Cast

Peter Falk, Alan Arkin, Beverly D'Angelo, Charles Durning, Robert Stack

Film description

Filmmakers have their superstitions. The movie should not get an ‘unlucky’ title. Ignoring this, Andrew Bergman wrote a script and started making Big Trouble. The story seemed very promising. It was to be a comedy referencing Double Indemnity (1944). The main protagonist, who works for an insurance company, conspires with the wife of one of his clients to kill him and take the insurance money. In the original, the motivation was an infatuation with the femme fatale; however, in Big Trouble he just needed the money to send his three kids to an Ivy League college.

Bergman quickly lost interest in the movie. When shooting began, he still had no ending. He had left his wife who was due to give birth to their child, and, what’s more, he was in the middle of redecorating his house. Guy McElwaine, running Columbia Pictures at the time, asked Cassavetes to take over. Cassavetes agreed, though with mixed feelings. He knew it was not his type of story. On the other hand, he needed money and hated inactivity. The budget for Big Trouble was $16 million – an incredible amount for Cassavetes. At the end of his career, he finally experienced the luxury available when working within the studio system. Despite fair reviews, the movie flopped and is remembered as the final Cassavetes movie. Cassavetes claimed, I don’t want this to be my last picture so I’ll be known for this piece of shit. (Marshall Fine, Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film. New York: Hyperion, 2005, p. 419).

Elżbieta Durys