John Cassavetes’ eagerly anticipated Husbands premiered at the San Francisco Film Festival on October 24, 1970. Expectations for the movie were especially high as this was the filmmaker’s follow-up to his widely celebrated Faces, a breakthrough for independent American cinema, which a young Roger Ebert described as “the sort of film that makes you want to grab people by the neck and drag them into the theater and shout: “Here!” It would be a triumphant shout.”
The reception for Husbands was somewhat less enthusiastic. For Andrew Sarris, “Husbands confirms, if indeed any confirmation were needed, that John Cassavetes is one of the major American film-makers of the past decade.” But more generally, critics were divided and polarized; Ebert, among others, saw “an artistic disaster.” Our take is closer to Jonathan Rosenbaum, who described the effort as Cassavetes at his “most irritating,” but nevertheless, found Husbands “impossible to dismiss or shake off entirely, and the performances—as is usually the case in his work—are potent.”
So on the one hand, we’re not really recommending the movie. It is not one of our top five Cassavetes (that list starts with The Killing of a Chinese Bookie and Opening Night). On the other hand, Husbands is a remarkable, important and possibly essential movie, one that is pushing hard against the limits of the form—and of what can be revealed by the process of performance. Certainly it is not what you would describe as “entertaining”—but keep in mind that Casavettes hated the very notion of “entertainment.” And if there was one thing he had no interest in doing, it was to please the crowd. Indeed, the legend of Husbands is that, having initially left the editing to others, after an extremely well received screening of a first cut (that faithfully followed the screenplay), Cassavetes took all of the material (he had shot over a million feet of film), and spent the better part of the following year re-cutting the picture until he finally arrived at the exhausting, squirm-inducing, please end this scene already feature that was ultimately released.
It is hard to describe Husbands (recently released in an outstanding edition by the Criterion Collection), without sounding like a stoner trying to explain virtual reality to a friend: “it’s like really, really, really, really, real—except it’s not.” But Husbands does achieve, in this regard, and to an unparalleled extent, what Cassavetes was reaching for in all his films—something that was tellingly real. The production was developed with the active participation of two actors with whom Cassavetes had not previously worked, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, and it is meaningful that the three would, in their own middle age, from this experience forge what would become life-long friendships. Falk would later co-star in (and help finance) A Woman Under the Influence, and pair indelibly with Cassavetes in Elaine May’s Miley and Nicky; Gazzara would appear in Chinese Bookie and Opening Night. (Additionally, no discussion of Husbands should fail to acknowledge the important contributions of producer/invariable affiliate Al Ruban and cinematographer Victor Kemper.) The point is, Husbands is not just a film, it was a process, and the meaning of that process was part of the purpose of the production.
The nominal story is fairly straightforward: three middle aged men, Archie, Harry and Gus (Falk, Gazzara and Cassavetes) try to come to grips with the sudden death of the fourth member of what had been an intimate circle of friends. Let it be noted, however, that most forty year old men in 1970 were not well equipped to process emotions, to say nothing of fears about fading youth and the burdens of responsibility when confronted with the sudden manifestation of mortality. Which is ultimately what the film is about. (Or as Archie puts it, speaking more generally, “what are we supposed to be feeling?”)
After a brilliant establishing montage and a marvelous, tight, elliptical funeral scene, Husbands shifts gears towards the sprawling entropy that characterizes the bulk of its two hours and twenty minutes. Our three protagonists, who “don’t want to go home,” spend the day and the night and much of the following day essentially in flight. Some of these long passages work better than others—personally I find the barroom singing scene unwatchable, but, unlike many others, consider the infamous “vomiting in the bathroom” sequence to be just a tour de force. A violent scene that follows, the confrontation between Harry and his (soon to be ex) wife, splits the difference—it’s very hard to watch but, I think, revealing, true, and necessary to see. Of course, your mileage may vary.
Midway through the film the un-merry trio impulsively fly off to London. They drink, they gamble, they argue, they pick up women. Two of these encounters go horrifyingly wrong—especially the excruciating scene that Cassavetes gives his character, an encounter that essentially devolves into an episode of date rape (or, as we call it today, rape). Archie’s ill-fated romantic venture, a rehearsal of stone-age (or is that rat-pack?) masculinist double standards regarding female sexuality, is only slightly less unpleasant. Nowadays the immediate reaction to these strands of the story – and, probably, to the film more generally – would be to dismiss the movie out of hand as misogynist, or a retrograde collaboration with toxic masculinity. Rosenbaum, for one, found the film marred by its “male braggadocio and bluster.”
But that is too easy. Jenny Runacre, then in her second film (she would go on to a long and distinguished career, and work with Antonioni, Pasolini, and Huston), sees Husbands as an important film, and, as an actor, a tremendous opportunity. (With Antonioni, she reflected, the actors are subordinate to the camera; in a Cassavetes film, the camera follows the performer, an observation also echoed by Ruban, speaking from experience as the cinematographer on several Cassavetes pictures.) “Improvising within the construct of what he wants,” Runacre recalls, “I broke through something in that scene.” (Something that included hitting Gus (that is, Cassavetes) without warning). She reads the film, and the rape scene, as bracingly reflective of the realities of the time, of the “compulsive drive for masculinity,” and expectations from that time of “how guys (and women) were supposed to behave.”
So it may not be easy to watch the behavior of Archie, Harry and Gus—but that may be the point. Writing in 1971, Betty Friedan put it this way: “I pay tribute to the men who made this film, in the hope that the truth it tells about the lonely craving for love today on the part of the husbands as well as the wives who dwell in that supposed American dreamhouse will make us both more aware of the need to change the foundations on which that house it built.”
Funeral for a Friend
Where to?
End of a Marraige
Archie in crisis
Harry on the rocks
Husbands