Opening Night

Stars: Gena Rowlands (Another Woman, Once Around, Night on Earth), Joan Blondell (Topper, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), Ben Gazarra (TV's "Run For Your Life"). The late actor/director John Cassavetes' dramas made during the 1970s are finally making their way to home video, with A Woman Under the Influence already out and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie due July 21. Opening Night stars Cassavetes' wife Gena Rowlands as Myrtle Gordon, a temperamental actress who's playing an aging woman in a Broadway play penned by Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell). Early on, Myrtle meets one of her biggest fans, a mysterious young girl who is hit by a car and killed. Haunted by her lost youth (as embodied in the dead girl), and enraged over her stage role as an older woman, Myrtle causes problems for her co-stars, the director (Ben Gazarra), the writer, the producer and, ultimately, the viewer. While rehearsing for weeks before a New Haven audience prior to opening in New York, Myrtle consistently changes her lines, walks out, and even seeks help from a spiritualist. Anyone with an ounce of sense would have realized that star or not, Myrtle was going to wreck the show. Rowlands' impeccable acting abilities notwithstanding, this meandering cycle is repeated over and over for over two hours, and Cassavetes, who was known as an "actor's director" (meaning he rarely used the term "cut") allows scenes that are dramatically going nowhere to play on and on and on. Anyone from the MTV generation will be outta here in 15 minutes max. Unfortunately--because there are some wonderful moments in the film. Audience: Cassavetes' fans and theatre goers.