The American Cinematheque's "Greatest Hits, 1993-1998," a summer series of reprises, continues Friday at Raleigh Studio with a program devoted to a sampling of the early television work of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. The series offers a splendid chance to catch up with fine films you may have missed when the Cinematheque first screened them.
First screened two years ago are two episodes from the highly regarded but short-lived "Johnny Staccato" TV series (1959-60) that were directed by Cassavetes, who also starred as a Manhattan jazz pianist-gun for hire. They're much closer in look and style to Cassavetes' 1962 "Too Late Blues," a studio-made B drama with a jazz background than to the gritty, highly personal, semi-improvised "Shadows" (1960), which he financed with his "Staccato" earnings and which launched his career as a major and distinctive independent filmmaker.
What's intriguing about the two "Staccato" episodes that were available for preview--both involve men dangerously obsessed by women, one played by Elisha Cook Jr., the other by Walter Burke--is that as well-directed as they are, you could actually imagine them working equally well as radio dramas.
Cassavetes teamed with Rowlands, his wife, in the 1965 Kraft Suspense Theater "Won't It Ever Be Morning?," in which Rowlands plays a jazz singer who's terrific on stage but who must struggle to express herself when a lawyer (Cassavetes) puts her on the stand in defense of her devoted manager (Jack Klugman), wrongly accused of murder.
There will be a Spanish-language double feature of first-time films at 9:30 p.m. Alfonso Cuaron's 1990 "Love in the Time of Hysteria" is a wonderfully risque sex farce in which we meet a handsome young Mexico City advertising copy writer (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), an incorrigible Don Juan. Suspense quickly builds as Cuaron deftly places a classic screwball comedy in a contemporary context with deadly serious implications.
For those of us who missed it when it was screened as part of the Cinematheque's 1997 edition of its annual "Recent Spanish Cinema" survey, Iclar Bollain's 1995 "Hi, Are You Alone?" proves to be a real treat. At the opening of the film, Nina (Silke), an attractive young woman of 20, is found in bed with a young man by her irate father, who forbids her to continue the relationship and orders her to spend more time working with him in his shop. This propels Nina onto a two-month adventure with her best friend Trini (Candela Pena).
