Remembering Gena Rowlands
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974)
Friday, September 13 | 7 pm
Director: JOHN CASSAVETES
Runtime: 155 min
VTIFF remembers the great Gena Rowlands with this film, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. A Woman Under the Influence is not only Rowlands’ finest performance in a career filled with A-list efforts, but one of the greatest, most daring performances ever committed to screen by any actor, anywhere, ever.
Rowlands died on August 14, 2024 at the age of 94, leaving behind an incredible body of work. Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker said in 2021, “The most important and original movie actor of the past half-century-plus is Gena Rowlands.” Rowlands received a Lifetime Achievement Oscar in 2015, though exactly how she didn’t win in 1974 is anybody’s guess.
Arguably the apex of director John Cassavetes’ actor-friendly, improv-heavy, truth-is-all style, A Woman Under the Influence tells the story of Mabel (Rowlands), an eccentric woman who deteriorating mental state exasperates her loving but baffled husband (Peter Falk, dynamite). The married duo of director Cassavetes and star Rowlands made eight films together, including another masterpiece or two (or three), but it doesn’t get much better than this. Rowlands herself remained incredibly proud of the work that she, Cassavetes and Falk put into the film, and believed it to be her best.
The film very nearly didn’t get made. Falk put up $500,000 of his own money (thanks, Columbo!) to get it filmed, but for 18 months after its completion, no distributor would touch it. When the New York Film Festival rejected the film, Cassavetes asked his friend and acolyte Martin Scorsese to intervene, leading Scorsese to threaten the removal of his own film from the festival. The NYFF capitulated, and A Woman Under the Influence went on to earn two Oscar nominations for best picture and director (somehow Falk was overlooked in a year that Art Carney won Best Actor).