The Times reports that Ben Gazzara, famed for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the films of John Cassavetes, has died at 81. In the video, Gazzara discussed his role in the Cassavetes film Husbands.

Looking for Palladin is a small movie with a big, big actor. In a gargantuan starring role, Ben Gazzara proves once again why he’s endured as one of the screen’s most popular and powerful performers for more years than the snow on top of his head gives away. After countless films, he has, at 79, forgotten nothing about how to grab you by the throat and hold you there until you cry uncle. And you are always, gratefully, better off for it.

Written and directed by Poland’s Andrzej Krakowski, Looking for Palladin is the first movie filmed in Guatemala by an outsider since Tarzan and the Green Goddess with Bruce Bennett in 1938. Need I remind you it is a vast improvement from nose to knee?

Mr. Gazzara plays Jack Palladin, an aging two-time Oscar winner who gave up acting eons ago, vanished from the movie business and settled in a quaint, dusty little colonial village named Antigua that doesn’t stand out on the tourist maps and where autograph hunters are rare as pink alligators. His life is pleasant, cloudless and so devoid of stress that he just might live forever. For companionship, he shares an elegant house with a waitress who loves him (Talia Shire). For kicks, he’s a cook at the Café Viejo, a local restaurant. And for peace, he’s got a new definition of retirement. Until, that is, his oasis is invaded by an arrogant, obnoxious, lower-rung Hollywood talent agent named Josh Ross (David Moscow), dispatched to Guatemala to find the reclusive actor and offer him a one-million-dollar cameo in a remake of one of his most famous films, to be shot on location in Italy. A brash, rude Hollywood import in imitation Gucci loafers and a lot of attitude is hard to overlook in a sleepy hamlet like Antigua, and for the first part of the movie the locals do their best to degrade and detour the guy, especially in all of Palladin’s local haunts, where he’s protected by a gang of pals, including the chief of police (Pedro Armendáriz Jr.), the shoeshine boy, the waiters and a group of American expatriate filmmakers who are planning a film of their own with Palladin as the star. Ross is too young to remember many of the classics in Palladin’s golden years, and he doesn’t even know what the actor looks like—a real disadvantage when he sometimes stands next to him in the same room without even knowing it. Two other obstacles to the kid’s success: Palladin was once married to his actress mother, which makes him the old ham’s reluctant stepson, and he’s oblivious to the fact that Palladin doesn’t want a comeback, even for a million dollars, a healthy per diem and four first-class plane tickets to Rome.

The movie takes a long time to make you sort out all of these people—and care. When the unlikely father and stepson finally connect, the movie turns slightly sticky with lumpy revelations and uncomfortable insights. But the acting is uniformly superb, like a reunion of cowboy actors at a dude-ranch barbecue. The cinematography beautifully captures the dramatic hues of the gorgeous textiles, shifting moods and architectural splendors of Guatemala, which is neither South America nor Mexico, but a magical combination of both, with azure skies and buildings of saffron yellow and chili-pepper red paint. Some of the writing is excellent; the scene in which Palladin relives the night his wife (and the boy’s self-centered, indifferent mother) died in his arms is as good a description of love and death as I’ve ever heard onscreen. Looking for Palladin has truthfulness on its side, as well as a major asset most films would throw in half of their European distribution royalties for—and I do mean Mr. Gazzara. As Jack Palladin, a dinosaur from another era preserved in art cinemas and on TCM, he’s half–Father Christmas and half–Walter Brennan. This may be a small movie, but it hands Mr. Gazzara a role that gives him plenty of room to live up to his reputation as a genuine movie icon. Warm, versatile, big-hearted, he’s an actor who acts with his arms wide open.

rreed@observer.com

A valentine to the City of Light, Paris, Je T’Aime threatens no electrical power outages, but it does leave a nice candlelight glow—nothing to scoff at, since candlelight on the Avenue Foch is better than a klieg light on Hollywood Boulevard.

This is a lavish, expensive compilation film of 18 vignettes, directed by 21 world-famous directors (three of them working in teams), featuring an elaborate cast of international stars, about how people of all nations and persuasions experience varied feelings of love (and other emotions) in the diverse neighborhoods of the world’s most beautiful city. Connected only by gorgeous shots of Paris at every hour of day and night, the film is a mixed bag that illustrates the disparate styles of a wide spectrum of directors united only in their passion for the city you can love or hate, but never ignore. The point is: You cannot go to Paris without feeling something.

Moving through the streets and arrondissements, the directors paint their own personal canvases of life as diverse as their creators’ backgrounds and nationalities. On the banks of the Seine, three rude loafers taunt and insult women until a Muslim girl trips and falls. One of the boys helps her readjust her veil, and while she explains its origins and symbolism, he becomes intrigued enough to abandon his friends and follow her to a mosque, opening up his narrow world to the possibility of new experiences. In a printing shop in the Marais, Gus Van Sant’s camera captures a strong physical attraction between two boys that borders on spirituality when a visitor falls nervously for the printer’s apprentice. He prattles on nervously in French, but the object of his attention has nothing to say. It’s only after he leaves that the apprentice reveals he hardly speaks a word of French and has no way of knowing what the fellow was saying.

Brazil’s Walter Salles moves to a grim suburb where a young immigrant mother rises at dawn, leaves her baby in a day nursery, and travels for hours to the posh 16th Arrondissement in the heart of the city to her job as a nanny to a rich woman’s child. Both children receive the same love and care. In one of the best episodes, Spain’s Isabel Coixet tells of an unfaithful husband (Sergio Castellitto), on the verge of asking his wife (the great British actress Miranda Richardson) for a divorce, who discovers she has just been diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Nobly accepting his duty, he stays on to care for her and finds renewed purpose and contentment in their marriage. Now that she needs him, he falls in love with his “patient” all over again, and when she dies, something in his heart dies, too. Japan’s Nobuhiro Suwa builds a fairy-tale charm out of tragedy: Juliette Binoche plays a distraught mother who gives up on life after the death of her young son, who loved American cowboy movies. One night she follows the sound of his voice into the rainy street, where she spends one last loving visit with him, thanks to an American cowboy (Willem Dafoe) who has become the child’s guardian angel.

Late at night in a dark alley in the Quartier de la Madeleine, a young man (Elijah Wood) comes face to face with a vampire. She decides to spare him, but he’s so besotted that he chooses to go to any length to have her, even if it means becoming a vampire himself. In the Parc Monceau, Mexico’s Alfonso Cuarón follows an aging American (Nick Nolte) whose long affair with a younger woman is going through a crisis now that her affections for him have shifted to someone named Gaspard. Turns out Gaspard is a baby. On a movie location in the Quartier des Enfants Rouges, Maggie Gyllenhaal is a bored American actress who falls dangerously for her drug dealer; Olivier Assayas helmed this one, tediously.

Horror maven Wes Craven shows an English couple (Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell) arguing in the Père-Lachaise cemetery and breaking off their engagement at the site where Oscar Wilde is buried. They are reunited with help from the ghost of Wilde himself, amusingly played by American director Alexander Payne (Sideways). Mr. Payne returns with Margo Martindale, giving a poignant performance as a lonely middle-aged mail deliverer from Denver who studies French for two years, saves her money, and takes her first trip to Paris for six days, expecting magic. Alone and homesick, the beauty of the city floods her with memories of all the missed opportunities in her empty life, yet all is not lost. “I fell in love with Paris … and I felt Paris fell in love with me.”

Finally, my favorite contribution: In a cozy café in the Latin Quarter, Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara reunite as an estranged American couple who meet in Paris for a friendly divorce. They share a glass of wine. They talk politely about their current lovers, their regrets, their grandchildren. Beneath the politeness and the sophisticated sarcasm, a genuine sense of resentment and affection rises to the surface, and later, in her hard reflection in the mirror and his aging profile shuffling down the street alone, a sense of loss as well. Ms. Rowlands, who shows 100 emotions in one curdled expression, is the real deal—one of the bona fide treasures of the silver screen. She wrote the screenplay for her episode, which is sensitively directed by her friend Gérard Depardieu and in itself worth the price of admission.

Some of the episodes are of only minimal interest, others are self-indulgent, and many of them have nothing to do with Paris at all, causing the film to lose focus. Things work best when the great city becomes the proscenium for experiences that seem doubly meaningful because they happen there, like the one by Joel and Ethan Coen. Set in the Tuileries metro station, it shows an American tourist (Steve Buscemi) who becomes unwisely interested in a couple making out across the platform. One thing leads to another, until the couple are both shouting obscenities at the bewildered innocent, the girl makes sexual advances, her boyfriend beats him up, and our visitor learns a hard lesson in why you should never stare at strangers in the subway. Come to think of it, this one, as the Coen Brothers know only too well, could just as well be set in New York. You can’t blame the frogs for everything.

Ben Gazzara’s expression of sardonic bemusement came to him early, growing up on East 29th Street. It was one of those melting-pot neighborhoods which contained a brewery, a doughnut factory, a butcher, two groceries, a funeral parlor, a candy store and a Boys Club where the young Gazzara went after school—everything needed to sustain life, or tend its aftermath. Around East 29th, it paid to be alert, and Ben Gazzara has always been a watchful sort.

Psychologically, he’s an unusual actor. He presents himself in his new memoir as emotionally comfortable—not a congenital outsider. He enjoyed his neighborhood, adored his parents, didn’t become an actor to gain notice or exact revenge. Rather, he was seduced into the craft by seeing Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie.

Mr. Gazzara, in fact, seems to be your basic working-class intellectual, an identity that years in the Actors Studio can’t quite disguise. One of his oldest friends is the architect Frank Gehry.

It seems to run in the family. His brother was a World War II medic who provided medical care as well as typing paper to Ezra Pound when he was interned after the war for his Fascist sympathies. "I like to think that my brother helped Pound write his masterpiece, ‘The Pisan Cantos.’"

Mr. Gazzara rose to notice as Brick in the original production of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, opposite Barbara Bel Geddes and Burl Ives. Mr. Gazzara was fond of his leading lady, but Williams didn’t think that was a good idea, considering the hostility Mr. Gazzara’s character shows her character. "If you like Maggie too much, Ben, then we have no play. If Brick likes her, we have nothing. Distance yourself from her, Ben."

Still brooding nearly 50 years later, Mr. Gazzara feels that this bit of authorial instruction threw his performance subtly off-balance. (Likewise, director Elia Kazan seems to have been directing Mr. Gazzara as if he were James Dean, a brilliant amateur with an indefinite craft who could only play what he’d personally experienced or felt.)

Mr. Gazzara’s sense of respect for his elders, of wanting to emulate rather than rebel, means that, unlike many of his generation of actors, he loved the concision of Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, James Stewart—the way they had of concealing the process, of never letting the acting show.

"There are a lot of very good actors today, but those guys had size" is the way he puts it. He pays tribute to the emotional generosity he found when he worked with Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder: "When he got in front of a camera, he was letter-perfect, and always knew what he was doing. His acting was so natural that if you turned your back you couldn’t tell if it was Jimmy talking in life or Jimmy talking in the movie."

He also singles out the graciousness of the unjustly neglected Fredric March (whom I’ve always bracketed with James Mason as one of those rare actors incapable of a bad performance): "When I told [March] I had trouble concentrating when the camera was up close, he suggested I think of the camera as another piece of furniture. I started to do that and it helped a lot. When it was time for my close-ups Freddy could have gone to his trailer and waited to be called for the next scene, but he insisted on being there, off-camera, to play the scene with me. He would perform it as fully as he did for his own close-ups. That was a courtesy that not all stars were prepared to extend to younger actors."

To judge from his memoir, Ben Gazzara is one of those people who’s most alive when he’s working (a characteristic common to artists). The people and process involved in putting on plays like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or A Hatful of Rain and movies like Husbands are vividly characterized in a way that overwhelms the often cursory attention paid to Mr. Gazzara’s lovers (Eva Gabor, Elaine Stritch, Audrey Hepburn) and his three wives.

Certainly the way he describes Janice Rule (wife No. 2) makes her seem impossibly distant from the watchful, luminously sexy, obviously intelligent actress I remember.

Conversely, John Cassavetes—with whom he made Husbands, Opening Night and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie —is rendered with much of the precision, and all the immediacy and affection, of first love: "It was there, in that kitchen … that I realized just how much John meant to me. I’d been floundering in my life and work and he’d given me the chance to have an adventure I’d never forget. He did that again and once again. He brought more laughter into my life than anyone else ever had before, and he seemed able to read my mind. I thought I was good at hiding my feelings, but he always knew when I was down. It was always at the right time that he’d tell me how good he thought I was. That meant a lot to me."

Mr. Gazzara has occupied the uneasy no-man’s land between character actor and lead. He never became a movie star exactly, never got the profusion of good parts that have kept, say, Gene Hackman so busy for nearly 40 years. As a result, there’s an undercurrent of mild professional dissatisfaction that runs through the book. Referring to the stage production of A Hatful of Rain, Mr. Gazzara writes: "This was only the second time that a production originating at the Actors Studio received rave reviews by the New York critics and brought commercial success. I’d starred in both of them. This fact has never gotten much notice from anyone."

Much of the book carries the authentic sound of Mr. Gazzara’s deep, smoky voice: "Living in Italy is like having someone pour delightful drops of beauty into your soul. You have breakfast, you see a Raffaello. You have lunch, you see a Bernini. You have a cocktail, you see a Michelangelo."

He also has a nice way of writing about acting—succinct but not casual, and always insinuating. His entry into actors’ heaven is probably guaranteed by Cassavetes’ Husbands and Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack, an adaptation of the Paul Theroux novel about an oddly moral pimp that contains his finest moments as an actor. He writes, "I loved the part, but I didn’t know my character well enough—yet. He hadn’t taken over. The problem was that I was working too hard to find him. I didn’t have to chase after him; he’d come to me if I just relaxed. That meant being brave enough to keep my performance simple until I understood enough about Jack to make points, to frame moments."

Like a Gazzara performance, In the Moment is reliable and direct, plain-spoke but communicative—and never dull.

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer. His biography of Louis B. Mayer, Lion of Hollywood, will be published by Simon & Schuster in May.