Gloria

Gena Rowlands died recently, and I mentioned that I had seen about one scene of her 1980 movie Gloria show up on one of the FAST channels. As it turned out, the movie is available to stream on demand on Tubi, so I sat down to watch it and do a review on it.

Rowlands is the star here and plays Gloria, but we don't see her at first. Instead, we see a working-class Puerto Rican woman named Jeri Dawn coming home to her Bronx apartment having done the daily shopping, a Bronx that decidedly hasn't recovered from the terrible years of the 1970s. The trip home is filled with small indignities, but when Jeri gets to the lobby of her apartment, there's something more alarming, in the form of a man in an ill-fitting suit. Jerri gets into the elevator and goes up to her apartment.

Gloria lives in the same apartment building, being a neighbor of the Dawns, although this is the era when you wonder how well the people know each other despite living on the same floor of the same apartment building. Apparently, however, Gloria and the Dawns know each other well enough that Gloria can pop over to ask to borrow some sugar or whatnot. There, she discovers the Dawns in a state of panic. Jeri's husband Jack (Buck Henry) works as an accountant for the Mob, but he's also a double agent, ratting on the Mob to the FBI. That's a fairly obvious problem, and worse, Jack has physical evidence. (You'd think he'd be smart enough to make multiple physical copies of that evidence.) So Jeri understands that that man in the lobby was part of a hit squad sent to take out Jack, and quite possibly the rest of the family as well.

Jeri begs Gloria to take the kids back to her apartment, since the Mob wouldn't know about her, and presumably Gloria could then take the kids to the police or something. Except that Gloria is known by the Mob, since she had worked as a "companion", living on the largesse that mob men would give her and having socked away as much as she could in a safety deposit box. Worse is that only one of the two Dawn kids, young Phil, is willing to go off with Gloria. And Gloria doesn't really like kids at all. Still, she takes Phil, as well as the ledger, with Dad telling Phil to keep it safe, which doesn't make sense, since he should just have Gloria give it to the authorities.

The hit squad comes and kills the Dawns, and Gloria has to figure out how to escape while having a kid in tow. Not only that, but a kid who for the longest time isn't ready to admit that his family is dead and he's never going to see them again. Gloria is able to get out of the building just as a crowd of onlookers and the cops and media are showing up, so she's able to make an escape. But there's a catch, in that the running cameras capture the image of Gloria and Phil, so the mobsters know exactly who they're looking for. Gloria and Phil go on the run for the rest of the movie.

Gloria was very well-received by the critics when it was released in 1980, garnering an Oscar nomination for Rowlands and picking up a best picture award at the Venice Film Festival. I have to say that while I mostly liked the movie, I wouldn't give it quite the high marks that the critics do. For me, that's largely down to the amount of suspension of belief the movie requires. The police never show up anywhere in the movie after the initial hit, which is odd since Gloria is on the run for at least three nights and gets involved in several very public gun scenes with hit squads.

The pluses, however, include Rowlands' performance, which is excellent. Apparently, a lot of people at the time had an issue with the child "actor" (he never had another role) playing Phil; I didn't have that much of a problem with him. The other really bright spot is director John Cassavetes' photography of New York, which here is the same sort of really grimy and not-nice place that it actually was in those days. Hollywood could never make New York look like this during the studio era.

So I'd definitely give Gloria a recommendation as something you should watch.