John Cassavetes (USA, 1974)
Gena Rowlands expected to attend

Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands) and her husband, Nick (Peter Falk) love each other, but are very different people. Nick is a loud and outgoing construction crew chief who doesn’t think twice about bringing the whole gang home unexpectedly for a spaghetti dinner. Mabel is a shy, insecure woman who tries hard to please her husband. In fact, her identity as an individual seems to have disappeared behind the roles she plays as wife and mother. But when others are around, her little eccentricities and nervous ticks become more pronounced. Eventually, friends and family begin to question her mental health. Nick’s mother pressures him to have her committed to an institution, and he reluctantly agrees. When she returns six months later, she has clearly changed. The strange mannerisms are gone, but so is the woman Nick knew and loved. Cassavetes’ penetrating look at a woman beset by mental illness echoes feminist accusations that many women were trapped in lives of claustrophobic domesticity. A key movie of the early 1970s, A Woman Under the Influence stands today as one of the foremost examples of Cassavetes’ unsparing realism. The seeds of today’s family dramas, and indeed, of the contemporary independent film movement, can be found here and in Cassavetes’ other works.

The UCLA Film & Television Archive carried out a painstaking restoration process to create this not-to-be-missed new print. A Woman Under the Influence will be presented a part of the Cinema Visionaries program, a traveling screening series created to celebrate motion pictures that have been preserved or restored with funding from The Film Foundation and Gucci.

Written by John Cassavetes. With Gena Rowlands, Peter Falk, Katherine Cassavetes, Lady Rowlands, Fred Draper. Photo courtesy of The Criterion Collection.

Tickets are $10 for valid SFFS members (memberships must be valid through the end of the Festival), $12.50 for non-members and $11 for seniors, students and persons with disabilities.

Castro Theatre
Sunday, April 26, 5:45 pm