Even as a fan of John Cassavetes movies, I completely understand how they can be off-putting. It’s intentional, part of the auteur’s legacy, with characters barking at each other, swinging for the fences in the direction of truth but also heightened into broad acting moves. I loved the way filmmaker Andrew Bujalski wrote about Husbands (1970) and defined an aspect of the Cassavetes style: “The quintessential Cassavetean gesture—a sudden non-sequitur shout, flail, or outburst intended to provoke a response…” I’d long wanted to see Husbands and it’s easier to track down a copy with the Criterion Collection release (from which Bujalski’s essay ‘Vows’ was written for). It is off-putting, maybe more so than any of the other Cassavetes movies I’m a fan of. There’s no indomitable Gena Rowlands to balance the masculinity on display like with Opening Night or A Woman Under The Influence, nor does it have the genre hooks of Killing Of A Chinese Bookie or Gloria. We have Cassavetes working with both Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk for the first time, playing three friends who are unmoored when their fourth friend dies from a heart attack. After the funeral, they proceed to go on a never-ending drunken tear, leaving behind their wives and children to drink, smoke, play sports, run around New York, and eventually, to follow one of them on a spontaneous trip to London. As typified by the very long scene where they berate a woman in a room for not singing with heart, which is filled with drunks taking turns singing songs, the main characters are not likeable, boorish and quite ugly despite the innate charisma of Falk or the charm of Gazzara. They are middle-class white males chasing “freedom” from all their responsibilities, men-child indulging in misogynistic and sexist behaviour who at times can’t seem to stand each other (shades of Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky). There were definite parts and sequences I didn’t enjoy and it goes out of its way to provoke (I remember reading an anecdote about Cassavetes and his collaborators laughing at the back of the cinema when the audience couldn’t take the protracted vomiting in the bathroom scenes). Yet there is something there, maybe just the obvious spark in the three actors playing with each other and pushing themselves, and the sobering finale which sees both the escape and the return home as existentially empty moves. I still think about some moments in Husbands and essays like Bujalski’s piece made me appreciate it more, even if I’m not in a rush to re-experience it again. Available on the Criterion Channel. Recommended (if you dare).
VHS Tracking 