Gloria
With Sharon Stone, Jean-Luke Figueroa, Jeremy Northam, Cathy Moriarty, Mike Starr, Bonnie Bedelia, and George C. Scott.
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Enjoyable hokum at best, Cassavetes’s movie draws a lot of confidence from old-fashioned Hollywood tropes. In contrast to his independent and more personal efforts, which initially appear to be all over the place, this tight scaling down of incident and character–a battered, middle-aged moll (Rowlands) and a precocious seven-year-old Puerto Rican kid fleeing a malevolent Mafia in bombed-out sections of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Jersey–clicks along like a well-oiled suspense machine, improbably delivering the shopworn goods. In some of the action sequences, pistol-packing Rowlands fills the screen like Toshiro Mifune, and the sheer dumpiness of certain locations carries an authentic funkiness.
I wouldn’t presume to cite all the reasons why; reviewers know precious little about what happens behind the scenes of most studio films. None of my four books on Cassavetes offers a clue whether he had any sort of final cut on the original Gloria, nor can I assess the relative control of Lumet, Stone, screenwriter Steven Antin, the two producers, and the studio over the new picture. For starters, I can’t begin to trust the credits, which omit Cassavetes’s name. The most I can do is try to tease out a central conceptual problem and a couple of missed opportunities.
The film might have worked if Stone’s 50s references meshed logically with her character’s personality and actions, but her performance and her character proceed on parallel tracks, connecting only occasionally; both have merit, but they seem to belong to different pictures. There are too many disparate and irreconcilable Hollywood conventions competing for our attention. Even Lumet’s usual attentiveness to New York locations fails to provide a catalyst (and few of his locations are as flavorsome as the original’s). Cassavetes’s Gloria may have been action-packed nonsense, but it was enjoyable precisely because it was all of a piece. This Gloria is simply pieces–a few of them enjoyable, most of them not.
