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IndieWire is a part of PMX Global, LLC, a subsidiary of Penske Media Corporation. © 2026 IndieWire Media, LLC. All rights reserved. Powered by WordPress.com VIPRetrospectiveJohn Cassavetes Practically Invented the American Independent Film, but Some of His Best Movies Were Made for StudiosHalf of the director's 12 features were financed and distributed by major studios, and some — like "Minnie and Moskowitz," screening next week at the New Beverly — are as uncompromising as his scrappiest indies.By Jim HemphillPlus iconJim Hemphill JimmyHemphillMore stories by Jim How a Sequel to a Movie Barely Anyone Saw Became a Sensational (and Originally X-Rated) 1980s IndieRead more Neil Jordan on Making His Homoerotic ‘Interview with the Vampire’ for a Major Studio with A-List StarsRead more One of the Year’s Best Film Books Celebrates the Unsung Artists That Turned ‘The Women’ Into a ClassicRead more September 23, 2026 12:30 pmAdd us as a Google Preferred Source'Minnie and Moskowitz'Everett CollectionShare
Cassavetes would go on to alternate studio and independent work for the rest of his career. Ultimately, major studios financed and distributed half of the 12 features he directed. (He also, oddly, made possibly his greatest movie, “Love Streams,” for exploitation outfit Cannon Films in 1985.) Cassavetes’ initial forays into corporate filmmaking were fraught, with the director chafing under Paramount’s assembly-line production on “Too Late Blues” and clashing with producer Stanley Kramer on “Child.”
Cassavetes more or less disowned both films, even though they show plenty of his strengths in fluid, energetic camerawork and sensitivity to performance, and “Too Late Blues” is thematically a piece with later Cassavetes classics like “Killing of a Chinese Bookie” and “Opening Night.” For Cassavetes, any form of compromise was total failure, so he returned to independent production for his fourth feature and first masterwork, the 1968 marital discord drama “Faces” — and, ironically, received the warmest embrace of his career from the establishment.
That came in the form of three Academy Award nominations: for Cassavetes’ screenplay and two performances (Seymour Cassel and Lynn Carlin). Critics were divided on the movie (Roger Ebert loved it, and Pauline Kael hated it, for example), but middlebrow Hollywood loved it in spite of its abrasive, harrowing depiction of men and women at emotional war, and Cassavetes was able to parlay its success into studio financing for his next feature, “Husbands” (1970).
“Husbands” was made for Columbia, and Cassavetes would complain once again about the compromises that came with institutional filmmaking. To the outside viewer, however, it’s difficult to imagine a less compromised piece of work: a structurally unconventional portrait of three men (Cassavetes, Peter Falk, and Ben Gazzara) who begin the movie lost and achieve only minimal enlightenment by the story’s end. It’s a film of rambling digressions and unpalatable behavior, with scenes that often end abruptly in the middle or run far past the point of resolution.
Cassavetes’ next film was another studio movie, and based on its premise alone one might think it was a better commercial fit for Hollywood than his earlier work. “Minnie and Moskowitz” (1971) tells the story of a strait-laced single woman (Gena Rowlands) who falls in love — in fits and starts — with a colorful hippie (Seymour Cassel) who pursues her with abandon, initially repelling her but eventually winning her over with his offbeat attitude and fearless passion. In other words, it’s a rom-com, a gender-reversal of the genre’s classics like “Bringing Up Baby” and “The Lady Eve,” in which a kooky free spirit chases, ultimately catches, and transforms a humorless stuffed shirt.
The catch is that by simply switching the genders of the two characters, Cassavetes turns the formula into something more intense and, at times, sinister — the obsessive behavior of a Katharine Hepburn in “Baby” or Barbara Stanwyck in “Eve” plays as more real and threatening when projected onto a man, and the amusing befuddlement of Cary Grant or Henry Fonda turns to genuinely unsettling concern and fear when Gena Rowlands is the object of relentless desire. Yet Cassavetes plays the whole thing at a kind of light, breezy pitch, directing “Minnie and Moskowitz” as though it’s just another escapist crowdpleaser.