A Woman Under the Influence
A Woman Under the Influence is a 1974 American drama film written and directed by John Cassavetes, and starring his wife Gena Rowlands and close friend Peter Falk. Rowlands plays a housewife whose unusual behavior leads to conflict with her blue-collar husband and family.
The film was Cassavetes' seventh as director, and was produced and distributed independently of major studios like most of his other films. The movie exhibits a highly naturalistic style in acting and camerawork compared to most Hollywood films from the era. It premiered at the 1974 New York Film Festival, before going into wide theatrical release on November 18, 1974. It received two Academy Award nominations: for Best Director and Best Actress. Rowlands won a Golden Globe Award and National Board of Review Award for her performance.
Since its release, the film has been regarded as Cassavetes' magnum opus, with Rowlands' performance often being cited as one of the best of all time. In 1990, the Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant", being one of the first fifty films to be listed. The film featured in Sight and Sound's 2012 list of the greatest films of all time on both critics and directors polls.
Plot
Although she is hesitant to do so, Mabel Longhetti, a Los Angeles housewife and mother who exhibits strange behavior, sends her three young children—Tony, Angelo, and Maria—to spend the night with her mother so she and her husband, Nick, can have a date night. Unfortunately, Nick, who is the foreman of a utility crew, has to cancel to fix a burst water main. Alone and drunk, Mabel goes to a bar and behaves very familiarly to a stranger named Garson Cross, who takes her home. She is almost unconscious by the time they get there, and Garson rapes her while she feebly attempts to fight him off.The next morning, a confused Mabel briefly argues with Garson—whom she confuses by calling him "Nick"—before he leaves. Nick brings his 11-member crew to the house for breakfast after their long night, and Mabel makes everyone spaghetti. She is very polite to Nick's colleagues, but she asks several of them for their names, even though they have met before. The meal is superficially pleasant, until Nick snaps at Mabel for making one of his men feel uncomfortable by being overly warm to him, and the men use a phone call from Nick's mother as an excuse to make a hurried exit.
Mabel hosts a play date, but the father of the other children, Harold Jensen, is disturbed by her behavior and reluctant to leave his children alone with her. Nick comes home with his mother, Margaret, to find all of the children half-naked and running wild, with Jensen trying to get his children dressed. He slaps Mabel and gets into a fistfight with an angry Jensen, but Margaret breaks them up, and Jensen leaves with his children.
At his wits' end, Nick calls Mabel's doctor, Dr. Zepp, to evaluate her mental health. Mabel gets worked up, particularly by the presence of her mother-in-law, who calls Mabel a bad wife and an unfit mother when Nick is trying to calm her down. She becomes increasingly detached from reality, and violently resists when Dr. Zepp tries give to her a sedative injection. Convinced she has become a threat to herself and others, Dr. Zepp has Mabel involuntarily committed.
At work, Nick is on edge and yells at his coworkers when they ask about what happened with Mabel. Eddie, Nick's closest friend, remains quiet, but even this rubs Nick the wrong way. He yells at Eddie while Eddie is rappelling down a steep incline, and Eddie falls and gets injured. Afterward, Nick picks up his children from school early to go to the beach and allows them to sip his beer.
Six months later, Nick plans a large surprise welcome home party to celebrate Mabel's return from the hospital. However, his mother points out that this may be overwhelming for her, and Nick has her ask all of the guests who are not family to leave. When Mabel arrives, she is quiet and apprehensive, and no one else knows what to say, either. Nick tries his best to make Mabel feel comfortable, but, when she begins to joke around, he blows up and says they are going to have a normal conversation. Mabel says she does not know how to act without the routine provided by the hospital, which included therapies and medications and shock treatments, and she asks everyone to leave. While the guests get their coats, Mabel begins to dance on the couch while humming the theme from Swan Lake.
When Nick approaches Mabel, she runs into the bathroom and cuts her hand with a razor. He stops her, and she runs to the living room and climbs back up on the couch. The children, confused and concerned, try to protect Mabel by pushing Nick away from her. Nick slaps Mabel, knocking her to the ground, and then tries to put the children to bed, but they escape and go back to Mabel. Seeming somewhat recovered, Mabel, still bleeding, takes the children upstairs and tucks them in while they express their love for her. She and Nick go back downstairs, where he tends to her hand and they clean up and get ready for bed.
Cast
From the American Film Institute:Production
Development
John Cassavetes was inspired to write A Woman Under the Influence when his wife Gena Rowlands expressed a desire to appear in a play about the difficulties faced by contemporary women. His completed script was so intense and emotional that she knew she would be unable to perform it eight times a week, so he decided to adapt it for the screen. Real household recordings of the Cassavetes-Rowlands family were one source of inspiration for script dialogue. When he tried to raise funding for the film, Cassavetes was told that "No one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged dame." Lacking studio financing, he mortgaged his house and borrowed money from family and friends, one of whom was Peter Falk, who liked the screenplay so much that he turned down a role in The Day of the Dolphin and invested $500,000 in the project.At the start, the crew consisted mainly of professionals and students from the American Film Institute, where Cassavetes was serving as the first "filmmaker in residence" at their Center for Advanced Film Studies. Cassavetes enlisted non-professional actors to play some roles, including many of his own family members. Working with a limited budget forced him to shoot scenes in a real house near Hollywood Boulevard, and Rowlands was responsible for her own hairstyling and makeup. Despite lacking funds for film stock before shooting, production proceeded after 10,000 feet of film mysteriously appeared the night before filming, with one legend claiming that it was stolen from a porno house.
Filming
Filming took place in 65 days over twelve weeks starting in November 1972, shot on 35mm film on a Mitchell BNC, with the use of an Arri camera for hand-held recording. A few weeks into the shoot, the original cinematographer Caleb Deschanel was fired due to clashes with Cassavetes, leading to many of the initial crew members leaving alongside him. Deschanel was replaced by Mike Ferris, who had never shot a feature film at the time.Although the film is largely scripted, Cassavetes did not allow rehearsals or discussion between actors for most scenes, refused to answer questions that performers had about their roles, and did not clearly demarcate when filming had began or ended in a take. The purpose of these restrictions was to cultivate unplanned, complex interactions and performances which were authentic to each actor.
Sound and editing
Cassavetes enlisted Bo Harwood to create music for the film, and later also gave him the job of recording the film's audio. He had also enlisted Harwood to play music with a piano. Harwood, then an unemployed rock musician, was initially hesitant, as he had never made a soundtrack, played piano or done sound recording before, but accepted the job.An initial cut of the movie was 3 hours and 50 minutes long, which was then cut down to a 155 minute edit and then the final 147 minute runtime.
Release
Upon completion of the film, Cassavetes was unable to find a distributor, so he personally called theater owners and asked them to show it. He got it booked at art houses and shown on college campuses, where he and Falk would discuss it with the audience. According to Jeff Lipsky, a college student who was hired to help distribute the film: "It was the first time in the history of motion pictures that an independent film was distributed without the use of a nationwide system of sub-distributors." Grossing $6 million, the film was Cassavetes’ biggest commercial success as director and its profits financed most of the production costs of his next two films, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night.The film was screened at the San Sebastián Film Festival, where Rowlands was named Best Actress and Cassavetes won the Silver Shell Award for Best Director, and the New York Film Festival, where it captured the attention of such film critics as Rex Reed. When Richard Dreyfuss appeared on The Mike Douglas Show with Peter Falk, he described A Woman Under the Influence as "the most incredible, disturbing, scary, brilliant, dark, sad, depressing movie", and added that he "went crazy. I went home and vomited", which prompted curious audiences to seek out the film capable of making Dreyfuss ill.
Home media
In 1992, Touchstone Home Video released the film on VHS.On September 21, 2004, The Criterion Collection released the film—together with Shadows, Faces, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie, and Opening Night —in Region 1 as part of the eight-disc DVD box set John Cassavetes: Five Films. Bonus features for the film include an audio commentary by composer and sound recordist Bo Harwood and camera operator Mike Ferris, a video conversation between Rowlands and Falk, an essay by film critic Kent Jones, and audio and written interviews with Cassavetes from 1975. On October 22, 2013, the box set was re-released on Blu-ray.