The films of John Cassavetes throb with the pulse of the real and the shock of the immediate. His rough and raw cinematic outbursts punch through actorly technique and film style in a minimal and visceral charge and shake viewers out of their complacency and smugness. It is not easy to experience a Cassavetes film, and it shouldn't be. Unlike most films, Cassavetes films are tortuous and troubling but, in the end, exhilarating and life affirming, like living through an exorcism.

The characters in Cassavetes' films are caught in moments of psychic epiphany, their ordered worlds ready for collapse. In A Woman Under the Influence, Cassavetes, cutting loose from his preferred worlds of seedy entertainment and worn-out barstools, explores the working class world of tract homes, spaghetti dinners, and families boxed in and ready to go at each other's throats at a moments notice.

Cassavetes, in A Woman Under the Influence, channels a housewife cracking at the seams. Gena Rowlands, in a truly great film performance, as Mabel Longhetti -- a blue-collar housewife whose bizarre behavior warns her husband Nick (Peter Falk) of an oncoming nervous breakdown -- tells her children during one of the few quietly emotional moments: "I hope you kids never grow up. You know, I never did anything in my life -- except I made you and you and you." This moving and despairing confession centers her breakdown in the matrix of the traditional role of women -- a hot topic in the early '70s with the burgeoning of the women's movement (A Woman Under the Influence was released during the Nixon resignation year of 1974). Cassavetes nails the emotional rage of a woman cantering over the brink of madness in a series of intense scenes brilliantly realized by Falk and Rowlands, and Cassavetes' camera cuts like a knife, capturing the rage and hopelessness of likeable characters who try their best but end up shouting past each other into an emotional abyss.

In all of Cassavetes' films, A Woman Under the Influence is the one film that narrows in on American family life and eviscerates it. Mabel can't fragment her personality enough for the well-meaning but dense Nick. As a model wife, mother, daughter-in-law, and lover, Mabel has diluted herself until there is no Mabel left. As she tells Nick, "Tell me what you want me to be. I can be that. I can be anything." And she can be anything because she is nothing. When she discovers that Nick has arranged to have her committed to a mental hospital, she has a mental collapse in front of her family in one of the most harrowing crackup scenes ever put on film. It takes Mabel's meltdown for Nick to realize what he's lost ("This woman cooks, sews, makes the bed, washes the bathroom; what the hell is crazy about that?") and it is only when Mabel returns and tries to slit her wrists in front of her family that Mabel and Nick can finally relate to each other.

In Cassavetes, only a howl of pain will set you free.

Read more on this film, with other Cassavetes classics.