Review/Film; Cassavetes, Rowlands And the Play Within MAY 17 1991 NYTIMES

“Opening Night" could be described as John Cassavetes's version of "All About Eve" if Mr. Cassavetes were the sort to be strongly influenced by the work of other film makers, which he most certainly is not. Like the characters who ramble amiably through this sprawling, funny, emotionally raw 1978 film -- which has a style that's of a piece with the director's other long films of the 70's, among them "Minnie and Moskowitz" (1971), "A Woman Under the Influence" (1974) and "The Killing of a Chinese Bookie" (1976) -- Mr. Cassavetes displays a remarkably free-spirited point of view.

"Opening Night" is a reminder of what has made Mr. Cassavetes's films so appealing, and of what can make them so maddening, too. For all its length -- nearly two and three-quarter hours -- it's a relatively thin example of the director's work, but a mischievous and inviting one, too.

Gena Rowlands, at her most radiant, totters through the film in the role of Myrtle Gordon, a very famous actress who requires vast reserves of forbearance from anyone who's daring or foolhardy enough to try working with her. As the film begins, Myrtle is in New Haven starring in the final tryouts of a play called "The Second Woman," which is, if God is willing and Myrtle can be held in check, on its way to Broadway.

Overseeing the production, and collectively gnashing their teeth when they are not sweet-talking the star, are the play's seasoned director, Manny Victor (Ben Gazzara), and his playful wife (Zohra Lampert), who good-naturedly tells him, "If I had known what a boring man you were when I married you, I wouldn't have gone through all those emotional crises"; a co-star named Maurice Aarons (Mr. Cassavetes), with whom Myrtle goes back a long time; the playwright Sarah Goode (Joan Blondell), who has more reason to worry about Myrtle than anyone else, and the producer David Samuels (Paul Stewart), Sarah's husband, the one who's most apt to bring down the curtain once and for all. Second most apt, actually, since Myrtle is doing everything she can to bring on a disaster.

Miss Rowlands, as she has shown in other films directed by her husband, can be incomparably funny while coming apart at the seams. The film, which presents bits and pieces of the play in rehearsal and then gradually lets them evolve into something whole, has a lot of fun with Myrtle's improvisations onstage and their unfortunate effects on her fellow actors.

As in "All About Eve," the star's secret fear turns out to be a dread of the aging process, which in this case is the subject of the play she's trying to do; Sarah, the author, says the phrase "the second woman" refers to the person a woman becomes once the pretty, youthful side of her disappears. Myrtle has so much trouble with this idea that she hallucinates a dead fan (Laura Johnson), who has been hit by a car early in the film but returns to haunt Myrtle as a vision of her own lost youth. This device, typically for Mr. Cassavetes, is labored and attenuated but strangely touching anyhow.

When Joan Blondell was making "Opening Night" in 1977, she told an interviewer, "I couldn't tell when the actors were having a private conversation and when they were actually changing the lines of the script." The shifting-sands quality that colors Myrtle's performances onstage also extends to the actors in the film, but the cast has a vibrancy that is perhaps a byproduct of this kind of uncertainty. As always, Mr. Cassavetes, a figure of wry, unpredictable intelligence and uncertain temper, is as darkly commanding in front of the camera as he is behind it.

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A version of this review appears in print on May 17, 1991, on Page C00011 of the National edition with the headline: Review/Film; Cassavetes, Rowlands And the Play Within.

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John Cassavetes e Gene Rowlands

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