s notable for being Brando’s first feature and he doesn’t disappoint. This is the kind of movie that makes you constantly wonder how they coaxed such good performances out of the cast. The story takes place within a post-war veteran’s hospital for paraplegics. It’s also a love story with a charming, misty-eyed final scene with Brando (Ken) and Teresa Wright (Ellen) who bears an uncanny resemblance, or vice versa, to Andie MacDowell.

I recently rediscovered the actress Linda Fiorentino (photo left), in the neo-nor film The Last Seduction (John Dahl 1994). Wow. Tough talking, hard as nails, this suffer-no-fools femme fatale has got to be one of the sexiest actresses over the past 40 years. In fact, she’s a live version, only with black hair, of Jessica in Robert Zemeckis’s 1888 Who Framed Roger Rabbit! 

But I was disappointed in Running on Empty, Sidney Lumet’s 1988 supposed take on former Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn’s life on the lam. A good cast (Judd Hirsch, Christine Lahti, Martha Plimpton and River Phoenix) is wasted in this slim plot that barely touches on the politics, both macro and micro, of 1960s America and how it affected these radicals personally. Any causal viewer might have thought this was just another story about a typical, um, domestic family.

And move over Alec Baldwin. You’d have nothing on Robert Mitchum as the personification of Donald J. Trump. While watching Peter Yates’ 1973 The Friends of Eddie Coyle it donned on me. Mitchum, with his A personality and gruff piercing frown, is the pure embodiment of Trump. He could play him in a nanosecond.