It is … quite interesting to discover in John Cassavetes' new film, Too Late Blues, a truly challenging Hollywood film, giving an unusual interpretation of a group of white jazz musicians in Los Angeles. It is still not the jazz film for which we have all been waiting, but more than its predecessors it reveals with authenticity the awkward, nonintellectual passions and weaknesses of people who make a living out of playing jazz music. It explores character with [depth and sincerity], and in the screenplay Cassavetes and his collaborator, Richard Carr, have managed to capture the argot—swift, hardboiled, and sometimes poetic—of music-making hipsters without a cause. It is a very strange and exciting film to come from a major Hollywood studio. (pp. 49-50)

[Despite] the early perplexities of the film (one is not really certain about Ghost's motivations or personality from the outset, yet this is deliberately...