Director John Cassavetes follows muse/spouse/leading lady Gena Rowlands as alcoholic Broadway actress, Myrtle Gordon, making a comeback in a play mirroring her own fears about aging. When an overzealous young fan is accidentally run over and killed right in front of Myrtle, it exacerbates her insecurities into near hysteria on opening night. Ben Gazzara is the play’s director trying to hold things together as his main star’s persona disintegrates as the evening progresses. Cassavetes appears as a supporting actor in the play, and veteran movie star Joan Blondell is the philosophical playwright. Director Cassavetes was beset by a critical backlash when Opening Night received its initial limited and sparsely-attended release in Los Angeles and New York. The following year 1978, the Berlin Film Festival bestowed its Silver Bear Award on Rowlands for Best Actress. It wasn’t until 1991, two years after Cassavetes’ death, that the film found wider distribution and experienced a critical rehabilitation.
“Gena Rowlands plays the role at perfect pitch” – Roger Ebert
“This is Cassavetes at his most complex and compelling. The air of ambiguity is palpable. The image is packed with possibility.” – Matthew Clayfield, Senses of Cinema
“Woody Allen said that he could watch a Bergman movie and feel himself gripped as if by a thriller; that’s how I felt watching this restored version of John Cassavetes’s 1977 picture Opening Night… It is both a psychological drama of eerie, internal strangeness, and a meditation on the enigma and loneliness of being beautiful.” – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
Read Dennis Lim’s essay for Criterion, Opening Night: The Play’s the Thing.
