Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk star in John Cassavetes’ raw and often harrowing depiction of a blue-collar American family on the rocks, delivering in the process two painful and heart-wrenching screen performances and one of the most raw, emotionally scalding portraits of a marriage ever committed to film.

Mabel Longhetti (Gena Rowlands), wife of everyman Nick (Peter Falk) and mother of three, has no emotional or creative outlets. Instead, she pours all of her energy into her family, spending her days anxiously waiting for her children to return from school and her husband to arrive home from work. But this is marital relations as commitment-meets-daily gender war. A kind of two-way domestic Blitzkrieg. When this dependence leads Mabel to suffer a nervous breakdown she is forced to spend time in a psychiatric hospital as she struggles to cope with her slide into mental illness. And her return six months later, dazed and shaken, where she is greeted to a welcome home party, threatens to trigger another collapse.

At its trembling heart, Rowlands’s performance - frantic, childlike, pleading and furious – stands today as a virtually unmatched tour de force. As a woman struggling desperately to reconcile who she thinks she should be — as wife, mother, lover — with the anarchic spirit she really is, Mabel is the kind of intense, complex, and above all deeply human role that is still all too rare. An uncompromising and completely unmissable study of domestic turmoil.

We’re getting a new kitchen in December

Throughout December the builders will be in to fit our new kitchen. We will still have a Soups and Sharing Platters menu and the Café/Bar will be open as usual. Find out more here, including details of the schedule of work. Thank you for your patience in advance.

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