{"id":1258,"date":"2012-02-04T18:09:30","date_gmt":"2012-02-05T00:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1258"},"modified":"2012-02-04T18:09:30","modified_gmt":"2012-02-05T00:09:30","slug":"in-memoriam-ben-gazzara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1258","title":{"rendered":"In Memoriam: Ben Gazzara"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Ben Gazzara died on Friday, at the age of eighty-one. He\u2019s one of the very greatest of film actors; he\u2019ll be remembered for just a handful of roles, out of the one hundred thirty-three listed in IMDb, but those are among the very summits of movie history. I\u2019m thinking, in particular, of his three films with John Cassavetes: \u201cHusbands,\u201d \u201cThe Killing of a Chinese Bookie,\u201d and \u201cOpening Night. In them (especially the first two) he plays varieties of himself, as Cassavetes saw him: the moderate man who loses his head and takes immoderate action. \u201cHusbands,\u201d in particular, finds Gazzara accomplishing one of the most astonishing, and moving, feats ever filmed: he steals a movie from Cassavetes and Peter Falk.<\/p>\n

Cassavetes constructed the movie not around a script (though there was one) but around the three actors (and said that \u201cthe combination of three impossible people verging on lunacy appealed to me\u201d); he pitched the project to Gazzara by shouting it at him across the Universal lot, and sold it to him definitively by screening \u201cFaces\u201d for him. As it turned out, \u201cHusbands\u201d is organized around Gazzara\u2019s character, Harry, an advertising man; he and two of his three best friends go on a two-day bender after the funeral of their fourth friend, and Gazzara\u2019s character\u2014whom Cassavetes often accidentally called \u201cBen\u201d while the camera was running\u2014feels himself being closed out from the intimacy of the other two. He gives the movie its big emotional kicks\u2014as in the famous vomiting-in-the-bathroom scene, when he challenges Archie (Falk) to a fight, roaring, \u201cNobody calls me a phony!\u201d Cassavetes said (in Ray Carney\u2019s \u201cCassavetes on Cassavetes\u201d),<\/p>\n

Gazzara\u2019s character was continually frozen out by me and Falk\u2014and Benny was really getting personally paranoid about it. In a three-person relationship there\u2019s always one guy on the outside, and during the picture, Benny was usually it. It was amazing to watch the turmoil, to encourage it, to feed the battle that was raging\u2026<\/p>\n

With that sense of the outsider\u2014the moderate-minded, less-crazy outsider\u2014who faces his emotions for seemingly the first time, Gazzara erupts and delivers what is perhaps the founding moment in modern bromance: when, in another bar, he tells Archie and Gus (Cassavetes) (I approximate the dialogue from memory), \u201cAside from sex\u2014and my wife is very good at it\u2014I like you guys better,\u201d and follows it with the inevitable (but, for 1970, still jolting), \u201cGus, I love you,\u201d and \u201cArchie, I love you\u201d\u2014followed by a big wet kiss on Archie\u2019s cheek, and the also-inevitable defensive (and offensive) jokes about being, i.e, not being, gay.<\/p>\n

Gazzara also has the movie\u2019s most terrifying and ugly scene, which is also its decisive one\u2014he returns to his house on Long Island, where he has a furious fight with his wife; he hits her, grabs his passport, and storms out of the house, vowing never to return. Harry decides to go to London, and coaxes his two friends to join him there on a freewheeling jaunt\u2014and, once there, it\u2019s his fragile state of mind\u2014and lusty pursuit of sexual vengeance\u2014that focusses his friends\u2019 attention and governs the action. In short, he\u2019s the core of a movie that\u2019s at the core of the modern cinema, even of the modern psyche.<\/p>\n

The movies are full of actors who bring joyful energy to larger-than-life heroes and others who plausibly, even movingly, embody the trimmer contours of ordinary people. Gazzara did that rarest of things: he invested an utterly regular guy and everyday person with terrifyingly intense, sudden, and grand emotions; he bound together stylish nobility and selfish voracity, exquisite tenderness and animal rawness. What he didn\u2019t do was look at his actions in the inner mirror; he came of age before the era of self-criticism, which may be why, as a performer, he seemed to age faster than others who were only a little younger\u2014and why his image has, justly, remained both titanic and untouchable, an object of nostalgia and of menace.<\/p>\n

Cassavetes died in 1989; Falk died last year; Gazzara, the last man, is gone now, too.