John Cassavetes Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann

Critical Essay by Stanley Kauffmann

[Minnie and Moskowitz] is by far John Cassavetes' worst film, with none of the good touches of Faces, without even any of the pseudo inquiry of Husbands. Guess what the theme is. Two lonely people! Misfits! Who find each other!! Even Chayefsky gave up this facile honesty twenty years ago.

He's a Very Human car-park in New York. But not just a carpark, of course; he's really searching. He searches on out to L.A. where he meets this Very Human girl. She, too, is searching, can't communicate, is a sexual object to men who merely use her, and is battered by life but is still golden, deep down inside. (p. 24)

Cassavetes boasts that his film is an "upper." What's chiefly wrong with it is that you know from the beginning that it was made to be an upper. A down-beat ending would by no means be the only truthful...
(read more)