Gloria ***** (1980, Gena Rowlands, Buck Henry, Julie Carmen, John Adames) – Classic Movie Review 1,203

Gena Rowlands is superb as Gloria Swenson, a middle-aged Bronx blonde who sets out to protect a young Puerto Rican boy (John Adames) by trying to beat the Mob at their own nasty game in the 1980 crime film Gloria.

The exhilarating original 1980 version of Gloria is one of writer-director John Cassavetes’s most successful films that finds him unusually but profitably working in a crime thriller mainstream movie area. The film won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival, tying with Atlantic City.

It’s gloriously sustained by a stonkingly powerful, take-no-prisoners, career-best performance by Cassavetes’s real-life wife Gena Rowlands as Gloria Swenson, a middle-aged Bronx blonde who sets out to protect a young Puerto Rican boy called Phil Dawn (John Adames) by trying to beat the Mob at their own nasty game.

Rowlands’s character Gloria is a gangster’s ex-mistress now gone straight, who gets mixed up in a murderous Mafia stake-out when she goes to borrow coffee from a Puerto Rican pal. The six-year old boy’s family are all wiped out by the Mob because his mild-mannered Mob accountant Jack Dawn (Buck Henry) was planning to inform on them to the FBI. Gloria goes on the run with the boy, who is being hunted by the Mob for information he may or may not have.

Things don’t start out well because Phil’s just a kid, and Gloria’s a strange white woman who hates kids. But they have common enemies as they run both from the Mob and from the authorities who believe Gloria kidnapped Phil throughout New York City. Gloria has to come up with a plan to save both of them.

This is Cassavetes enjoying the rare luxury of being on a totally confident roll, in a unique movie where he’s not going to put a single step wrong. Cassavetes sharpens up an intense chase tale by his habitual documentary-style attention to detail and atmosphere, by pushing the story dynamically along, by giving the movie a scary feeling of visceral reality and especially by concentrating on the developing central relationship, going for the truth and avoiding any hints of easy sentimentality.

Rowlands was Oscar nominated as best actress and there’s no doubt that she should have won. Cassavetes planned merely to sell his screenplay, not to direct, but after his wife Rowlands was signed to play Gloria, she asked him to direct. Meanly and unfairly, Adames tied with Sir Laurence Olivier in The Jazz Singer for the Worst Supporting Actor Razzie award of 1980. It seems that Gloria isn’t the only one who hates kids.

Despite great word of mouth and reviews, it wasn’t super successful financially: budget of $4 million and box office of $4.9 million.

It was remade as Gloria in 1999 by Sidney Lumet, starring Sharon Stone.

Gena Rowlands died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease at her home in Indian Wells, California, on 14 August 2024, aged 94.

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands (June 19, 1930 – August 14, 2024).

Virginia Cathryn Rowlands (June 19, 1930 – August 14, 2024) is a four-time Emmy and two-time Golden Globe winner. Her work with her actor-director husband John Cassavetes in ten films includes A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and Gloria (1980), gaining her Oscar nominations as Best Actress.

She won the Berlin Silver Bear for Best Actress for Opening Night (1977) and is also remembered for Woody Allen’s Another Woman (1988), The Neon Bible (1995) and her son Nick Cassavetes’s film, The Notebook (2004),

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1,203

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