There’s only one way to properly pay tribute to a film legend who’s just passed. You pick out a favorite title on their resume and you re-watch it, remembering all that they were and meant on the big screen.

Gena Rowlands piled up a lot of credits in her seven decades in movies and TV. Her passing at 94 last week brought everything from “A Woman Under the Influence” to “The Notebook,” “Another Woman” to “Unhook the Stars” to mind when reading tributes and recalling her work.

I interviewed her prior to a commemorative showing of her late husband John Cassevetes indie classic “Faces” at the Florida Film Festival some years back, and had chatted with her when “The Notebook” became a late life blockbuster, reminding the world who she was in a sentimental romance that paired her up with James Garner as they played senior citizen versions of Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling.

She was a tireless champion of her husband’s work, and made sure to make time for their director son Nick Cassavetes whenever he went out of his way to hire mom (“Unlock the Stars,” “The Notebook”).

But “Gloria” (1980) reminds us that they weren’t just keeping it all in the family when turning the spotlight on Rowlands. Playing a brassy, post-menopausal mob moll forced to protect a neighbor’s kid from the same mobsters she calls “friends,” Rowlands is fierce, focused, and in every confrontation the kind of tough broad you don’t want to cross.

Cassavetes captures New York at its dirtiest, the late ’70s when mob shootings made headlines, but barely turned the heads among the jaded, downtrodden Big Apple citizenry. This was America in mid “malaise,” when the cars, the fashion and the very color palette of the culture reached a nadir. This was “Warriors” era New York, post “Serpico,” when the city thought twice about entrusting its safety on the lawless streets to corrupt, lazy, union-protected cops.

“Gloria” is a patient thriller that immerses us in that place and time in a story that is simplicity itself.

Gloria lives next door to a family whose breadwinner (funnyman/screenwriter Buck Henry) is a mob accountant who got careless. They’re slow to flee the doom they know is coming. A pouty teen daughter refuses to take shelter with Gloria, who isn’t that keen about the idea either.

“I hate kids, especially YOUR kids,” she laughs to the mother (Julie Carmen).

Is she joking? Maybe. But Gloria’s life of dealing with serious gangsters causes her to take in Phil (John Adames), a “Puerto Rican” six year-old who takes his Dad’s farewell “Be a MAN” command seriously. He doesn’t like Gloria, and makes a break for it from her more than once.

But he hears the shooting, the blast that blows out a window. Gloria tries to tell him “It’s all a dream,” but he knows better. His family is gone.

Gloria does a quick calculation, throws clothes and cash into a suicase and drags the sassy boy in disco togs down the stairs, into the streets and on the lam.

She has a place where she can lay low — for a few hours, anyway. It’s the love nest of the married mobster she used to “date.”

Getting out of New York with the child’s face plastered on the Daily News and her name on the TV would be bad enough. In pre-Internet NYC, the mob had enough guns to cover Penn Station, buses and any other route out of the city.

Gloria, packing a nickel-plated :38, will keep them alive with her wits, her moxy and her pistol-packing bravado. She repeatedly gets the drop on the bad guys, who either underestimate her or figure she can’t be serious about risking her neck for this kid and his father’s mob account book.

“Punks,” she calls them. “You gonna murder a six year old Puerto Rican kid in the middle of the street?” Only “sissies” need a “magnum” hand-gun. Not Gloria.

“Let a WOMAN beatcha!” she bellows at one point. As she’s outshot a carload of them on the street, others in an apartment and stared-down and dodged death on the subway and in a train station, Gloria allows herself to get seriously riled up, but never cocky. She is humiliating the wrong guys. Repeatedly.

Cassevetes populated this picture with a couple of veteran movie heavies — Lawrence Tierney plays a bartender, with familiar faces Tom Noonan and Sonny Landham as made men — but was more interested in finding “real” New York faces. The extras on the streets look as if they were filmed on the sly, guerilla filmmaking style.

Although he was making a genre picture, the writer-director took care to keep it real at all times. The violence is shocking, the players the most convincing NYC mobsters (bitching about “traffic” when they’re late to a hit) and mob-connected victims, and Gloria’s trial-and-error problem solving is wholly relatable and believable.

Her ex-lover in the mob may insist “all women are mothers,” but Gloria’s not convinced. “Maternal” shmaternal, she may have to ditch this kid. Or she may be able to bargain or sweet-talk her way out of this. But when all else fails, that pistol in her purse is the last thing they expect her to reach for.

Cassavetes lets this story unfold in a naturalistic time frame. Gloria herself may be near panic, but nothing that happens arrives in a rush or blows by in a blur. We, like our heroine, have time to try and reason a way out of this jam, this city and this fate.

“Gloria” was remade, with Sharon Stone adequate in the title role, in 1999 and ripped-off (or paid homage to) by Luc Besson with “The Professional,” another take of an armed hard-case parenting/protecting a child survivor of a mass mob shooting.

The big difference between other versions of this sort of story may be the nature of the relationship between the 50something Gloria and her charge, a little boy (Adames is too raw to seem a “child actor”) who trembles with fear then sputters with brass at the woman he tells “I HATE you” before deciding “I love you,” a child misunderstanding and too young to take his father’s “Be a MAN” commandment seriously, because he doesn’t know what that means.

The confused, laughed-off sexual subtext here was creepily pushed to the fore in Besson’s gonzo and edgier “The Professional,” which gives that picture an icky edge that hasn’t dulled with the passing decades.

“Gloria,” the movie and the heroine, are too canny to let that be a trap, too sentimental to take such child speak seriously and too determined to make that one belated shot at motherhood pay-off to let that spoil their rough-and-ready thriller that feels indie, even though Cassavetes and Rowlands were well into their studio picture careers by this point.

Whatever movie you think of when you remember Cassavetes, when you think of Rowland you sure as shooting better think of “Gloria.” Over forty years since its release, the film and the legend who played the title role remain pistol-packing empowerment incarnate, a reminder about the life experience and toughness of “post menopausal women” that only sexist “sisstes” would dare underestimate.

Rating: PG? With bloody gun violence, sexual situations, profanity?

Cast: Gena Rowlands, John Adames, Julie Carmen and Buck Henry.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Cassavetes. A Columbia release on Tubi.

Running time: 2:03