Faces

John Marley in Faces (dir. John Cassavetes, 1968).

It's like cinematographer Al Ruban infused the camera with his own consciousness, and Cassavetes communicated telepathically with the actors, making everything come together into one impassioned strand of living, breathing celluloid tissue. A consummate fusion of filmic and verbal poetry. The dialogue is like the images: just this side of linear, naturalistic up to a point, and then the point goes soft and blurry. One character remarks about Marley's character: "There he goes with that uncanny phraseology of his again." (Interestingly, according to an undocumented anecdote I found by googling the phrase, Sam Fuller used to talk about a certain kind of noir speech as "uncanny phraseology"--I wonder if this was an intentional nod by Cassavetes.)