Cassavetes wrote this as a screenplay for sale, offered it to Peter Bogdanovich to direct, but he said Cassavetes 'was the only one who could make its complicated dualities work'. (Do you think that was a nice way of saying 'Yeah, not really my cup of tea, thanks'? But in a way, it's a variation on Paper Moon.) Peter notes that it subverts the usual gangster genre picture in that the attractive woman is both the strongest and most compassionate person in it - certainly when she starts blasting away at hoods in a car, it's something of a (pleasant) shock.
Gena Rowlands is tough and occasionally tender, John Adames is fine as the kid. (When he says things like 'I don't know what's going on', or 'I want to play stickball', it breaks your heart.) It's a nightmare in a film - they are perpetually on the run, pursued. That's surely an early use of Steadicam in the (brilliant) subway scenes. New York then looks unfriendly. (It's funny to think how Peter and his crew would have been filming They All Laughed there at much the same time.)
Buck Henry is the only other actor I recognised.
Benefits from a good and melancholy score from Bill Conti. Photographed by Fred Schuler (Arthur, The King of Comedy), edited by George Villasenor.
That is the film noir actor tough-guy Lawrence Tierney as 'Broadway Bartender' (he is in Reservoir Dogs too). NO relative to Gene.
Gena's pronounced 'Jenna' apparently. She received an Oscar nomination for this (lost to Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter) and A Woman Under the Influence, also directed by Cassavetes.
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