Method Moll

By RICHARD CORLISS

GLORIA

Directed and Written by John Cassavetes

What Method actor would not love to work with John Cassavetes? His films (Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence) are actors' showcases. His camera waits patiently for the smallest behavioral tic or the grandest explosion of dynamite acting. The characters he creates are compulsive talkers, walkers, smokers, prowling the urban nightscape, their lives a cacophonic symphony of desperation, their aggressions spilling out like a Bowery bum's shirttail. Cassavetes encourages openness, improvisation, the primacy of being over performing. An actor prepares, and the moviegoer watches, and Cassavetes approves. He as much as tells his cast: The screen is yours, the script is yours; run with it. For actors trained by such evangelical Methodists as Lee Strasberg, this is heaven, like being back at the Actors Studio, but going public and getting paid for it.

This approach does not always make for good movies. An actor's revelation may not be a character's truth; a series of bravura scenes may torpedo the narrative structure. What is meant as a species of cinema verite may too easily become as specious as old-fashioned movie-star acting. Cassavetes is a deadly serious director, but his films are best seen as rickety star vehicles. His most shining star--his Bette Davis, his Gloria Swanson, his Joan Blondell--is his wife Gena Rowlands. In Gloria, he has finally realized her strengths and her limitations, and has cranked out a passable imitation of those '30s gangster movies with brassy broads and sassy tots, a Methodical Little Miss Marked Woman.

Gloria Swenson (get it?) was once a chorine and a mobster's moll. Now she's on the lam from her old pals, with a neighbor's Puerto Rican son in tow. For two hours of screen time, Gloria and tough little Phil (and the movie) meander around Manhattan because the Mob has covered all the bus, train and air terminals and the fugitives never think to rent a car. But nothing fazes Gloria, who smokes Salems down through the filters, talks cheekily with hoods and, in defense of her ward and for the sheer hell of it, triggers half a dozen deaths.

Gloria is also a golddigger with a heart of gold and Gloria is the story of two hard people coming to terms with love and trust. The movie's achievement is that it manages to be almost as effective as it is predictable. Its failure is in pretending to a naturalism it cannot maintain whenever movie actress and movie crew go slumming through the Big Apple and bystanders gawk into the lens, auditioning for stardom in some future Cassavetes film.

At 46, Rowlands is a terrific-looking woman who has aged like a fine piece of furniture: even the scratches and weather-warps are marks of character. Cassavetes' camera has found a fit object of veneration, a great movie-star face that, in motion or repose, commands attention. In Gloria, Rowlands obviously has a lot of fun playing the hard-boiled momma. She hunches her shoulders, narrows her eyes, breathes through her teeth, slaps her hand on her thigh and spits out lines like "I don't like kids. I hate kids. Especially your kids," and "I'll kill anybody that's tryin' ta kill me."

Rowlands' young costar, John Adames, was all of seven when Gloria was filmed. But even now he possesses the dark good looks of a gnome gigolo. His mannerisms seem as if the director might have bought them at a movie-memorabilia shop: gestures from Cagney, a voice as wispy as Peter Lorre's, sardonic smiles from the early John Cassavetes. But they are perfectly suitable to the slapdash style and gravelly tone of a film that uses Method acting to conceal, and then reveal, the workings of a soft old Hollywood heart .

--By Richard Corliss

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