Friday's Old Fashioned: Opening Night (1977)

“Opening Night”  blends a backstage farce with a backstage melodrama in the vein of “All About Eve.” But in straining those elements out, writer/director John Cassavetes proves to have concocted something altogether different and original, a rumination on performance, and the performer, all brought to life in an electrifying performance by Gena Rowlands who sometimes seems to deliberately let the seams of acting show and then, just as easily, make them disappear. She is Myrtle Gordon, a celebrated stage actress, but also a tormented alcoholic, and if in some moments Rowlands conveys steady elegance, in others, she is on the verge of emotional collapse, if not collapsing already. She is readying a new play in previews, but one requiring her to play a middle-aged woman, which as a middle-aged woman, gives her pause, terrified at being typecast for the rest of her life, underlined in how both her leading man (Cassavetes) and director (Ben Gazzara), with whom she’s had prior romantic entanglements, have broken those off, pointedly deeming their relationship “professional.” These worries are exacerbated when her car hits and kills a young adoring fan, an accident which she flees. What ensues, however, is less murder mystery than ghost story as the deceased girl’s visage haunts Myrtle like an apparition of her youth. 

It sounds dark, and it is, though it’s also surprising just how much “Opening Night” opts for something unexpectedly liberating as Myrtle seeks to literally exorcise the apparition all while rebelling against the play, and the director, and the playwright (Joan Blondell), and all of it building, as the title suggests, to opening night. You might recall that the fourth-season finale of Larry David’s HBO comedy “Curb Your Enthusiasm” was also called Opening Night, in that case referring to the overriding storyline of David starring as himself in a stage production of “The Producers.” It initially goes awry when David panics and forgets his lines, only to save the day by essentially breaking the fourth wall, segueing into a standup comedy routine, winning the crowd’s approval, and then segueing back into the show. I don’t know if David had or has ever seen “Opening Night,” but I could not stop thinking about how in its own unlikely way, that climax echoes Myrtle’s climactic first show moment in which she tears up the play in the middle of itself and makes something else by drawing on the play and her own past and present, living the role by refusing to forget herself.