Off the Top of his Head

Cassavetes claims that his film is an "improvisation." Well, if you use the term as meaning the result of what, say, a musician does when he ad libs, then this film is obviously not the same kind of thing at all. And when we find that no script was used, that seems to have been the only justification for the term being applied to the film. For there is continuity of a kind, there is some plot line and the same characters appear all the way through. No, the earliest directors often had no script or formal shooting schedule either, but they provided a film with a plot, characterisation and interest. And just recently the makers of Nice Time did the same thing for Piccadilly Circus as Cassavetes does in New York. Though that didn't quite come off, It certainly had more punch and life than this pretentious piece of home movie making.

(Footnote: It's infuriating to see the Paramount up to its old trick of chopping up the image to fit the screen. What a farce!)