Rent Too Late Blues (1961)

Cassavetes in Studio Handcuffs - Too Late Blues review by griggs

In 1961, mainstream American films didn’t open on Black kids laughing and mucking about. Too Late Blues does. Cassavetes fills the frame with kids who aren’t local colour or wallpaper, just people, fully there. It’s a radical little move that tells you from shot one he’s not here for business as usual.

This film has a reputation as the sell-out, the one for the studio. It isn’t. It’s smoother round the edges, sure, but you still get the Cassavetes fingerprints – scenes that breathe, actors talking over each other, emotions spilling out instead of hitting tidy marks.

Bobby Darin is fine; Stella Stevens is something else entirely, all raw nerves and brittle edges. She’s so fragile you want to bubble-wrap the screen, and whenever she disappears the film deflates. There’s an excruciating bar-room pile-on, twitchy male egos and brittle friendships, with art and money slugging it out underneath. I kept daydreaming about the alternate-universe version with Gena Rowlands and Montgomery Clift – Cassavetes’ original choice for the leads – and how much stranger and sadder it might have been.

The plot goes daft, the script creaks, but the mess is weirdly lovable – a studio job that still feels stubbornly, scruffily Cassavetes.