Good movies are timeless. Or they feel so. Sometimes this is because their subject is universal and it does not really matter what epoch the action is set in. In some other cases the quality of the story and of the acting make the period irrelevant. A good example is 'Gloria', a film made in 1980 by director (and actor) John Cassavetes about whom I knew very little before seeing this film. And yet, 'Gloria' is a gangster movies that keeps the interest of viewers all over the two hours of screen time and looks new and fresh, despite having been filmed almost 40 years ago.The subject of the film will look familiar, as later movies like Luc Besson's 'Léon' have dealt with the theme of gangsters involved folks meeting and befriending kids, and melting to humanity in the course of the story. 'Gloria' however included from start a big twist. The lead adult hero is a woman, the ex-girlfriend of one of the mob chiefs, who witnesses the murder of the family of a six years old kid (her neighbor) who has nobody left to care about him and no place to go. Taking him under her protection means placing her in conflict with the mob (as the kid holds an accounting book with compromising mafia secrets) and with the law (she is believed to have kidnapped the kid). What follows is a few days of running from everybody and fighting for survival in the New York of 1980.The New York in the film is a city that looks so familiar: the streets (much dirtier and more dangerous), the buildings (combining modern and decrepit), the skyline (with the painful silhouettes of the twin towers), the people who look so much the same as the diverse human landscape of the big city we know. The only major thing that seems to have changed is the value of the dollar. It may be as difficult as 40 years ago to change a 100 dollars bill, but two dollars fifty cents would not be sufficient nowadays for any room in a city hotel, probably not even for a tip in any city hotel. The other ingredient that makes the film interesting is the excellent acting performance of Gena Rowlands who partners with the young John Adames, a kid actor who did not grow into an adult actor. She is vulnerable as a woman who does not like kids (her cat is collateral damage in the first minutes of the film) and has a troubled past, yet strong as she knows the language and manners of the crime world and how to survive it. The ending is a little disappointing, unexpectedly conventional for such a film that is so non-conventional from many points of view, but this does not spoil too much the good impression left by this fresh classic.

This is the film Cassavetes did for Hollywood bossmen after the debacle of Opening Night. While it is far from his norm - it has music cues and a score, a gangster plot with a few shootouts - aren't we better off that he had the opportunity to go out with a camera that year and not sit around in dismay? Cherish it, he had only one more left.It is his most straightforward and probably written in a haste, crude in spots, about an ex-mafia moll and a little kid running from gangsters around New York. It wouldn't be out of place in a double bill with Don Siegel really, or not that much.It actually casts light on another side of Cassavetes, less talked about. One was of course the visionary swimmer into streams of soul, tossing and turning in search of a true face.. Another was the actor who took odd paying jobs, wearing a variety of faces to finance that vision when he got back, very much like Welles whom he admired. He had done all sorts, many that were crime stuff on and off TV. Adored Cagney.We have deliberate reference of all those gangster films of old here, gumshoes and broads stuff, Rowlands as female Bogart (she calls other women dames), in turns snarling at bad guys and coolly walking away, waving it all off as dream. But this isn't that cocksure type film; this is about dreams, hopes, frayed nerves.The little boy salvaged from a gangster plot is the center that keeps pulling her back, summoning more of her gangster past around her, including finally the lover she never made it with. You can see how in longer Cassavetes form we would have uncertain life as this woman floats around bars and odd rooms and contrasts with being pulled back to a role she left behind, pulled to get out of it. Chinese Bookie comes to mind. That would have been tremendous to see but we have something else. All of the cool stuff are anachronistic at this point, not really draped with a sense of cool, which is a fashion sense. Cassavetes wouldn't know cool from a bar of soap really, lovable dunce that he was, so it comes out on the other side of the familiar posturing in an unselfconscious way.It's all abit like Rowlands' clothing (foisted on her by Cassavetes). That red kimono would have been fabulous in Rita Hayworth times but looks a bit out of place now, odd. Ditto Rowlands' tough expressions, as if propped up with some effort. This is all far from where the likes of Tarantino and Besson, who grew up in movies, would take these things to iron them out. You can watch this and see how that would play out.There's a weariness without sentimentality here that seeps in through an open window somewhere in this room that you've found yourself in for the night. A sense of not having much more time for masks and that whole posturing where you have to be someone. This is tied in that sweet exchange about "beating the system" between her and boy. People usually don't, but maybe some do, who knows? Who really cares about a system?Underneath it all there's a marvelous sense of wandering that I find myself giving into always in movies; it seems we go everywhere in New York. Underneath the worn fabrics, this is one about the (existential) body that must wear them, about weight that doesn't manage to hold you down. The sublime point as ever with Cassavetes is not giving up.

An important entry in the list of gritty 1970s films (released 1980) that served as a counterpoint to anodyne plastic schlock available in the mainstream.Gloria herself is a metaphor for New Yorkers - complaisant in the crumbling of the city around them, existing in an uneasy complicity with the forces of corruption, and bolting herself into an apartment that vainly attempts to keep the decrepitude of the Bronx at bay.Ms. Rowlands does a workmanlike job. She shines at moments when depicting ferocity in confronting mobsters with a gun in her hand; but at other times, she is less convincing in showing that she is conflicted about continuing to protect the child whom she takes in at its father's behest, moments before he and the rest of the family are liquidated by the mob.Her work would have been easier if the script had been more coherent. At one point the two protagonists take refuge in an apartment, huge and luxe, without any apparent explanation of whose it is or how Gloria has the key. It would help if so much of the dialog were not inaudible. Full marks to Cassavetes for trying for authentic sound, but there are moments when we wish he could have looped a few lines that sound as if they were recorded in the next room by someone coughing through a cushion.Ultimately, the star of this movie is the Bronx itself, shown at the depths of the Dinkins administration. The flaking paint and dingy lighting of decaying hallways and stairwells; potholed streets and shuttered stores. New Yorkers will value this film for the hugely evocative portrayal of the city as she was, when she was on her knees. Thirty years later, recession or not, New York City is a different world.

Gena Rowlands is Gloria, a friend of the mob in New York City. She lives in a shabby Bronx apartment house and is entertaining the six-year-old son of a neighboring family, John Adames, when the rest of the family -- a miscast Buck Henry as an FBI informant, his succulent Puerto Rican wife, their daughter, and their wizened abuelita -- are blown away by the goon squad. They need to kill Adames too. Those are the rules.The uncertain and somewhat guilty Rowlands, who hates kids, takes off with him. They are pursued from hotel to hotel, from train station to subway, by hit men. Gloria is a tough babe, though, and is always quickest on the draw, though rarely more than one step ahead of her executioners.It's hardly an unfamiliar armature. An urban person who has no use for children is suddenly saddled with one and must take care of him or her. In the course of many tribulations, they bond. The now-humanized rogue rides into the sunset with his new companion. Charlie Chaplin's "The Kid" is one of the more entertaining examples.This film, though, was directed by John Cassavetes, famous for his mostly improvised and impeccably dull slices of life. Please, God -- no more Zorbas.This is Cassavetes' most structured and conventional movie and, like Orson Welles' "The Stranger," it mostly succeeds in its attempted mixture of poetry and commercialism.Let me get the weaknesses out of the way. First of all, the Mafia not only want to blow away Buck Henry and his family; they also want the black notebook he's been keeping, the one labeled "MacGuffin." And Henry gives the book to his little BOY and tells him to keep it? Why? Almost all of the dialog sounds written and rehearsed but some is clearly made up on the spot. The impromptu lines come from the kid, which is a shame. It's bad enough that little Adames can't act, but for Cassavetes to urge him to improvise dialog almost turns into child abuse, especially when it comes out like, "Good-bye, you sucker, you little insect." And Buck Henry as the terrified family man about to squeal on the Mafia. How did he get the role? And the climactic scene has Adames running -- in slow motion -- towards an open-armed Rowland while the score tells us this is a happy ending, just in case we missed it.So much for the bad stuff. The rest is quirky -- and I don't mean that negatively. I'll just give examples from two scenes.(1) The mob shows up at Buck Henry's apartment and the halls echo with shotgun blasts. (Cassavetes doesn't show us the killings, just the family sitting around waiting to be slaughtered.) Now, in an "ordinary" action movie, the echoes would no sooner have died down than we would hear police sirens in the background. Not here. The hoods take their time poking around Henry's apartment while looking for the little black book. No hurry, folks. The police response time here is geared to reality, not to movie conventions.(2) Gloria barely manages to sneak out of another apartment house with the kid and the MacGuffin and must make a quick escape before the hit men reach her. In most movies, the pursued runs into the street, yells "Taxi!", and a cab screeches to an immediate halt in front of him. Or maybe there's one already waiting at the curb. Here, she calls out furiously and waves her hand and the taxis whiz by as they do in real life.Adames is no actor, as I've said, but at least he's not cute in any stereotypical way. And he never cries. The sentimentality is kept within reasonable bounds. Gena Rowlands is aging but still beautiful, even when cheaply made up and wearing sleazy pleated skirts and jackets that look like some kind of polyester or fake silk. She's thoroughly deglamorized, as she should be -- not old, but worn and a little frayed around the edges like a library book that has been checked out often. In the bad old days, Barbara Stanwyck could have waltzed through this part.Rowlands is from Wisconsin, though, and it shows in her speech. ("Cooled" instead of "cold.") It doesn't sound right when she attempts a New York accent but it doesn't exactly sound wrong either. It's kind of like a comfortable Mid-western pasture that's been littered with garbage and flaps of raggedy paper and planted with graffiti-laden signs.Boy, did Cassavetes have an eye for locations. Who else would have shot a scene of Newark's Penn Station IN Newark's Penn Station? The place isn't appallingly seedy, nor is it as clean and rococo as Moscow. It has nothing like Grand Central's Oyster Bar. It's simply uninteresting.I wish -- come to think of it -- that Cassavetes' script had been a little more taut, more thought-out and convincing, where the central relationship between Rowlands and Adames is concerned. The exchanges alternate between spiteful barbs and little understated caresses and are at no point believable.Still, this is an original work and well worth catching.