FILM · 1974 · USA
A Woman Under the Influence
- Directed by
- John Cassavetes
- Runtime
- 155 min
- Studio
- Faces International Films
24 archived facts 6 topics 1 source Last reviewed Oct 2026
Mabel Longhetti, desperate and lonely, is married to a Los Angeles municipal construction worker, Nick. Increasingly unstable, especially in the company of others, she craves happiness, but her extremely volatile behavior convinces Nick that she poses a danger to their family and decides to commit her to an institution for six months. Alone with a trio of kids to raise on his own, he awaits her return, which holds…
Summary: TMDB
All facts (24)
- #001
After completing A Woman Under the Influence, John Cassavetes could not find a distributor and at one point was literally carrying the reels under his arm from one cinema to another in the hope of finding someone to screen his film. Eventually Martin Scorsese, who had recently won critical acclaim for Mean Streets (1973) and was a great admirer of Cassavetes's work, threatened to pull his own film Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) from a major New York film festival if it did not accept A Woman Under the Influence.
- #002
John Cassavetes originally wrote the film as a play, but his wife Gena Rowlands dissuaded him from it, noting that the role would be too painful and exhausting to perform every night.
- #003
To help finance the film, John Cassavetes remortgaged his house, and Peter Falk contributed part of his earnings from Columbo (1971), bringing the total to $500,000. When no one wanted to buy "Influence," Cassavetes spent $750,000 to release it himself, most of it his own money, with the guidance of young distributor Jeff Lipsky. He helped "four-wall" the film, or rent out cinemas, to get it shown, and it eventually went into worldwide release and ultimately grossed $12 million.
- #004
The two women Mabel asks for the time while waiting for the school bus on the street were Gena Rowlands's real-life friends from school.
- #005
In a 2004 interview with Peter Falk and Gena Rowlands, they state that there was no rehearsal other than the table read and that they were not allowed to talk to each other about their characters. They agreed with John Cassavetes that you never know what will happen until you are in front of the camera. Falk recalls one of the scenes shot for the film and how Cassavetes ran up to him just before his first take and put a blue hat on his head. This became the iconic worker's hat that Nick (Falk's character) wears in several scenes. Falk says that adding this hat at the last minute contributed to his performance. Similarly, Falk states that with Cassavetes you sometimes shoot without even being aware of it. One example was the scene in which the doctor tries to give Mabel a sedative; he says he did not know they had started shooting when Mabel spoke her first line. According to Falk, this allowed Nick to experience a more genuine shock.
- #006
Lady Rowlands (Martha Mortenson) played the mother of her real-life daughter Gena Rowlands (Mabel Longhetti).
- #007
The film was actually shot in 1972. Because of director John Cassavetes's difficulties in distributing it, it did not enter theatrical release until late 1974.
- #008
The film represents actor/writer/director John Cassavetes's only Oscar nomination in the directing category.
- #009
At one of the premieres, Peter Falk was not present, and he later received a phone call from John Cassavetes saying that Falk had been booed when his name appeared in the final title sequence. Falk was shocked and confused until it was explained that this was the beginning of the women's rights movement, so everyone had naturally sided with Gena Rowlands's character.
- #010
Katherine Cassavetes (Margaret Longhetti) was John Cassavetes's mother.
- #011
In a 1975 interview with John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, the interviewer asks: "Did you have Gena in mind when you wrote this, and how much of the character you created was Gena," and Cassavetes responded, "Making a film is partly revenge[…] the truth is Gena told me to write something for her. I suppose I'm an obedient person." The origin of A Woman Under the Influence (1974) began when director Cassavetes's wife, actress Gena Rowlands, said she wanted to make a play about the difficulties contemporary women face. When Rowlands wrote the play, she recalled: "I couldn't believe John wrote this. I don't want to be sexist because I really don't believe that women can't write for men and men can't write for men. But I really couldn't believe that a man could understand this particular problem."
- #012
Richard Dreyfuss claimed that when he first saw the film he found it so upsetting that it made him vomit.
- #013
In one scene, Nick and the children whistle the melody of This Old Man, which would become a recurring motif in Columbo (1971), in which Peter Falk starred as the lead character. It was introduced to the series a year before the release of A Woman Under the Influence (1974), in the episode Any Old Port in a Storm (1973).
- #014
The film is included on Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" list.
- #015
The film was shot in 13 weeks. Unable to find a studio space to shoot in, the scenes at the Longhetti house were filmed in a somewhat run-down house on Taft Boulevard just off Hollywood Boulevard.
- #016
This is one of 11 films John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands made together. Their other films are Shadows (1958), A Child Is Waiting (1963), Faces (1968), Machine Gun McCain (1969), Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), Two-Minute Warning (1976), Opening Night (1977), Gloria (1980), Tempest (1982) and Love Streams (1984).
- #017
The $3.50 bar tab is equivalent to about $22.40 in 2024.
- #018
Xan Cassavetes (Adrienne Jensen) is the daughter of John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.
- #019
As Jeff Lipsky, the college student John Cassavetes hired to help distribute the film, put it, "For the first time in cinema history, an independent film was distributed without using a nationwide sub-distribution system." Despite Cassavetes's efforts to find a distributor, the film was repeatedly rejected because, as distributors told the director, "Nobody cares about women's problems."
- #020
Because there was no budget for hair and makeup, Gena Rowlands did her own, and with only one copy of her costumes (unthinkable on a Hollywood production), the clothes were sent to the dry cleaner overnight after every shoot.
- #021
Gena Rowlands was nominated for Best Actress for both Gloria (1980) and A Woman Under the Influence. John Cassavetes was nominated three times: for directing A Woman Under the Influence, for writing Faces (1968) (which also earned him two acting nominations), and as a supporting actor in The Dirty Dozen (1967). Neither Rowlands nor Cassavetes ever won an Oscar.
- #022
A Woman Under the Influence (1974), which Hollywood studio chiefs thought no one would want to see, surprised everyone by recouping its $1 million cost and turning a very substantial profit.
- #023
Gena Rowlands and John Cassavetes were husband and wife.
- #024
A Woman Under the Influence (1974), probably the most accessible and most respected of John Cassavetes's films, followed two remarkable works, Husbands (1970) and Minnie and Moskowitz (1971). It was the fourth feature film project between the married couple Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands.
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