September 21 was a national holiday for "Star Wars" fans, who've been waiting years for George Lucas to unveil his prized trilogy on DVD.
But there was another reason for DVD rejoicing that day, as the peerless Criterion Company — North America's premier source for foreign and classical films — released "John Cassavetes: Five Films," the company's most anticipated box-set yet.
Cassavetes aficionados — like yours truly — happily shelled out the 100-some bucks for the bulky collection of the director's signature films, including masterpieces like "Shadows" (1959), "Faces" (1968), "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974), "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" (1976) and "Opening Night" (1977) along with "A Constant Forge" (2000), an exhaustive 200-minute documentary on the director.
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself, since most of you are likely asking, "Who the hell's John Cassavetes?"
Some may recognize him from Roman Polanski's "Rosemary's Baby" as Mia Farrow's foreboding husband or "The Dirty Dozen," where he played an irascible soldier.
Cassavetes' true importance in film history lies in his output as the writer/director who, in the opinion of many historians and critics, jumpstarted the American independent film movement decades before Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater or any other modern filmmaker even touched a camera. With a couple exceptions, he self-financed and distributed the films himself to theatres, relying only on artistic integrity and guts, not studio-backing or executives' desires.
Cassavetes sought to capture the entire human experience on celluloid in all its glory: the happiness, the pain and humiliation, joy, sorrow, anger and — most of all — love. His work dealt with people and relationships, and it brims with unvested, tumultuous emotion. It's adult cinema in the best sense of the word, and though it takes patience and active engagement to watch, the rewards for the open-minded viewer are limitless.
His films were among the most personally realized, too: many feature his wife, actress Gena Rowlands, and his friends, a cadre of recurring actors including Seymour Cassel, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. He often manned the camera himself and hired friends and associates for the rest of the crew. "Five Films" is a wondrous monument to this idiosyncratic, hugely influential director, and it's the DVD event of the year.
The box-set has a veritable grab bag of extras: documentaries, interviews with actors, alternate versions of films and scenes and a lengthy booklet with essays, tributes and writing by the man himself.
Grade: A
Special Features: A