Double Feature: ‘Gloria’ And ‘Widows’ Showcase Women Navigating The Brutal World of Violent Men

In the glory days of theater-going, movie fans would sit back, relax, and enjoy not one but two features at their favorite movie theater. While it’s more difficult to find in our multiplex era, the wide variety of movie titles on streaming services means movie lovers can have their own double feature in the comfort of their own homes — and we’re here to help you decide what to watch. In this week’s edition of the Decider Double Feature, we pick two crime dramas that pack powerful punches thanks to their fierce female protagonists: John Cassavetes’s Gloria and Steve McQueen’s Widows.

Ever since the early days of cinema, filmmakers have long enjoyed examining the psychology of those who live lives of crime. For one thing, it’s inherently interesting for audiences: we love to watch people commit crimes while understanding why they are doing so in the first place. And, of course, there’s the thrill of watching a heist take place. A complex plan, practically setting our heroes (or anti-heroes) up for failure, is perhaps the most nail-biting genre of all. 

While the movies have often depicted men as the perpetrators of crime, female characters are often part of the scheme. In the film noir genre, the femme fatale might be a murderer or a thief herself. Or, she could just be a lowly pawn in another man’s plot — an innocent who turned a blind eye to her man’s nefarious deeds, whether out of pure ignorance or self-preservation. This week’s Double Feature features two movies about women who are forced to reckon with their proximity to the criminal underworld from which they have profited.

I’ll let true film historians decide if Gloria is Cassavetes’s best film or not, but it’s certainly his most accessible. Starring his wife and regular collaborator Gena Rowlands in the title role, the film follows Gloria as she becomes an unwitting companion to a young Puerto Rican kid named Phil after his family is killed in a mob hit. Rescuing the young Phil as a favor to his mother, Gloria takes the kid on the lam with her after she was spotted leaving the scene with the boy. But she’s hardly just in the wrong place at the wrong time; she has her own ties to the mob, just like Phil’s accountant father who left in their possession a ledger that his murderers and the cops would love to get their hands on. 

As Gloria and Phil traverse the wilds of gritty New York City, still grimy and vile in this 1980-set film, the script slowly reveals Gloria’s connection to the mob: she’s an old-fashioned gun moll, portrayed in this film as a modern woman who is fiercely independent. But if she’s at all threatened by the men chasing after her and her newfound charge, she doesn’t show it. The famous scene that sees her pulling out a gun and offing a carful of mobsters sets the tone for the rest of the film to come (heightened by the sudden swell of composer Bill Conti’s glorious and dramatic score). It’s Gloria who is in charge, often baiting and taunting the men who pursue her. 

It’s a powerhouse performance from Rowlands, who — let’s face it — is unable to deliver anything else. (She earned her second Academy Award nomination for the role.) It’s somewhat surprising to see a woman in her early 50s, especially one as glamorous as Gloria, match wits with these criminals and showing off her street smarts in a time that by all contemporary accounts is thought of as a dangerous and nearly unlivable era in New York City’s recent history. But one gets the sense that Gloria could survive any setting in which she should find herself, and perhaps more interesting is her relationship with Phil. At first she’s hesitant; there are many times when she wants to give him up. But she’s loyal to a fault (that is, perhaps, the biggest trait of the gun moll stock character), and she puts herself at risk to keep him safe because she recognizes his frailty as an innocent young boy who was swept up in a dark and deadly world. 

Gloria may have flipped the femme fatale on her head at a time when Hollywood was experiencing a film noir revival, but Steve McQueen’s 2018 film Widows takes a similar concept and runs completely rampant. Viola Davis leads the cast of this ensemble action-drama as Veronica, a wealthy Chicago woman whose husband Harry (played by Liam Neeson) is killed along with his partners in a heist gone wrong. But her grieving period is cut short when a crime boss and aspiring politician comes to collect the $2 million that her husband and his team stole, forcing Veronica to come face to face with her husband’s seedy and violent double life. Just like Gloria, Veronica is in possession of a book — one that details the complicated scheme Harry was about to pull off. 

Rather than going on the run, however, Veronica enlists the widows of her husband’s partners (played with devastating toughness by Michelle Rodriguez and Elizabeth Debecki in completely underrated performances), breaking through these women’s hardened shells and convincing them to help her pull off the crime that will save them from the violent men who will certainly punish them for their husbands’ theft. The result is a white-knuckle thriller that examines a rapidly gentrifying Chicago manipulated by a corrupt political system (Colin Farrell co-stars as the petulant heir to a long-standing political dynasty) while also depicting the banal nature of violence and abuse. And with a script co-written by Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn, there are some plot twists that drop like unexpected key changes in a pop song — the kind of surprises that only heighten the underlying tension of a film that presents a team of anti-heroines up against extreme odds to simply live the lives they had before their husbands up-ended them with their untimely deaths.

While McQueen’s film might be a more straight-forward thriller than Cassavetes’s, the two have a lot in common — more than just the Women Doing Crimes plots. Both Gloria and Widows are a study in desperation, looking at the lengths at which people go to save themselves and those they love from outside forces hell-bent on destroying any sense of comfort they’ve acquired. Gloria and Veronica prove their worth time and time again in their respective stories; they barely stumble in their quests for self-preservation, and both films slyly prove that these unsuspecting women have more resources to their disposal than they let on. They know how to navigate the brutal world established by and over-run with violent men because they’ve prepared for this: the inevitable moment when they are no longer able to stand on the sidelines and claim innocence. There’s the old cliche about a woman who has been scorned, but in these films it’s resourcefulness and independence that drives to protect themselves and avenge those they could not save.

Tyler Coates is a writer who lives in Los Angeles.

Where to stream Gloria (1980)

Where to stream Widows