And yet, and yet ... love blossoms somehow between Minnie Moore and Seymour Moskowitz, during four crazy days and nights. Seymour thinks he might be able to improve his position; get a job in a larger garage, maybe. Minnie shakes her head and sighs when she looks at him: "Seymour, look at that face. It's not the face I dreamed of, Seymour."

Consumed by love, Seymour bangs his fist against the roof of his pick-up truck: "Minnie, oh, Minnie! Oh, Minnie!" Seymour is not very articulate. He only talks about three things, Minnie says, money, eating and cars. "Cars are very important to Seymour," Minnie explains to her mother. Her mother nods, a little stunned. "Seymour CARES about cars."

And all of this is why love scores an altogether unreasonable triumph over common sense in "Minnie and Moskowitz," the new comedy by John Cassavetes. The movie is sort of a fairy tale, Cassavetes says; it's dedicated to all the people who didn't marry the person they should have. It is a movie on the side of love, and it is one of the finest movies of the year.

Cassavetes has always been an interesting director, with an inspired unpredictability to his work. He likes to get the texture of real life in his films, and when his experiments succeed they produce brilliant work like "Faces," which I thought was the best film of 1968. When they don't work, we get embarrassingly disconnected and obscurely personal work like "Husbands," which was maybe the most overrated film of last year.

"Minnie and Moskowitz" isn't much like anything Cassavetes has done before, except in its determination to go all the way with actors' performances - even at the cost of the movie's over-all form. Cassavetes, an actor himself, is one of the few American directors who is really sympathetic with actors. He lets them go, lets them try new things and take risks. This can lead to terribly indulgent performances, as it did in "Husbands." But in "Minnie and Moskowitz" it gives us performances by Gena Rowlands and Seymour Cassel that are so beautiful you can hardly believe it.

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