Gloria (1980)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I've watched it 3 times in the past 10 days. But I have to admit that when I saw it years back I didn't care for it much. It's funny how your viewpoint changes over the years. I'm just about sure that some of the critics here may also do the same as the years pass. However, most so-called 'critics' are so full of themselves anyway in my opinion.But what's not to love about the film? Directed by John Cassavetes, the music by Bill Conti, the lovely opening credits and artwork by Romare Bearden, the great NYC locations, etc. I love the opening sequence where the watercolor painting of night buildings dissolves into a real night scene and those two opening minutes of the fly over of New York and Yankee Stadium and as we see the Statue Of Liberty you can see that dawn is approaching with the sky lighting up. As the fly over continues under the Brooklyn Bridge then the shot of the bridge with Manhattan in the background and George Washington bridge in the lower part of the frame. And finally the camera pans to a day game at Yankee Stadium to zoom up on the bus approaching. I did spot a continuity glitch where the 3 teens are running toward the El and there's a crowd of people on the corner and when they show them running from the bus the crowd is missing. Big deal. One more comment before I go when they show Gloria and Phil at the cemetery and the scene slowly dissolves with the gravestones and laps into the bridge shot of NYC skyline and I thought how the skyscrapers seemed to symbolize the gravestones too. Life and death in the Naked City.I Love This Movie

You start with flinty, streetsmart gangster types, cross their paths with a little kid, put them in urban peril, and then you squeeze how things stack up for sentimentality, suspense and humor. It's a charming idea, and perhaps that's why this could be considered John Cassavetes's most conventional film. It tells the story of a gangster's girlfriend who goes on the run with a young boy who is being pursued by the mob for information he doesn't even know he might have. But he wants to tell the story his own way, obstructing every convention we would normally expect, instilling a realist perspective in how we follow the movie, making the pay-off that much more worthwhile. Cassavetes didn't intend to direct his script. He just wanted to sell the story to Columbia Pictures. But once his wife Gena Rowlands was asked to play Gloria, she obliged Cassavetes to direct it.This underdog crime drama is particularly absorbing in its first hour, and ignites with a great beginning. We follow one character, it leads to another character, perspectives are interknit, the situation builds and Cassavetes has complete control over what we know and expect, all in spite of the all-too-familiar premise, which is then set for the rest of the movie, which is a cat-and-mouse hunt per the seedier locales of New York and New Jersey. He makes the threat so real that when the two key characters evade tangible danger, we still feel the tension whenever they round a corner, get in and out of cabs, and other such ordinary actions. He doesn't let on that unwanted company is present. It just happens. There is one scene that lasts for quite awhile before we realize, after Rowlands's title character does, that unwanted company has been there the entire time.In an Oscar-nominated performance, Rowlands is expectedly the beautiful lead actress, but she sports a kind of masculine quality, creating a much more dense dynamic when she, afraid of her maternal instincts, finds them overpowering her lifelong self-preservation, and begrudgingly protects the boy. As the film progresses, however, she becomes more sincere in her protection, and integrates her love with her seasoned familiarity with how to stay alive in this town. In one creative take on the Fine, I Don't Need You Anyway scene, she asks a bartender, "There's reasons I can't turn and just look, but is there a little kid headed in here or across the street or whatever?" She drives her role with such honest irritable liveliness. Yet the kid is also well cast. He was a conspicuous little boy named John Adames with dark hair, big eyes and a way of trucking his dialogue as if confronting you to adjust a single word. It all works because everything about his character, the way he dresses, talks, revolts and moves, serves the naive notion that he is older, smarter and cooler than he is.Cassavetes has a natural keenness for guilelessly unadorned location shooting in that he never plans, stages, waits on the weather or time of day, or hires extras or stunt drivers. Note how passers-by in the distance will often look on at the characters, whether Gloria has pulled a gun in a public place or not. Wherever the characters need to be, that place is in real time, as dirty, scuzzy and purely of the film's era as it would've normally been. There's a shabby flophouse where the clerk tells Gloria, "Just pick a room. They're all open." There are bus stations, back alleys, dimly lit hallways, and bars that open at dawn. And his occasional action scenes are so thrilling because of their surprise.For once, Cassavetes doesn't stage indefinitely extensive scenes of dialogue wherein the actors indulge in their own view of their characters' unraveling. But I miss that. As I've already said, I am very impressed with how tightly he mounts suspense from the very beginning, how Gloria and the kid zip from cab to bus to cab to street to hotel to cab and so on. But regardless of how doggedly realistic he is in his portrayal of a recycled movie plot, he still relies upon that plot rather than the impositions of his characters flexing their wings.

What really made me pity this movie is its idea and what it got of elements. The Beauty and the Beast in the action genre.. Great, and that was before movies like (Léon - 1994) came out, but it seemed that a tornado of naivety hit the whole thing ruthlessly. It needed a lot and a lot and a lot to be a great movie. The dealing with the possible good material was highly provocative where some scenes deserved the laugh, because the writing (Gloria threatens the whole gang in a restaurant!), or the directing (the boy says : "I love you to death" while the camera is almost shooting only his forehead !!?), or the acting (The mafia men couldn't act, John Adames as the kid was unbearably awful = John Cassavetes's responsibility).Elaborately, It forces me to believe that its script had been written (read : fabricated) in 2 days, especially when it relies on the dialog to develop everything, and the dialog was too far-fetched to be logically possible. Also with matters like killing the family at the beginning which's my definition for horrible hastiness, or the end where it turns out that Gloria is Supergirl or the woman of steel, which's quite nothing in familiar flicks, but on the top of OTHER catastrophes here, it is pain barrier. I become so sick whenever I watch artistic movies that lack everything except the laziness, and proudly it brags with that in the name of novelty, realism, whatever. Here, the anguish is double because it's not a movie like that, it's an American thriller with different idea and a dull everything I suppose ! It looked as low as some Blaxploitation movies while it isn't one, it just took the worst of them.Some would say "It's a classic", and other would say "it's the worst ever" ! Actually it's a movie you can summarize its status by the irony between (Rowlands) who got an Oscar nomination for it, and (Adames) who got a Razzie nomination for It (and fairly won !), so IT WAS the Beauty and the Beast indeed ! And I ranked it as one of the worst Buddy-movies, if not the worst ever. Though, when I first watched it I was a kid (a freak kid who loves movies more than life!) so I loved it so much. In fact I think (Gena Rowlands)'s acting was impressive, she owned the role and the screen, if only that was through another script! The cinematography tried to be as non-Hollywood as it could be, I recall clever sequence with a running steadicam (in 1980) in which Gloria escapes with the kid from the restaurant, as a whole it managed to be somewhat harshly real yet through bad-made unreal story ! Plus it didn't add anything profound.. Unlike the music.(Gloria) as a movie, fails on the romantic level and sucks on the thrill level, but the music helps out to redeem both. Bill Conti handled it seriously more than anybody got involved in it. OH MY GOD, his music was like a diamond in the rough. No doubt it's bigger than the movie. It managed to give it a sublime soul, a touch of greatness, and wide shadows to the flat characters and fabricated events. Maybe Conti believed in the story and the movie to the utmost, or he didn't watch the movie but how he loves his work and uses to do it rightly ! Or maybe he did watch it so he was forced to lift it up and cover its faults. It created such a personality for the weak movie, that embodied the Latino background, the chase's feel, the rebellion sense of the title's character, and the passion between her and the kid; nearly all what the movie flopped at !. I think Conti was inspired by Yoakhen Rodrego's Concerto D'aranjuez, its spirit seems clear somewhat in the tunes. Anyhow, It's some catchy soundtrack that marked a movie with high quietly lacked it badly on so many levels. Sometimes, rare times, the music makes the glory of some movies, but Bill Conti just revived it, and donated it with some sensitive case or dramatic deepness, but it needed more and more to be as larger than life as its music.So take the soundtrack and remake (Gloria), I'm not kidding, (Gus Van Sant) sort of did it with (Bernard Herrmann)'s music through his (Psycho - 1999) but not to be like it, as a deformation for its original, because it can't stand more inferiority.

Gloria is riveting in its own weird way, but it's exactly because writer/director John Cassavetes doesn't want to play by the rules and make things very easy for the audience. His technique isn't as footloose and fancy free as in his other pictures like Faces and Killing of a Chinese Bookie (which maybe makes it slightly less gritty than those films), but considering that this is somewhat more of a higher-budgeted 'Hollywood' picture it certainly isn't entirely conventional. Which isn't to say that the formula doesn't sound as tried-before, because it does: a young kid possible see some bad things happening involving some gangsters and his family, and is protected by a neighbor, tough-talking, smoking', trigger-happy dame Gloria Swanson (yeah yeah, like the actress), and the two go on the run from the mobsters all over New York City.As with a film like Leon: The Professional, which had gender roles reversed and minus the assassin-tutoring, there's something to be said for the shattering of innocence through the act of murder. In the case of Gloria it's never really clear exactly that Phil's family is dead- he just knows, more or less, he can't get back home to them and has to stick with this lady he (more or less) loves kind of by default. It's a disturbing situation made more-so by how the behavior and conversations go between the uneasy and hard-boiled Gloria and this precocious but bright young Puerto Rican kid who has his father's 'book' the mob wants. Now, some of the plotting isn't always air-tight, and the whole significance of wanting to go to Pittsburgh remains fuzzy throughout.But there's an energy to the picture, something that keeps us wanting to see where these two will go, or how they'll get back together again if they're only momentarily separated by getting off the wrong subway train. It's slightly spiky mixing of melodrama and film-noir, and it has a lot more than I would ever think Cassavetes would be capable of as a genre director. But what makes the film more than just decent fare, or rather a fine but less-than-great diversion for the director, is his wife Rowlands as he title part. She's so good here, so bad-ass, so terribly mis-matched with this kid played by John Adames for all the right reasons for the story (who I can't decide yet was either very good or very bad in the part, or both), that any big story or character gaps can be forgiven. This is a story of paranoia as much as a chase for Cassavetes, and he pulls off this thrilling sensation of 'will they get away with this' than expected.Nowhere near a great film at all, but it's enjoyable and rollicking fun with a crazily impressive lead.