Wednesday, July 17 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ
Directed by John Cassavetes • 1971
One year after the release of the revelatory and difficult Husbands, John Cassavetes continued his ongoing studies in machismo with his unsteadying take on the screwball comedy, Minnie and Moskowitz. Cassavetes, no stranger to courtship or domesticity, cast his wife and closest collaborator Gena Rowlands as a woman under the gaze of his deranged men. Museum curator Minnie Rippon (Gena Rowlands), a great appreciator of beauty (and a great example of it) removes her cartoonishly oversized sunglasses at the museum and at the cinema, where she can fully immerse herself in the fantasy and artifice of picture-perfect movie love. After a lifetime of romantic disappointment, she feels resigned to what she’s grown to accept as reality (did Ingrid Bergman have to navigate the same world?). In an astonishing monologue, a wine-drunk Minnie proclaims movies to be a “conspiracy,” explaining to her equally hopeless and clueless friend that she “…never met a Charles Boyer. I never met a Humphrey Bogart.” She has a string of violent encounters with suitors who admit to envying and objectifying her, without particularly liking or even knowing her (“…if I could find someone…it could be you…it could be someone that would have your qualities…that if I touched her hand she would not pull it away, if you know what I mean.”) Parking attendant Moskowitz (Seymour Cassell), the least bad of the bunch, is no charmer; he’s uncouth and forceful; he may come to her rescue, but she never escapes a scene of chaos unscathed. But he sweeps her off her feet (literally). To the well-bred and emotionally repressed Minnie, he is an absolute original, and the closest thing she’s found to a lover in a while. He may not be Charles Boyer, but he exists, and he likes the movies too. (RIN)
114 min • Universal Pictures • 35mm from Universal
Preceded by: “D’ Fightin’ Ones” (Friz Freleng, 1961) – 7 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: The Jackie Robinson Story on Wednesday, July 24 at NEIU
