Broadway actress Myrtle Gordon (Gena Rowlands) rehearses for her latest play about a woman in denial at the onset of her autumn years. When she witnesses the accidental death of an adoring young fan, it leads to a crisis of confidence in both her professional and her personal life which threatens to wreck the production.
Featuring a startling and compelling performance by Gena Rowlands which won her the Silver Bear for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival, Opening Night is one of John Cassavetes’ most self-reflexive works, a contemplation of aging and the actor’s art of making a part your own. Myrtle’s epic battle with the playwright Sarah Goode (Hollywood veteran Joan Blondell) cuts to the heart of the filmmaker’s struggle with industry convention and conformity; Sarah believes the play is there on the page — Myrtle knows that it can only come to life if the actors transcend their lines to convey lived experience.
My favourite Cassavetes film. It has an aura, a taste, which is very explosive. It’s very raw, very distraught. Those fights in the movie feel real to me. The film is about an actress becoming crazy, which is a plot I like very much. Myrtle Gordon is an amazing character and Gena Rowlands does one of the best drunk scenes I ever saw.
Pedro Almodovar
John Cassavetes
Gena Rowlands, Joan Blondell, John Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara, Zohra Lampert
USA
1977
English
Indigenous & Community Access
Credits
Screenwriter
John Cassavetes
Cinematography
Al Ruban
Editor
Tom Cornwell
Original Music
Bo Harwood
Art Director
Bryan Ryman
Also in This Series
Dedicated to one of the most inspiring and influential American actresses of the past half century, this series showcases the versatility and star power that was Gena Rowlands.
Faces
Ten years after his landmark debut, Shadows, John Cassavetes returned to the indie model, self-financing this wrenching portrait of the sexual mores and miseries of American middle class. Gena Rowlands is luminous as Jeannie, the film's emotional barometer.
A Woman Under the Influence
Gena Rowlands is extraordinary in this painful and compassionate trial of love, the most intense and essential movie from legendary independent filmmaker John Cassavetes. "The toughest of all great American films." Kent Jones
Minnie and Moskowitz
John Cassavetes' deliciously witty take on Hollywood romance is a modern screwball comedy, a mismatched love story between a car park attendant (Seymour Cassel) and a museum administator (Gena Rowlands) who believes herelf to be too good for him.
Gloria
Gena Rowlands was nominated for Best Actress for her portrait of gangster's moll Gloria Swenson: a tough, chain-smoking broad who finds herself running from her former friends in the mob to protect her next door neighbour's orphaned six-year-old kid.
Love Streams
The last movie Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes made together is an eccentrically beautiful, painful piece about a writer (Cassavetes) broken out of his self-imposed exile by the arrival of a son he doesn't know, and a sister he hasn't seen in years.
