Faces (1968 film)

The film, shot in cinéma vérité-style, depicts the final stages of the disintegrating marriage of a couple (John Marley and Lynn Carlin). Various groups and individuals with whom the couple interacts after the husband's sudden statement of his desire for a divorce are introduced. Afterwards, he spends the night in the company of brash businessmen and prostitutes, while the wife spends it with her middle-aged female friends and an aging, free-associating playboy they had picked up at a bar. The night proceeds as a series of tense conversations and confrontations occurs.

• John Marley as Richard Forst
• Gena Rowlands as Jeannie Rapp
• Lynn Carlin as Maria Forst
• Fred Draper as Freddie
• Seymour Cassel as Chet
• Val Avery as Jim McCarthy
• Dorothy Gulliver as Florence
• Joanne Moore Jordan as Louise
• Darlene Conley as Billy Mae
• Gene Darfler as Joe Jackson
• Elizabeth Deering as Stella

The film was shot in high-contrast 16 mm black-and-white film stock. Steven Spielberg worked as an unpaid runner.[5]

As is the case with several of Cassavetes' films, several different versions of Faces are known to exist (though it was generally assumed that after creating the general release print, Cassavetes destroyed the alternative versions). It was initially premiered in Toronto with a running time of 183 minutes, before Cassavetes cut it to 130 minutes. Though the 130-minute version is the general-release version, a print of a longer version with a running time of 147 minutes was found by Ray Carney and deposited at the Library of Congress; 17 minutes of this print were included in the Criterion box set John Cassavetes: Five Films, but Carney has said that numerous differences between the two films are seen.

Faces holds an 85% approval rating on review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 26 reviews with an average rating of 7.3/10.[6] Roger Ebert gave the film 4 out of 4 stars and wrote that the film "tenderly, honestly, and uncompromisingly examines the way we really live".[7]

Pauline Kael, however, was negative to this film, criticizing the "badly performed" acting and "crudely conceived" scenes.[8]

In 2011, Faces was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". The registry called the film "an example of cinematic excess" whose extended confrontations revealed "emotions and relations of power between men and women that rarely emerge in more conventionally structured films".

Faces, and other Cassavetes projects, had significant creative impact on Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen, and Robert Altman.[9]

• List of American films of 1968
• New Hollywood

• Carney, Raymond Francis, Junior, “American Dreaming: The Films of John Cassavetes and the American Experience,” (Berkeley and Los Angeles, California and London: University of California Press, 1985).

• Faces essay by Ray Carney at National Film Registry
• Faces at IMDb
• Faces at AllMovie
• Faces at Rotten Tomatoes
• Masks and Faces an essay by Stuart Klawans at the Criterion Collection
• Faces review by Richard Brody at The New Yorker