The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (363 page)

Mickey
(Philip André)
Rourke
, b. Schenectady, New York, 1956
It’s a fond touch in Francis Coppola’s
The Rainmaker
(97) that Mickey Rourke should play the master lawyer, the boss on the lam, reached by phone, but living in splendid ease on some tropic island. For Mickey Rourke has rather “gone away,” leaving us to marvel over what happened to this glorious, rebellious kid actor, so tempted by silly sexual showoff, by the idea of becoming a boxer, and just being difficult, out of reach. He could come again. The guy one sees in
The Rainmaker
could still be waiting for his right moment, the big role, the unequivocal revelation that he has always been in charge.

He is the kind of guy who has tried nearly every oddball occupation you can think of, and that fringe feeling has frequently showed in his knowing, amused eyes. He carries knowledge with him, and he has a panache, a wintry humor, that is not common in actors of his generation. He made his debut in
1941
(79, Steven Spielberg);
Fade to Black
(80, Vernon Zimmerman); as a character named Nick Ray in
Heaven’s Gate
(80, Michael Cimino); the arson expert in
Body Heat
(81, Lawrence Kasdan); as Boogie in
Diner
(82, Barry Levinson);
Eureka
(83, Nicolas Roeg); brilliant in
Rumblefish
(83, Coppola);
The Pope of Greenwich Village
(84, Stuart Rosenberg);
Year of the Dragon
(85, Cimino); and then, in his greatest hit, the movie that made him a cult object in some countries and an undying idiot in other people’s eyes,
9½ Weeks
(86, Adrian Lyne).

He was the private eye in
Angel Heart
(87, Alan Parker); Irish in
A Prayer for the Dying
(87, Mike Hodges); Charles Bukowski in
Barfly
(87, Barbet Schroeder); an ex-fighter in
Homeboy
(88, Michael Seresin); to Italy, as Assisi’s saint, in the ridiculous
Francesco
(89, Liliana Cavani);
Johnny Handsome
(89, Walter Hill); getting back to chic sex in
Wild Orchid
(90, Zalman King); in the old Bogart role in
Desperate Hours
(90, Cimino);
Harley Davidson & the Marlboro Man
(91, Simon Wincer);
White Sands
(92, Roger Donaldson); opposing Jean-Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman in
Double Team
(97, Tsui Hark).

It was not encouraging that he had to do
Love in Paris
(97, Anne Goursaud), a kind of child of
9½ Weeks; Point Blank
(97, Matt Earl Beesley);
Buffalo ’66
(98, Vincent Gallo); a priest in
Thicker Than Blood
(98, Richard Pearce);
Thursday
(98, Skip Woods);
Shades
(99, Erik Van Looy). By the time of
Shergar
(99, Dennis C. Lewiston), a daft piece of Irishness about a great horse, it looked as if he had had plastic surgery—or the IRS had caught up with him. Whatever, he seems less given to smirking or frowning:
Animal Factory
(00, Steve Buscemi);
Get Carter
(00, Stephen Kay);
The Pledge
(01, Sean Penn);
The Follow
(s) (01, Wong Kar-Wai);
Picture Claire
(01, Bruce McDonald);
They Crawl
(01, John Allardice);
Spun
(02, Jonas Åkerlund);
Masked and Anonymous
(03, Larry Charles);
Once Upon a Time in Mexico
(03, Robert Rodriguez);
Man on Fire
(04, Tony Scott).

Well, I like comebacks, and I shall be happy to see Mickey Rourke live a long and calm life. But I am not of the opinion that the world, his being, or his nature turned with
The Wrestler
(08, Darren Aronofsky), a wretched, interminable film over which anyone who once loved Mickey Rourke’s quickness must have been turning in their premature graves. Yes, he was nominated for an Oscar, and he might have won it. But
The Wrestler
, it seemed to me, only extended his decline—you have to place it in this list:
Sin City
(05, Rodriguez and Frank Miller);
Domino
(05, Scott);
Stormbreaker
(06, Geoffrey Sax);
Killshot
(09, John Madden);
The Informers
(09, Gregor Jordan);
Iron Man 2
(10, Jon Favreau).

Russell Rouse
(1916–87), b. New York
1951:
The Well
(codirected with Leo Popkin). 1952:
The Thief
. 1954:
Wicked Woman
. 1955:
New York Confidential
. 1956:
The Fastest Gun Alive
. 1957:
House of Numbers
. 1959:
Thunder in the Sun
. 1964:
A House Is Not a Home
. 1965:
The Oscar
. 1966:
The Caper of the Golden Bulls
.

Rouse was a mysterious privateer, whose handful of films are all trembling with some crazy ingenuity: in
The Well
, the girl who can save a black from being lynched is—guess where?
The Thief
has no speech. Why?—to show that it can be done.
House of Numbers
has Jack Palance playing twins, one inside San Quentin, the other outside, although the plot has them back and forth like a tennis rally.
Thunder in the Sun
is about a wagon train of gypsies. While
The Caper of the Golden Bulls
is a robbery story that reaches its climax in the running of the bulls in Pamplona. This blatant originality is surely due to Rouse, who wrote most of his scripts with Clarence Greene. Their partnership also wrote films for others to direct, and they were the authors of the inspired story and script for
D.O.A
. (50, Rudolph Maté), recycled for the far less gripping
Color Me Dead
(69, Eddie Davis).

Gena
(Virginia Cathryn)
Rowlands
, b. Madison, Wisconsin, 1930
She was of Welsh descent, the daughter of a man who would be a state assemblyman and a state senator, and of a serious amateur painter. But, compelled by some mysterious emotional crisis in the family, she dropped out of the University of Wisconsin and went to New York, to the American Academy of Dramatic Art (she would drop out of that, too). But it was there, in the early 1950s, that she met John Cassavetes. He would later say: “She and I have friction in terms of lifestyle and taste. We agree in taste on nothing. She thinks so totally opposite to anything I could ever conceive!”

The perfect recipe? They were married in 1954, and they were married still at his death in 1989. She was his actress; he was her director. And in the intense atmosphere of the extended Cassavetes family, those assignments were not always too closely examined in terms of wisdom. They were essential, and Gena Rowlands was wife, mother, and general provider for the cast and crew on their films. That doesn’t mean that they necessarily found too many ways to agree. In life as much as in matters of taste, Cassavetes was a wishful liberal who actually imposed a kind of tyranny on his followers. It was the only way, and surely American film needed their contrary example.

Still, the thought persists that Gena Rowlands was not just the greatest talent in the group, but one thatmight have gone otherways. I daresay she is now the only one who might admit that story—but to speak it out loud would be to defy so many sacrifices and so much of their family tradition.

But she was a young beauty, who rather modeled herself on Dietrich, and who was very serious about the theatre. She had had an understudy role in
The Seven Year Itch
on Broadway, and when Eva Marie Saint proved unavailable (because of new motherhood), Joshua Logan cast Rowlands opposite Edward G. Robinson in Paddy Chayefsky’s
Middle of the Night
(54). She gave a stunning performance, but even then she advanced slowly, in part because of her family duties. But she did get some Hollywood work:
The High Cost of Loving
(58, José Ferrer);
Lonely Are the Brave
(62, David Miller);
The Spiral Road
(62, Robert Mulligan). She attracted a lot of attention with her role as the deaf-mute Teddy Carella in the TV series
87th Precinct
(61–62). She also had a supporting part in her husband’s career disaster,
A Child Is Waiting
(63, Cassavetes), and roles in
Tony Rome
(67, Gordon Douglas) and
Machine Gun McCain
(68, Giuliano Montaldo), with Cassavetes.

And so it was 1968—when she was thirty-eight—that she appeared in
Faces
(Cassavetes). Her performance in that film, and in several that followed, were widely hailed. She would get two Academy Award nominations for her husband, which surely helped his films at the box office. But notice how seldom, in fact, she worked, as he struggled to put pictures together:
Minnie and Moskowitz
(71); Mabel Longhetti, with Peter Falk, in
A Woman Under the Influence
(74);
Opening Night
(77);
Gloria
(80);
Love Streams
(84), by which time she was fifty-four.

Gradually, over the years, she did a few other things, but often within the extended family: an episode of
Columbo
(75);
Two Minute Warning
(76, Larry Peerce), with Cassavetes;
The Brink’s Job
(78, William Friedkin); and a few TV movies. They did
Tempest
(82, Paul Mazursky) together, and she was with Ben Gazzara in the pioneering TV movie about AIDS,
An Early Frost
(85, John Erman). She had the title role in
The Betty Ford Story
(87, David Greene); she was the mother in
Light of Day
(87, Paul Schrader); and she did
Another Woman
(88, Woody Allen). But by the time Cassavetes died, she was sixty.

She has worked much harder since, often on TV, and she is regarded with universal fondness. But it is hard for that actress to get great parts:
Once Around
(91, Lasse Hallström);
Night on Earth
(91, Jim Jarmusch);
Ted & Venus
(91, Bud Cort);
Silent Cries
(93, Anthony Page);
Something to Talk About
(95, Hallström);
The Neon Bible
(95, Terence Davies);
Unhook the Stars
(96, Nick Cassavetes, her son);
She’s So Lovely
(97, N. Cassavetes);
Paulie
(98, John Roberts);
Hope Floats
(98, Forest Whitaker);
The Mighty
(98, Peter Chelsom);
Playing by Heart
(98, Willard Carroll);
The Weekend
(99, Brian Skeet);
The Color of Love: Jacey’s Story
(00, Sheldon Larry);
Wild Iris
(01, Daniel Petrie);
Charms for the Easy Life
(01, Joan Micklin Silver);
The Incredible Mrs. Ritchie
(03, Paul Johansson);
The Notebook
(04, Nick Cassavetes);
Taking Lives
(04, D. J. Caruso);
The Skeleton Key
(05, Iain Softley); with Gazzara in an episode for
Paris, Je T’Aime
(06, Gérard Depardieu);
Broken English
(07, Zoe Cassavetes); on TV in
What If God Were the Sun?
(07, Stephen Tolkin).

Alan Rudolph
, b. Los Angeles, 1943
1977:
Welcome to L.A
. 1979:
Remember My Name
. 1980:
Roadie
. 1982:
Endangered Species
. 1983:
Return Engagement
(d). 1984:
Choose Me; Songwriter
. 1985:
Trouble in Mind
. 1987:
Made in Heaven
. 1988:
The Moderns
. 1990:
Love at Large
. 1991:
Mortal Thoughts
. 1993:
Equinox
. 1994:
Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle
. 1997:
Afterglow
. 1999:
Breakfast of Champions
. 2000:
Trixie
. 2001:
Investigating Sex
. 2002:
The Secret Lives of Dentists
.

Old-school auteurists could go crazy with Rudolph—it would be a good graduate-school film-studies exam question to require a paper that vindicates every Rudolph film and fits it into the scheme of l’oeuvre. Escaped auteurists can just say with glee (and relief) that the man is constitutionally unpredictable.

Let us suppose, in addition, that Rudolph is affected by the company he keeps.
Remember My Name
had Robert Altman as its producer—but Rudolph did the script. It had a great score by Alberta Hunter, and it was an early example of Rudolph’s taste for unexpected casting calls: Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, Alfre Woodard, Jeff Goldblum, and Berry Berenson. The result is a picture securely, if not sanely, placed within the deranged vision of its heroine. It is also a movie that reminds one of the marvel of the late seventies: acerbic, lyrical, independent, yet faithful to a southern California that Hollywood now tries to ignore.

The Moderns
is Rudolph at his most literary and artificial; there are moments when one can believe the film was made by Nabokov and Charlie Parker after seeing
F for Fake
. In fact, Rudolph had Jon Bradshaw as his writer, and yet another amazing cast: Keith Carradine did seem capable of the paintings; Linda Fiorentino and John Lone made flesh out of notional roles; Chaplin and Geneviève Bujold were very funny; and Kevin O’Connor was the screen’s best-ever Hemingway. Even Wallace Shawn was tolerable. Along the way,
The Moderns
was a glorious joke about creative reputation, a vivid pastiche of period bohemianism, and so alive a film it trembled with views, hints, glances, and possibilities.

In addition, Rudolph has made some of the most unwatchable films to be signed by a first-class director:
Songwriter, Trouble in Mind, Made in Heaven
, and
Love at Large. Choose Me
is that rarity for the director, a film with good and bad. But
Mortal Thoughts
seemed to mark a step forward. At last, Rudolph seemed to understand mainstream entertainment. The structure was intricate and perhaps overly indicative of the ending. But the movie gave us working-class life, and it had exceptional performances from Glenn Headley and Demi Moore.