Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

This movie was so-so. It had it's moments, but wasn't the greatest.

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Young Phil is the only surviving member of his family after the mob kills his mob accountant father Jack and everybody else. Jack's been stealing from the mob and informing the FBI. The mob is after Jack's book on the mob. Jack sent the book and Phil to their neighbor friend Gloria Swenson (Gena Rowlands). Phil is a brat and Gloria hates kids. They go on the run from the mob as she tries to work out a way to save themselves.This is the classic collaboration between director John Cassavetes and his wife Gena Rowlands. It has his gritty documentary indie style and the rundown NYC setting. The formula is simple. John behind the camera and Gena in front of the camera. That's all anybody needs to know about this movie. Gena just has so much skills portraying this woman. I'm not as kind with the kid but he's just a kid from the neighborhood. He's just too big I AM THE MAN! He has limited skills to play with. The movie can be a bit uneven especially with the pacing but it's a must see for Cassavetes and Rowlands fans.

Under the superb direction of husband John Cassavetes, Gena Rowlands a worthy Oscar nominated 1980 performance for "Gloria." A gritty tale of a neighbor, who happens to be mob-connected, shields a young boy whose family has been wiped out by the mob since the father, an accountant for them, squealed to the FBI about their work.As Gloria, Rowlands turns in a gritty, mean performance as one lady-killing machine. She is as tough as they come but comes to have a heart for the young boy under her care.In some respects, when there is no shooting, the film often takes comic turns. I just loved the 6 year old compared Gloria to a dame and he as her man. The kid certainly has the street-smarts and that in itself makes this film engaging.

Gena Rowlands is Gloria, a tough gangster's moll who gets in over her head when she agrees (reluctantly) to take care of 6 year old Phil Dawn(John Adames), the half Puerto Rican neighbor whose parents (Buck Henry and Julie Carmen) realize that they are about to be murdered by the mob. Henry, a mob bookkeeper, has turned over states evidence, and this means a death sentence for him and his family (which includes a daughter and mother-in-law). Gloria makes it clear from the beginning that she doesn't like kids, much less this one, but unconsciously takes him anyway, leading to a show-off between her and old mob associates, which includes her former lover. Gloria isn't afraid of using her gun to keep the mobsters away from the boy, and instantly, this brings sympathy towards her seemingly cold character. Like gangster's molls of the great crime dramas, she is hiding a heart of gold underneath all that toughness, and that makes the film extremely engrossing in watching out how it all unfolds.Rowlands and Adames are powerful in their performances, and they share an amazing chemistry together. Adames doesn't act like any movie kid; he is real. Why he won a "Razzie" (Worst) Supporting Actor award makes no sense to me. Rowlands plays the role as if she were Gloria Grahame, Ida Lupino and Ann Savage all rolled up into one. This lady will take no nonsense, even telling a tough waitress at a Grand Central restaurant to take a hike. In fact, the film makes great use of New York locales not usually seen in mainstream films. The film is filled with many clichés, and the ending is very forumalatic (in a "The Lady Vanishes" way), but it left me feeling totally satisfied. Sometimes formula works, especially when the heart is present, and this film is filled with heart.

You start with flinty, streetsmart gangster types, cross their paths with a little kid, put them in urban peril, and then you squeeze how things stack up for sentimentality, suspense and humor. It's a charming idea, and perhaps that's why this could be considered John Cassavetes's most conventional film. It tells the story of a gangster's girlfriend who goes on the run with a young boy who is being pursued by the mob for information he doesn't even know he might have. But he wants to tell the story his own way, obstructing every convention we would normally expect, instilling a realist perspective in how we follow the movie, making the pay-off that much more worthwhile. Cassavetes didn't intend to direct his script. He just wanted to sell the story to Columbia Pictures. But once his wife Gena Rowlands was asked to play Gloria, she obliged Cassavetes to direct it.This underdog crime drama is particularly absorbing in its first hour, and ignites with a great beginning. We follow one character, it leads to another character, perspectives are interknit, the situation builds and Cassavetes has complete control over what we know and expect, all in spite of the all-too-familiar premise, which is then set for the rest of the movie, which is a cat-and-mouse hunt per the seedier locales of New York and New Jersey. He makes the threat so real that when the two key characters evade tangible danger, we still feel the tension whenever they round a corner, get in and out of cabs, and other such ordinary actions. He doesn't let on that unwanted company is present. It just happens. There is one scene that lasts for quite awhile before we realize, after Rowlands's title character does, that unwanted company has been there the entire time.In an Oscar-nominated performance, Rowlands is expectedly the beautiful lead actress, but she sports a kind of masculine quality, creating a much more dense dynamic when she, afraid of her maternal instincts, finds them overpowering her lifelong self-preservation, and begrudgingly protects the boy. As the film progresses, however, she becomes more sincere in her protection, and integrates her love with her seasoned familiarity with how to stay alive in this town. In one creative take on the Fine, I Don't Need You Anyway scene, she asks a bartender, "There's reasons I can't turn and just look, but is there a little kid headed in here or across the street or whatever?" She drives her role with such honest irritable liveliness. Yet the kid is also well cast. He was a conspicuous little boy named John Adames with dark hair, big eyes and a way of trucking his dialogue as if confronting you to adjust a single word. It all works because everything about his character, the way he dresses, talks, revolts and moves, serves the naive notion that he is older, smarter and cooler than he is.Cassavetes has a natural keenness for guilelessly unadorned location shooting in that he never plans, stages, waits on the weather or time of day, or hires extras or stunt drivers. Note how passers-by in the distance will often look on at the characters, whether Gloria has pulled a gun in a public place or not. Wherever the characters need to be, that place is in real time, as dirty, scuzzy and purely of the film's era as it would've normally been. There's a shabby flophouse where the clerk tells Gloria, "Just pick a room. They're all open." There are bus stations, back alleys, dimly lit hallways, and bars that open at dawn. And his occasional action scenes are so thrilling because of their surprise.For once, Cassavetes doesn't stage indefinitely extensive scenes of dialogue wherein the actors indulge in their own view of their characters' unraveling. But I miss that. As I've already said, I am very impressed with how tightly he mounts suspense from the very beginning, how Gloria and the kid zip from cab to bus to cab to street to hotel to cab and so on. But regardless of how doggedly realistic he is in his portrayal of a recycled movie plot, he still relies upon that plot rather than the impositions of his characters flexing their wings.