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.

Hazards in Headline Writing

Not an image of Gena Rowlands in The Notebook.

Gena Rowlands died last week at the age of 94. She was perhaps best known for blazing trails in a series of films like “Faces” (1968) and “A Woman Under the Influence” (1974), an unmatched performer and a patron saint of American independent film. Or perhaps not. When news of her death first emerged, the headlines of numerous news outlets, like CBS and NBC and USA Today, deemed Rowlands as the star of “The Notebook (2004).” That was a nice film, a sweet film, a film to watch on your phone while you’re relaxing on the beach, but I mean, c’mon, this would be like deeming Parker Posey, who thankfully will never die, as the star of “You’ve Got Mail.” Many, including the actor Carrie Coon, took to the social media platform Still Referred to as Twitter to voice incredulity: “We lost Gena Rowlands,” wrote Coon, “but also our dignity, as headlines trumpet: actress from ‘The Notebook.’” This caused others to voice incredulity that Coon would knock a movie so many loved, and that was, in fact, directed by Rowlands’s son, Nick Cassavetes. Coon riposted further incredulity that people could not hold two truths at once. Indeed, the news outlets that mentioned both “The Notebook” and “A Woman Under the Influence” probably got it right; each one has a place. Maybe we just need copy editors to have a fuller grasp of film history.

The hullabaloo made me think of Sarah Vowell’s piece for This American Life in the 90s, eventually collected in her book “Take the Cannoli,” in which in advance of Frank Sinatra’s death she implored television networks to refrain from peppering their future Ol’ Blue Eyes obits with snippets of “My Way,” “the most obvious, unsubtle, disconcertingly-dictatorial chestnut in the old man’s vast and dazzling backlog,” an unworthy testament to the monumental singer’s career. (I know that when Bruce Springsteen dies, which he won’t, the television news networks will play “Born to Run,” of course, and that’s fine, even if I have always fantasized about them playing the first verse of “The Price You Pay” instead.) They did not heed her call. The dead might well be happier dead, as the esteemed philosopher Harry Lime once noted, but it’s only natural to want to properly honor the legacy of a mountain-mover like Rowlands. Or like Faye Dunaway, whenever her time comes, which I hope is not any time soon. 

Indeed, what this minor hubbub really did was reinforce my now semi-long-standing apprehensiveness in regard to Dunaway. The obituaries themselves will be fine, no doubt, as they were with Rowlands, but even if her own mountain-moving work was, I dare say, more universally known than that of Rowlands, it was so long ago that even if “Dunston Checks In” wasn’t enough of a box office hit to get cited, I can still imagine oblivious copy editors summarizing Faye Dunaway as “Hollywood star who read the wrong Best Picture winner at the 2017 Oscars.” If I see that in the headline - if I see that in the first paragraph of the eulogy - then there’s gonna be trouble.