Minnie and Moskowitz

Late listing: tomorrow night at 9:30, at IFC Center, one of John Cassavetes’s miraculous masterworks, “Minnie and Moskowitz,” starring Gena Rowlands (Cassavetes’s wife), Seymour Cassel, and Cassavetes himself. (The screening will be followed with a discussion with the director John Cameron Mitchell.)

Here’s Pauline Kael’s entire review of the film, from the Jan. 22, 1972, issue of the magazine, while the film was in first run:

John Cassavetes built this movie on a small conceit—a love affair between two people who are wildly unsuited to each other—and it doesn’t take root. The picture drivels on about the joys of spontaneity, whole Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel remain embarrassingly wrong for each other.

A year earlier, she had written similarly dismissive things about Cassavetes’s “Husbands.” Clearly, she had an allergy to his films; more importantly, she thought that giving vent to her allergy was more important than figuring out what a serious man was getting at in his films. Here’s a clip from the film, featuring Rowlands and Cassavetes:

Here’s what the YouTube poster has to say, verbatim, about the clip:

Gena Rowland’s Many faces blow me away as her boyfriend is breaking up with her I can hardly believe this is on film!

I second this astonished enthusiasm, and add that Cassavetes’s inflection of the line “I keep remembering the laughs we had” gets me every time. Sometimes the amateurs on the Internet get it right.

Questions? Comments? I miss something? E-mail me at TNYFrontRow-at-gmail.com.