Another of John Cassavetes's warm-hearted films made among friends -- his wife Gena Rowlands, his mother Katharine Cassavetes, his mother-in-law Lady Rowlands, and his good buddy Peter Falk. Characteristically, the director seems interested in, and intimate with, the people themselves, and quite indifferent, or blind, to the people's jobs, pastimes, daily duties. The focus in this movie of pressing, probing closeups is on a housewife's alienation from her well-meaning husband, as her whimsical qualities, from her childlike mischief to her Ruth Gordon-ish mouth tricks to her spaghetti breakfasts, are understood to be insanity by those around her. It is not hard to swallow the premise that she is not really cracked, since her quirkiness is above all a sign of the actress's artful, crafty, scene-stealing flamboyance. She is, as they say, crazy like a fox. And the woes that befall her call up audience sympathy in much the same way as in classic damsel-in-distress melodramas (Gaslight, My Name Is Julia Ross, Experiment Perilous). In the end, it is left to the children of the household, clear-eyed and open-hearted, to rescue her from the tyrannies of her fellow adults. (1974) — Duncan Shepherd
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