Philadelphia Weekly

“It’s a terribly sad thing,” blurts John Cassavetes, drunkenly slumped over on the subway early in the morning, lighting his umpteenth cigarette after another sleepless night, “when a man realizes that he’s never going to be a professional athlete.”


Such passing, childish and strangely moving regrets run ragged all over Husbands, iconoclastic writer-director Cassavetes’ epically rambling, exasperating and enthralling 1970 masterpiece, which was finally released on DVD for the first time just last week—long overdue for a critical reconsideration. 


Everybody from Pauline Kael to Roger Ebert savagely panned Husbands, the black sheep of the maverick filmmaker’s oeuvre upon its initial release. As a result, it’s often missing from retrospectives of the director’s work and remained conspicuously absent from The Criterion Collection’s supposedly definitive 2004 Cassavetes Box Set. (I myself couldn’t track it down until eight years ago, when I found an out-of-print VHS copy on eBay.)


And yet for men of a specific temperament, quoting Husbands has become something like a secret handshake. It’s Cassavetes’ most dangerous and unfiltered expression of masculine 
anxiety—a raw, deliberately off-putting 
opus.


The setup is divine in its simplicity: Three guys attend their best friend’s funeral, and it takes them days to get home. Archie (Peter Falk), Harry (Ben Gazzara) and Gus (Cassavetes) are model, upright Long Island suburbanites. Proud parents, reasonably happy husbands, successful in business, they’re living their lives according to all the middle-class values we’ve been taught to hold so dear. But their pal’s sudden death from a heart attack has sent a shockwave through the trio as the sudden specter of mortality conjures up confusing feelings of impotence and despair that they’re not equipped to articulate.


So they do what guys often do in unfamiliar emotional situations: they act out. Husbands is the ultimate “men behaving badly” movie, as the three carry on like overgrown children for the majority of these 142 minutes. They drink, smoke, swear, start trouble and pick up broads—lashing out at the world and each other, frantically bantering, bellowing and clowning around, anything to stave off the inevitable acceptance of death. It’s a barrage of boorish, annoying behavior and yet, because their panic is so palpable, they never lose our sympathy.


What a trio! Gazzara is the tallest and the loudest, constantly making inane pronouncements with that inimitable sonorous voice. Falk hunches across the movie half-perplexed, spewing non-
sequiturs, while Cassavetes cackles maniacally throughout. (At least 20 minutes of screen time are devoted to laughing fits.) Their raucous repartee captures the peculiarities of male friendships, marked as they are, for better or worse, by strange competitive streaks, affectionate bullying, and the tacit agreement that most important things should be left unsaid.


This epic bender eventually brings these three to swinging London (amusingly always presented in the midst of a torrential downpour.) Trumpeting their vitality, the boys spend a hard night gambling and wooing women, two activities they happen to be spectacularly bad at. The results are so awkward these portions are almost too painful to watch.


The rap against Husbands is that it’s shapeless and self-indulgent, which seems to me to be the entire point. Cassavetes’ methods famously 
favored improvisation, allowing scenes to ramble and rant in odd directions, which makes perfect sense for a movie that’s basically just three guys stalling because they don’t want to go home.


The DVD restores some footage that was cut after the film’s premiere, elongating an already epic early-morning dive-bar sequence in which our good men preside over a sing-along contest with the local drunks, as well as a controversial men’s room interlude that, considering the time period, was perhaps one of the first occasions in which famous movie stars were ever shown vomiting and farting in a major studio release.