Theatrical Release

Husbands (1970, Director: John Cassavetes): I’m not cer­tain which of the films of John Cassavetes would be the best point of entry for a new­comer, but I don’t think I’d recom­mend Husbands, which was my own intro­duc­tion. Considered the god­father of American inde­pendent cinema, Cassavetes worked as an actor and dir­ector on other people’s films in order to fin­ance his own unique studies of ordinary people acting out. In Husbands, it’s about the mys­teries of the middle-aged male psyche, and it’s one loud and crazy ride.

His pre­vious film, Faces (1968) had been an unex­pected hit, and so not only did he find someone to help fin­ance the film (Italian pro­ducer Bino Cicogna, whom Cassavetes had met while working in Italy on Machine Gun McCain in 1969), but later on, he con­vinced Columbia to release the film the­at­ric­ally. Nevertheless, Husbands was a com­mer­cial failure, des­pite some intense performances.

It’s essen­tially a three-hander. Harry (Ben Gazzara), Gus (John Cassavetes) and Archie (Peter Falk) attend the funeral of the fourth member of their group, and, trying to work through their grief, go on an epic bender, which lasts sev­eral days and takes them from New York to London.

Although the tagline is “A Comedy about Life, Death and Freedom,” there are only a few places where I laughed, and uncom­fort­ably at that. Instead, Cassavetes’ exam­in­a­tion of male friend­ship, grief, and mid­life crises becomes more and more har­rowing as it goes on. This bender is a des­cent into a sort of howling exist­en­tial hell.

Not being familiar with the rest of Cassavetes’ work as a dir­ector, it was ini­tially dif­fi­cult for me to tell whether these emotionally-stunted, crass and abrasive char­ac­ters are meant to evoke our sym­pathy or not. Their “charm” cer­tainly becomes more trans­parent the more time we spend with them, and Cassavetes enjoys drawing scenes out to almost absurd lengths. An early scene of a drunken sin­galong in a bar must run at least 20 minutes, and by the end, with our trio bul­lying a woman into adding more “pas­sion” to her per­form­ance, our opinion of these guys has cer­tainly changed for the worse.

So it’s not a huge sur­prise when Harry comes home to change the next morning and ends up in a phys­ical con­front­a­tion with both his wife and her mother. As the defacto leader of the trio, he’s the most aggressive. Before his ill-fated trip home, he’s told Gus and Archie, “Aside from sex, and she’s very good at it, I like you guys better.” He fol­lows this up with a few repe­ti­tions of the phrase, “Let’s go home and get it over with.”

After his violent out­burst, he grabs his pass­port and tells his friends that he needs to get away; oth­er­wise, he’d just go back inside and apo­lo­gize and he doesn’t want to do that. All these guys seem power­less when it comes to their wives and chil­dren and other respons­ib­il­ities, but their “acting out” just seems to con­firm their imma­turity, des­pite the macho trappings.

Under the cover of con­cern for their friend, Archie and Gus decide to go with him, to “tuck him into the hotel and then come back home,” they assure each other. As soon as they arrive in England, they want to gamble, drink and pick up women, as if these activ­ities are what bind men together. The only member of the trio who tries to com­mu­nicate any­thing deeper is Archie, but poor old Peter Falk always seems to end up talking to him­self. He’s the sort of actor who seems to end up doing that in almost everything he’s ever done.

There’s another long scene in London, where our three tough guys suc­ceed in get­ting three attractive women back to their hotel rooms. Gus has picked up a woman who’s men­tally unbal­anced, and the other two appear to have hired pros­ti­tutes, but in any case, the fol­lowing “seduc­tion” scene is one of the most creepy and joy­less I’ve seen in a long time. It is kind of funny to realize that the only people willing to spend time with these guys are either crazy or are being paid.

It’s a strange thing, though. Although I couldn’t wait for the film to end, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it for days. These loud brutes, “drama kings” if I can coin a phrase, are trapped not only in their jobs and mar­riages, but in their con­cep­tion of what being a man is all about. Their attempts to con­nect with each other, to grieve their friend and their passing youth, all end in shouting and viol­ence. Their rage is inar­tic­u­late but exposes some­thing, except they don’t have the vocab­u­lary to express this vul­ner­ab­ility. Perhaps I’m reading more into the film, but I want to give Cassavetes credit for for­cing the audi­ence to spend two and a half hours in the pres­ence of such unre­con­structed brutes. Their humanity comes out not in what they say but in what they’re unable to say. This is no comedy. It’s a tragedy.

Tagged as: cassavetes, independent, lightbox, malebonding

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