Pretty Good

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Blistering performances.

Follow the tough-as-nails Gloria as she hopscotches all over NYC with a kid in tow, from subway to train to taxi to bus. This is the most non-linear film I've ever seen, it plays out as more of an experimental film than a mainstream piece. That the character of Gloria is the focus of the camera in almost every single scene implies that this is more of a character study than a mob movie, an idea confirmed by its title. I was startled to realize how similar this film is to the Pope of Greenwich Village, with the same kind of rambling, non-linear storytelling style.The most fascinating thing about this film is that Gloria is so guarded that you can never read her motives...any moment something startling could happen. When a car full of mobsters pulls up and demands that she hand over Phil, the boy, Gloria hauls out a piece and blows them back to the stone age; it's a scene that is completely unexpected, and you find yourself admiring her. In another scene, they journey to a diner and sit down for a meal, then she gets up and begins talking to a group of men at a table in the background, and you suddenly realize that she didn't just randomly choose this restaurant, she came to make a deal with the mobsters; it's so unexpected, nothing in this film is what you expect it to be, there is a surprise around every corner. Cassavetes apparently wanted to keep you guessing, and one can imagine him dismissing cliché after cliché from the screenplay until it was completely original.Gena Rowlands is marvelous; with her poker face, she calmly deals with one crisis after another, casually solving her problems with her gun or her intellect, which she honed on the streets after years of being involved with the mob. As the film progresses, her weary cynicism gradually erodes to affection for the little boy she initially disliked. This film is refreshingly original.

I won't relate the storyline - it's all over the place here. Just trust me on this: GLORIA is a wonderful modern noir, full of kicks and energy and schtick. It belongs to its time and its setting - the 'not nice', hot, sweaty NYC of the late 70's - as much as any great Warner Bros. classic. And Gena Rowlands...oh, my. As with many a classic, there are flaws all over the place, from the murdering of the family in the beginning - dad and mom know what's going to happen and everybody just hangs around, tense and fearful? - to the adorable boy's fairly wretched performance. Doesn't matter. Rowlands takes this flick, straps it on her back, and runs. She is nothing short of sensational, as she was as well a brilliant actress. Too bad she limited herself to (mostly) her husband's films. But, they gave us this. And, if you need to learn how to ride a subway with attitude, order a cold beer, or treat a cabbie, watch and learn.

You start with flinty, streetsmart gangster types, cross their paths with a little kid, put them in urban peril, and then you squeeze how things stack up for sentimentality, suspense and humor. It's a charming idea, and perhaps that's why this could be considered John Cassavetes's most conventional film. It tells the story of a gangster's girlfriend who goes on the run with a young boy who is being pursued by the mob for information he doesn't even know he might have. But he wants to tell the story his own way, obstructing every convention we would normally expect, instilling a realist perspective in how we follow the movie, making the pay-off that much more worthwhile. Cassavetes didn't intend to direct his script. He just wanted to sell the story to Columbia Pictures. But once his wife Gena Rowlands was asked to play Gloria, she obliged Cassavetes to direct it.This underdog crime drama is particularly absorbing in its first hour, and ignites with a great beginning. We follow one character, it leads to another character, perspectives are interknit, the situation builds and Cassavetes has complete control over what we know and expect, all in spite of the all-too-familiar premise, which is then set for the rest of the movie, which is a cat-and-mouse hunt per the seedier locales of New York and New Jersey. He makes the threat so real that when the two key characters evade tangible danger, we still feel the tension whenever they round a corner, get in and out of cabs, and other such ordinary actions. He doesn't let on that unwanted company is present. It just happens. There is one scene that lasts for quite awhile before we realize, after Rowlands's title character does, that unwanted company has been there the entire time.In an Oscar-nominated performance, Rowlands is expectedly the beautiful lead actress, but she sports a kind of masculine quality, creating a much more dense dynamic when she, afraid of her maternal instincts, finds them overpowering her lifelong self-preservation, and begrudgingly protects the boy. As the film progresses, however, she becomes more sincere in her protection, and integrates her love with her seasoned familiarity with how to stay alive in this town. In one creative take on the Fine, I Don't Need You Anyway scene, she asks a bartender, "There's reasons I can't turn and just look, but is there a little kid headed in here or across the street or whatever?" She drives her role with such honest irritable liveliness. Yet the kid is also well cast. He was a conspicuous little boy named John Adames with dark hair, big eyes and a way of trucking his dialogue as if confronting you to adjust a single word. It all works because everything about his character, the way he dresses, talks, revolts and moves, serves the naive notion that he is older, smarter and cooler than he is.Cassavetes has a natural keenness for guilelessly unadorned location shooting in that he never plans, stages, waits on the weather or time of day, or hires extras or stunt drivers. Note how passers-by in the distance will often look on at the characters, whether Gloria has pulled a gun in a public place or not. Wherever the characters need to be, that place is in real time, as dirty, scuzzy and purely of the film's era as it would've normally been. There's a shabby flophouse where the clerk tells Gloria, "Just pick a room. They're all open." There are bus stations, back alleys, dimly lit hallways, and bars that open at dawn. And his occasional action scenes are so thrilling because of their surprise.For once, Cassavetes doesn't stage indefinitely extensive scenes of dialogue wherein the actors indulge in their own view of their characters' unraveling. But I miss that. As I've already said, I am very impressed with how tightly he mounts suspense from the very beginning, how Gloria and the kid zip from cab to bus to cab to street to hotel to cab and so on. But regardless of how doggedly realistic he is in his portrayal of a recycled movie plot, he still relies upon that plot rather than the impositions of his characters flexing their wings.

What really made me pity this movie is its idea and what it got of elements. The Beauty and the Beast in the action genre.. Great, and that was before movies like (Léon - 1994) came out, but it seemed that a tornado of naivety hit the whole thing ruthlessly. It needed a lot and a lot and a lot to be a great movie. The dealing with the possible good material was highly provocative where some scenes deserved the laugh, because the writing (Gloria threatens the whole gang in a restaurant!), or the directing (the boy says : "I love you to death" while the camera is almost shooting only his forehead !!?), or the acting (The mafia men couldn't act, John Adames as the kid was unbearably awful = John Cassavetes's responsibility).Elaborately, It forces me to believe that its script had been written (read : fabricated) in 2 days, especially when it relies on the dialog to develop everything, and the dialog was too far-fetched to be logically possible. Also with matters like killing the family at the beginning which's my definition for horrible hastiness, or the end where it turns out that Gloria is Supergirl or the woman of steel, which's quite nothing in familiar flicks, but on the top of OTHER catastrophes here, it is pain barrier. I become so sick whenever I watch artistic movies that lack everything except the laziness, and proudly it brags with that in the name of novelty, realism, whatever. Here, the anguish is double because it's not a movie like that, it's an American thriller with different idea and a dull everything I suppose ! It looked as low as some Blaxploitation movies while it isn't one, it just took the worst of them.Some would say "It's a classic", and other would say "it's the worst ever" ! Actually it's a movie you can summarize its status by the irony between (Rowlands) who got an Oscar nomination for it, and (Adames) who got a Razzie nomination for It (and fairly won !), so IT WAS the Beauty and the Beast indeed ! And I ranked it as one of the worst Buddy-movies, if not the worst ever. Though, when I first watched it I was a kid (a freak kid who loves movies more than life!) so I loved it so much. In fact I think (Gena Rowlands)'s acting was impressive, she owned the role and the screen, if only that was through another script! The cinematography tried to be as non-Hollywood as it could be, I recall clever sequence with a running steadicam (in 1980) in which Gloria escapes with the kid from the restaurant, as a whole it managed to be somewhat harshly real yet through bad-made unreal story ! Plus it didn't add anything profound.. Unlike the music.(Gloria) as a movie, fails on the romantic level and sucks on the thrill level, but the music helps out to redeem both. Bill Conti handled it seriously more than anybody got involved in it. OH MY GOD, his music was like a diamond in the rough. No doubt it's bigger than the movie. It managed to give it a sublime soul, a touch of greatness, and wide shadows to the flat characters and fabricated events. Maybe Conti believed in the story and the movie to the utmost, or he didn't watch the movie but how he loves his work and uses to do it rightly ! Or maybe he did watch it so he was forced to lift it up and cover its faults. It created such a personality for the weak movie, that embodied the Latino background, the chase's feel, the rebellion sense of the title's character, and the passion between her and the kid; nearly all what the movie flopped at !. I think Conti was inspired by Yoakhen Rodrego's Concerto D'aranjuez, its spirit seems clear somewhat in the tunes. Anyhow, It's some catchy soundtrack that marked a movie with high quietly lacked it badly on so many levels. Sometimes, rare times, the music makes the glory of some movies, but Bill Conti just revived it, and donated it with some sensitive case or dramatic deepness, but it needed more and more to be as larger than life as its music.So take the soundtrack and remake (Gloria), I'm not kidding, (Gus Van Sant) sort of did it with (Bernard Herrmann)'s music through his (Psycho - 1999) but not to be like it, as a deformation for its original, because it can't stand more inferiority.