Cinema: It's a Picture About Life

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Too Late Blues (Paramount). "I believe in movies, not money," said John Cassavetes when he went West to make this picture. Shadows, the film he improvised in Manhattan with a cast of unknown actors and a budget of $40,000 (TIME, March 24), had caused the critics of two continents to bow down before him. and as he surveyed the gilded hills of Hollywood Director Cassavetes apparently felt like a voice crying in the wilderness of materialism. "In Hollywood," he announced loudly, "they want to make pictures that make money. They don't understand and they don't care what I am saying in my picture. But I don't care if I make money. All I care about is making a movie I believe in. It's a picture about life, about the inability of people to live—not to survive, but to live. It's probably the straightest picture about human beings ever made."

With this modest preamble, the dark-eyed darling of American cinema's avant-garde confidently picked up the directorial baton—and fell flat on his face. Too Late Blues is a routine, B-flat movie musical in which Cassavetes can seriously claim success in only one respect: the picture will not make money. To begin with, it constitutes a tired tract for the hysterical cult of hip that preaches salvation through syncopation. The plot, moreover, is a canned arrangement played to death in a dozen previous pictures of this sort: progressive jazzbo (Bobby Darin) goes commercial; loses art, loses heart, loses girl (Stella Stevens); but in the reprise he straightens out and flies right. The script is an anthology of unintentional hilarities. "Just where do I stand," the heroine hollers angrily when the hero advises her to give up sex, "without my body!" The jazz, composed for the occasion by David (Laura) Raksin, is cool and epicene. Actress Stevens is blonde. Singer Darin does not sing; and besides, he looks like a rubber teddy bear.

"This picture may flop in the States," says Darin's manager, "but Europe will eat it up." If Europe does, there's going to be an awful big burp.