1978 Cut! (Also playing: 1976 Original Theatrical Cut)
Starring frequent collaborators Ben Gazzara and Seymour Cassel and based on an idea he developed with Martin Scorsese, Cassavetes’ unforgettable neo-noir is the tale of a strip-club owner pressured by gangland thugs into murdering a stranger.
After originally releasing a 135-minute version, Cassavetes responded to humdrum box office and negative reviews by trimming almost 30 minutes to put out this more widely seen 108-minute cut two years later. Opinions differ on which version is better, but in honor of Cassavetes' stress-inducing, underseen noir's 50th anniversary, we’re presenting both cuts, letting you make up your mind on these two very different takes on a beloved genre from one of independent cinema's greatest masters.
In what other film would a waitress from famed post-hippie L.A. restaurant The Source take her morning break next door to audition for Ben Gazzara’s bizarro performance-art strip club? When his high-flying lifestyle owes debts to a sinister syndicate (led by Seymour Cassel and a wonderfully mushy Timothy Carey), he’s given a tough choice: knocking off a Chinese “bookie” or losing his beloved theatre.
Cassavetes renders all of this with a hallucinatory eye, subverting genre conventions with his unsettled rhythms and a sweetly absurdist tone. Likewise, Gazzara perfectly embodies the fractured, contradictory persona of a character as much filled with frailty and vice as he is with ambition and integrity.
"A movie about a testy, outsider artist and his gang of misfit collaborators, the John Cassavetes biopic once-removed." -WBUR