Our Daily Trailer: MINNIE & MOSKOWITZ

John Cassavetes loved to talk about love - especially, he loved to talk about the way love was messy and wonderful and refused easy categorization. Ultimately, love was the throughline of the director’s work - what we do for love, what love does to us, the crazy, delightful and terrible things that spring out of love. But nowhere in Cassavetes’ filmography is love itself as celebrated - and as hilarious -  as it is in 1971’s Minnie & Moskowitz.

Where many of Cassavetes’ films could be challenging experiences to casual viewers, Minnie & Moskowitz is easily one of his most accessible movies, tracing the beginning of a relationship between a quiet, sad museum curator (Gena Rowlands) and a free-spirited goofball (Seymour Cassel) who pursues her, his intentions riding a blurry, often hilarious line between romantic and misanthropic. Along the way, we get to see two of the funniest, weirdest scenes of Cassavetes' career. In one, Cassel’s Moskowitz extends a kindness toward a chatty, unstable cafeteria patron (the unforgettable Timothy Carey). In the other, Rowlands’ Minnie barely survives what might be the most uncomfortable blind date ever committed to film, with an unhinged, hateful Nice Guy named Zelmo (the amazing Val Avery).

Minnie & Moskowitz is a really sweet, un-showy piece of filmmaking, and today it’s woefully, tragically underseen. For whatever reason (licensing rights, probably), as we Criterion-ize film history and bundle it up into box sets, some great films are getting lost in the shuffle. Minnie & Moskowitz is one of them. My out-of-print DVD is treasured and kept in a cool, dry place (there’s another, all-region edition in the Amazon link below), and I really hope someone sees fit to restore the film properly in the near future.