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Minnie and Moskowitz

  • 1971
  • GP
  • 1h 54m
IMDb RATING
7.2/10
5.7K
YOUR RATING
Seymour Cassel and Gena Rowlands in Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Romantic ComedyComedyDramaRomance

A museum curator falls in love with a crazy parking attendant.A museum curator falls in love with a crazy parking attendant.A museum curator falls in love with a crazy parking attendant.

  • Director
    • John Cassavetes
  • Writer
    • John Cassavetes
  • Stars
    • Gena Rowlands
    • Seymour Cassel
    • Val Avery
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    7.2/10
    5.7K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • John Cassavetes
    • Writer
      • John Cassavetes
    • Stars
      • Gena Rowlands
      • Seymour Cassel
      • Val Avery
    • 43User reviews
    • 30Critic reviews
    • 67Metascore
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 2 nominations total

    Photos39

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    Top cast27

    Edit
    Gena Rowlands
    Gena Rowlands
    • Minnie
    Seymour Cassel
    Seymour Cassel
    • Moskowitz
    Val Avery
    Val Avery
    • Zelmo Swift
    Timothy Carey
    Timothy Carey
    • Morgan Morgan
    • (as Tim Carey)
    Katherine Cassavetes
    • Sheba Moskowitz
    Elizabeth Deering
    • Girl
    Elsie Ames
    • Florence
    Lady Rowlands
    • Georgia Moore
    Holly Near
    • Irish
    Judith Roberts
    Judith Roberts
    • Wife
    Jack Danskin
    • Dick Henderson
    Eleanor Zee
    • Mrs. Grass
    Sean Joyce
    • Ned
    David Rowlands
    David Rowlands
    • Minister
    Darren Patrick Moloney
    Darren Patrick Moloney
    • Jim's Son
    • (as Darren Moloney)
    Alpha Blair
    • Girl at Bar
    • (uncredited)
    Bruce Brown
    • Husband
    • (uncredited)
    John Cassavetes
    John Cassavetes
    • Jim
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • John Cassavetes
    • Writer
      • John Cassavetes
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews43

    7.25.7K
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    Featured reviews

    9MOscarbradley

    Whatever else this is, it's not a comedy.

    One of John Cassavetes' greatest films is also one of his least known. He made it in 1971 and over the years it has been largely forgotten. I've seen it described as a romantic comedy and even as a screwball comedy but I found it very disturbing. It's not a comedy and I'm not even sure it's a love story. It's characters are all dysfunctional, unhappy people and Minnie and Moskowitz are the most dysfunctional of all.

    She works in a museum and he works as a car-parking attendant and the film charts their hit and miss relationships, with each other and with other people. It is also largely improvised which gives it the feeling of life being lived in front of our eyes rather than simply being played out but these are people you definitely wouldn't want to know or maybe they aren't people at all but just extentions of Cassavetes' off-the-wall imagination.

    It is magnificently acted by Cassavetes' repertory company of friends and family though at times it feels more like a series of classes at the Actor's Studio. Gena Rowlands is Minnie and Seymour Cassell is Moskowitz and they are superb as you would expect as indeed are everyone else, particularly Val Avery and Timothy Carey as men having meltdowns in restaurants and an uncredited Cassavetes as an unfaithful husband, while the cinematography of the three credited cinematographers, (Alric Edens, Michael Margulies and Arthur J. Ornitz), gives the film the documentary-like look the director obviously intended. This is independent cinema at its purest and most unrefined; scary, moving, rarely romantic. Just don't call it a comedy.
    8jzappa

    The Most Pathetic Love Story I've Ever Seen

    Minnie and Moskowitz is the most pathetic and ungraceful love story I've ever seen. Between Minnie, a disillusioned museum curator whose abusive married boyfriend dumps her and leaves her even more uptight and confused than she already was, and Seymour Moskowitz, a parking attendant so desperate for attention that he spends his nights going to bars and restaurants aggravating people, there is a chaotic and disenchanted match from the start. Just like so many pairings that we see every day.

    In nearly every love story, there is a man and a woman, the man being confident, funny, either classically hot or attractive in his own way, whose shortcomings are charming, and the woman a wounded soul who could have any man she wants who chooses this guy because there's just something about him. These movies make everyone feel so good because the characters embody what every man and woman wants to be, not what they are. Minnie and Moskowitz, instead of indulging in any hint of fantasy in the realm of romance, depicts people who may just be more common than the attractive, confident people with so much experience playing the field. What's the story behind the love affairs of the ugly, alarmingly awkward man with no life and no job that we all run into, or the woman so crippled by insecurity that it's difficult to talk to her?

    This film is not as fascinating as Cassavetes's Faces or Opening Night, but it has that riveting quality that Cassavetes always fought so hard to render, which is an unbridled depiction of people underneath the ego that hides behind itself in nearly all other films. Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel, delivering startlingly pitiable people, are hardly likable. Moskowitz nearly drives us mad, let alone Minnie. He imposes himself so forcefully in her life, the dates are an explosion of the inner voices of ours that respond to the screamingly inept uneasiness on dates we've all been on, rejections we've all swallowed, and arguments we've all had that we know were our own faults. I admire a film like Minnie and Moskowitz because, as the trademark is with the films Cassavetes helmed himself, it identifies with us in 100% honesty. Our egos play no part in company with his characters, thus a tremendous achievement per performance by actor.
    oliverio-p

    brilliant enough to inspire dark scribblings

    Zelmo says "people that listen continuously are much more interesting than people that talk continuously" He doesn't get the girl. Seymour says "I think about you so much I forget to go to the bathroom." He gets the girl. "When I'm with someone I want to get away." This is the girl speaking. Her name is Minnie . She also says "I don't like men. They smile too much. You see a lot of teeth." This is no ordinary love story. Correction this is an extraordinary love story where Minnie ultimately becomes a Moskowitz which is difficult to say with a straight face. But the ultimate romance is between John Cassavetes and the English language. Forget the popcorn, to eternally enjoy Minnie &Moskowitz, have a notepad and some shorthand and "if you have bread, we can make toast."
    7caspian1978

    Cassavete's Look into the Human Heart

    At times, you forget that you are watching a movie and not the lives of two average (but unique) people and the incomplete lives that they live. Searching for love, if not just acceptance, both live in a world where relationships are as confusing as the people in the relationship. By the end of the movie you can't help but smile at the images Cassavetes captures in the last 30 seconds. Without any narrative, Cassavetes gives the conclusion to the two character's lives together. True happiness...
    chaos-rampant

    Transcendental jazz against the void II

    Step the third in my journey through Cassavetes..

    Here, he takes one of the most popular movie formats, the romance. Boy- meets-girl in LA, under the lights. But she is no cool femme fatale, she is fragile, unsure of herself. He is no Bogie himself; as the film starts he is watching The Maltese Falcon in a theater, a scene where Mary Astor throws herself crying on Bogie's feet. Trying to pick up women afterwards, he's chased out of bars, looked at as a weirdo and beaten up in an alley.

    The idea is that we are not going to see movie people, but real people on the street. That was the ambition anyway, a situation aggravated by Cassavetes' actorly Studio background—as in Husbands, we have constant shouting matches, awkward intrusions, obnoxious pulling and nervousness. He seems to think the room inhabited by these characters won't feel real and lived, unless we have damage on the walls, a Greek sensibility, after all the main story recasts Zorba.

    So unlike a Bogart film, the actors here don't coolly glide off each other, they cut themselves on each other's edges.

    The same situation develops here as I described in my comment on Husbands. The edges, the damage are unusually pronounced, by this I mean a situation like when Moskowitz almost runs her over with his truck to get her to go with him takes me out of it. A softer next moment will pull me in again, until the next hysteric one and so on.

    Which brings me to my main discussion about presence.

    Moskowitz is the kind of character who can be likable once you get to know him, the sort of bond you form with coworkers that greatly depends on shared time. Minnie is warm when we first see her, but there's a haughty, nervous ghost in her. It is, let's say, a truer to life perception than the immediately charming Bogarts and Stanwycks of old. It requires work to take them in, giving space.

    That narrative room, that space where characters wreck themselves and things works the same way once you excise the shouty moments, simply wonderful. None of the individual visual moments are cool or typically beautiful. The locales are drab and mundane. The light and textures all natural, the whole is imperfect but breathes. In this, he equals Pasolini, another master of the living eye.

    So on a moment-by- moment basis, the space is like the characters, intensely present flow to undefined horizon. In a movie like the Maltese Falcon, the narrative horizon is immediately defined (get the bird), and again defined in every scene (get out of there, rough someone up, etc.) so we are at all times comfortably tethered, enjoying the play. What Cassavetes does matters in the long run in the sculpting of the overall effect, it doesn't leap to attention.

    Like Husbands, this slowly starts to work for me once I have a narrative shift that faintly, very faintly defines a certain horizon in the story—here marriage. Cassavetes is work, because this happens so late in the movie, the bulk of it is like staring at a blank page waiting for inspiration, or waiting for musicians to tune their instruments. Here, that shift happens about 9/10ths in the film, and then we're through that and a new horizon opens, the closing shots of family life and then it's over.

    So it starts to work late but extends for me to long after it's over, it's one of the most haunting effects I know, transcendentally marvelous; more on that in the next comment on Woman.

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    Related interests

    Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally... (1989)
    Romantic Comedy
    Will Ferrell in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)
    Comedy
    Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)
    Drama
    Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942)
    Romance

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      John Cassavetes directs his wife Gena Rowlands, his mother Katherine Cassavetes, his brother-in-law David Rowlands, his mother-in-law Lady Rowlands and his children Xan Cassavetes and Zoe R. Cassavetes.
    • Goofs
      When Moskowitz is carrying Minnie in the living room, she has a lit cigarette in her hand. After he carries her upstairs to her bedroom and puts her down on the bed, she has no cigarette in her hand.
    • Quotes

      Seymour Moskowitz: If you think of yourself as funny, you become tragic.

    • Connections
      Featured in Edge of Outside (2006)
    • Soundtracks
      Skid-Dat-De-Dat
      (uncredited)

      Written by Lil Armstrong

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    FAQ17

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    Details

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    • Release date
      • July 21, 1972 (Sweden)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • John Cassavetes' Minnie and Moskowitz
    • Filming locations
      • Los Angeles County Museum of Art - 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Hancock Park, Los Angeles, California, USA(Moskowitz drops Minnie off in front of the museum plus interior shots)
    • Production companies
      • Faces Music
      • Universal Pictures
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Budget
      • $900,000 (estimated)
    • Gross worldwide
      • $2,296
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

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    • Runtime
      • 1h 54m(114 min)
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

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