The films of John Cassavetes: part 5 - HUSBANDS
August 4th 2010 13:41
I can understand that certain people would like a more conventional form, so that they can borrow it, much like the gangster picture. You can "read" it, because it's something you know already. But if you deal with a scene [in an unconventional way], it's very hard for people to get with the film because of their expectations. Other films depend on a shorthand, a shorthand for living. You recognize certain incidents and you go with them. People prefer that you condense; they find it quite natural for life to be condensed in films. They prefer that because they can catch onto the meanings and keep ahead of the movie. But that's boring. I won't make shorthand films. In my films there's a competition with the audience to keep ahead of them. I want to break their patterns. I want to shake them up and get them out of those quick, manufactured truths.
- John Cassavetes
Yesterday I wrote about ‘Faces’, Cassavetes first crowning achievement. With Husbands, I arrive at a film which possibly divides people the most and is certainly his most notorious film. The film which simultaneously gives me the most amount of thrill and frustration, joy and irritation, as an experience in life itself does. Husbands was originally intended to star Cassavetes himself along with Lee Marvin and Anthony Quinn, a film which was about three middle aged men who went on an extended bender of drinking and self discovery following the death of their best friend. Apparently Lee Marvin and Anthony Quinn loved the idea, but when they got in a room together Marvin and Quinn absolutely hated each other they discovered and instantly called the idea off.
‘Husbands’ is a slow experience with some overwhelming moments, brilliant in some, disappointing in others. Now while I genuinely do believe that Husbands could have been the masterpiece that Faces was, I certainly don’t see it as an uneven film. Instead it was a film which was so close to Cassavetes own life and so painfully personal that it becomes the closest to the actual experience of living that I have ever seen. No other film I have watched has provided the surreal yet hyper-real experience of making me feel that I was right next to the characters that inhabit this film. There is no road map here, more than ever we are placed with in the subjectivity of living and mid life crisis, there is nothing for these men to solve, no external obstacle for them to overcome except them selves.
Written and directed in 1970, the film starts Peter Falk (Columbo, Wings of Desire), Ben Gazzara (Anatomy of a Murder, The Big Lebowski, Dogville) and John Cassavetes himself (The Dirty Dozen, The Killers, Rosemary's Baby) as three middle aged men who’s very own mortality is questioned when one of their closest friend unexpectedly dies. Any film goer who is familiar with the acting of these three men won’t be surprised to hear that there is an overdose of sublime acting in this film. These three men are suddenly faced with an urgency that their life has passed them by and Husbands asks that impossible question - 'what do you do with the time that you have left?'
The film refers to itself as ‘a comedy about life, death and freedom’. Husbands begins with three men, played by Gazzara, Falk and Cassavetes attending the funeral of their former fourth compadre. In the film these three middle aged men go off on an extended wake, consuming large amounts of alcohol, followed by even larger amounts of throwing up. In their time together they contemplate what has become of their lives, their marriages, their dreams and take a flight of irresponsibility as they abandon everything they have and go off to London for an extended bender of gambling, women, drinking and sports. Upon letting their inner boys run rampant and forgetting their lives they ultimately land up fleeing from London again as nothing changes they can't escape how their lives are because this is who they are as people, we see that dissatisfaction in them as they partake in ruckus laughter, bawdy behavior and copious amounts of alcohol to kill time and desperately try to find something, anything, whatever they are looking for takes place in the form of intense male bonding that will ring true to male audiences and have them in stitches.
The very source and point of ‘Husbands’ experience comes out of the death of John Cassavetes younger brother, Nicholas Cassavetes. In the cathartic experience of creating Husbands - Cassavetes resists the traditional tendency to obviously make any point through the editing process. While the film has traditional edits from person to person, that is however as far as it is prepared to go. We are left with the raw experience of these three men, as they attempt to figure out what they have done right and wrong, just where, why and how their lives fell into mediocrity and banality.
This results in a film that demands multiple viewings for you to patiently discover its riches and dig an obscures masterpiece out from the overflow of unprocessed rawness in Cassavetes' most difficult film. This is what I find so admirable about this movie, call Cassavetes reckless but he refused to edit together a film which lightly washed over the experience of these characters, he sticks us right down in the mud with them as we struggle ourselves to perceive what is really happening and if there has even been any change in them as people.
A bizarre scene from Husbands, Archie (Peter Falk) is dared to pick up an old woman
Husbands could possibly be the funniest film ever made about life and death, in fact the original edit was by all accounts hilarious, edited by the Tanner brothers who were masters of comedy editing. To paraphrase Cassavetes himself, “the edit of Husbands is wonderful, a really funny film that Columbia pictures are very pleased with and it’s a pity that no one will ever get to see it”. Cassavetes ripped Columbia’s edit away from them as it was his right to do, according to his contract, and re-edited a much tougher film to sit through. In return for his efforts Columbia pulled the film from the cinema as soon as it started turning out poor box office return (also there were many people walking out the film who repulsed by the 11 minute scene involving an unappetisingly realistic vomiting contest that these men have after a few days of binge drinking) and Columbia also refused to release the film on video until 1999 (which included a certain 11 minute scene mysteriously gone from the film).
There are legendary stories behind the making of Husbands, Cassavetes essentially pulled a con on the producer to get the money for it, who was a young inexperienced Italian producer who had just produced Machine Gun McCain, then apparently when filming Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara felt that their unconventional methods of eliciting great spontaneous performances were being hampered by the over experienced crew and Cassavetes would give most of the crew fake call sheets for the next day and just give a hand full of crew the real locations, so they could be left in piece to experiement with different takes and performances. Husbands succeeded so well in putting you through the confusion that these men felt in their lives that the film back fired as many critics just thought the film itself was muddled and undisciplined, which wasnt the case as Cassavetes went to great preparation to achieve this effect.
Husbands is ultimately a very brave film which compromises the entertainment value of itself in search of the journey you land up having with three middle aged men who are figuratively lost at sea and enter full crisis mode. Husbands is indebted to Sydney Lumet's film Bye Bye Braverman. Film maker and critic Peter Bogdanovich claimed that Husbands was the only film that was ever made which addressed the dysfunction between men and women that the sexual revolution would leave in it's wake, and the way the women are treated in this film reveals this quite severely.
Popular Orble film critic and walking film encyclopedia who writes for JDM Film Reviews once made an excellent observation during our screening of Husbands. He stated that the only other film made about men feeling their lives had hit a dead end, since Husbands was made, has been Fight Club, which arrived thirty years later (perhaps he can elaborate more on the idea below in the comments section). Watching Husbands in between it's moments of hilarity can sometimes feel like a slog and it's a long film with overly drawn out scenes but it's possibly the most important film ever made about men.
Here is another clip from Husbands
- John Cassavetes
CINEMA REACHES IT'S BREAKING POINT
Husbands - finally released decades after it's brief theatrical run
Yesterday I wrote about ‘Faces’, Cassavetes first crowning achievement. With Husbands, I arrive at a film which possibly divides people the most and is certainly his most notorious film. The film which simultaneously gives me the most amount of thrill and frustration, joy and irritation, as an experience in life itself does. Husbands was originally intended to star Cassavetes himself along with Lee Marvin and Anthony Quinn, a film which was about three middle aged men who went on an extended bender of drinking and self discovery following the death of their best friend. Apparently Lee Marvin and Anthony Quinn loved the idea, but when they got in a room together Marvin and Quinn absolutely hated each other they discovered and instantly called the idea off.
‘Husbands’ is a slow experience with some overwhelming moments, brilliant in some, disappointing in others. Now while I genuinely do believe that Husbands could have been the masterpiece that Faces was, I certainly don’t see it as an uneven film. Instead it was a film which was so close to Cassavetes own life and so painfully personal that it becomes the closest to the actual experience of living that I have ever seen. No other film I have watched has provided the surreal yet hyper-real experience of making me feel that I was right next to the characters that inhabit this film. There is no road map here, more than ever we are placed with in the subjectivity of living and mid life crisis, there is nothing for these men to solve, no external obstacle for them to overcome except them selves.
Meet the men of Husbands
Written and directed in 1970, the film starts Peter Falk (Columbo, Wings of Desire), Ben Gazzara (Anatomy of a Murder, The Big Lebowski, Dogville) and John Cassavetes himself (The Dirty Dozen, The Killers, Rosemary's Baby) as three middle aged men who’s very own mortality is questioned when one of their closest friend unexpectedly dies. Any film goer who is familiar with the acting of these three men won’t be surprised to hear that there is an overdose of sublime acting in this film. These three men are suddenly faced with an urgency that their life has passed them by and Husbands asks that impossible question - 'what do you do with the time that you have left?'
The film refers to itself as ‘a comedy about life, death and freedom’. Husbands begins with three men, played by Gazzara, Falk and Cassavetes attending the funeral of their former fourth compadre. In the film these three middle aged men go off on an extended wake, consuming large amounts of alcohol, followed by even larger amounts of throwing up. In their time together they contemplate what has become of their lives, their marriages, their dreams and take a flight of irresponsibility as they abandon everything they have and go off to London for an extended bender of gambling, women, drinking and sports. Upon letting their inner boys run rampant and forgetting their lives they ultimately land up fleeing from London again as nothing changes they can't escape how their lives are because this is who they are as people, we see that dissatisfaction in them as they partake in ruckus laughter, bawdy behavior and copious amounts of alcohol to kill time and desperately try to find something, anything, whatever they are looking for takes place in the form of intense male bonding that will ring true to male audiences and have them in stitches.
John cassavetes and Ben Gazzara in full flight - or is that fight...
The very source and point of ‘Husbands’ experience comes out of the death of John Cassavetes younger brother, Nicholas Cassavetes. In the cathartic experience of creating Husbands - Cassavetes resists the traditional tendency to obviously make any point through the editing process. While the film has traditional edits from person to person, that is however as far as it is prepared to go. We are left with the raw experience of these three men, as they attempt to figure out what they have done right and wrong, just where, why and how their lives fell into mediocrity and banality.
This results in a film that demands multiple viewings for you to patiently discover its riches and dig an obscures masterpiece out from the overflow of unprocessed rawness in Cassavetes' most difficult film. This is what I find so admirable about this movie, call Cassavetes reckless but he refused to edit together a film which lightly washed over the experience of these characters, he sticks us right down in the mud with them as we struggle ourselves to perceive what is really happening and if there has even been any change in them as people.
A bizarre scene from Husbands, Archie (Peter Falk) is dared to pick up an old woman
Husbands could possibly be the funniest film ever made about life and death, in fact the original edit was by all accounts hilarious, edited by the Tanner brothers who were masters of comedy editing. To paraphrase Cassavetes himself, “the edit of Husbands is wonderful, a really funny film that Columbia pictures are very pleased with and it’s a pity that no one will ever get to see it”. Cassavetes ripped Columbia’s edit away from them as it was his right to do, according to his contract, and re-edited a much tougher film to sit through. In return for his efforts Columbia pulled the film from the cinema as soon as it started turning out poor box office return (also there were many people walking out the film who repulsed by the 11 minute scene involving an unappetisingly realistic vomiting contest that these men have after a few days of binge drinking) and Columbia also refused to release the film on video until 1999 (which included a certain 11 minute scene mysteriously gone from the film).
Grown men clowning about in public
There are legendary stories behind the making of Husbands, Cassavetes essentially pulled a con on the producer to get the money for it, who was a young inexperienced Italian producer who had just produced Machine Gun McCain, then apparently when filming Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara felt that their unconventional methods of eliciting great spontaneous performances were being hampered by the over experienced crew and Cassavetes would give most of the crew fake call sheets for the next day and just give a hand full of crew the real locations, so they could be left in piece to experiement with different takes and performances. Husbands succeeded so well in putting you through the confusion that these men felt in their lives that the film back fired as many critics just thought the film itself was muddled and undisciplined, which wasnt the case as Cassavetes went to great preparation to achieve this effect.
Ben Gazzara giving his greatest performance ever in 'Husbands'
Husbands is ultimately a very brave film which compromises the entertainment value of itself in search of the journey you land up having with three middle aged men who are figuratively lost at sea and enter full crisis mode. Husbands is indebted to Sydney Lumet's film Bye Bye Braverman. Film maker and critic Peter Bogdanovich claimed that Husbands was the only film that was ever made which addressed the dysfunction between men and women that the sexual revolution would leave in it's wake, and the way the women are treated in this film reveals this quite severely.
Popular Orble film critic and walking film encyclopedia who writes for JDM Film Reviews once made an excellent observation during our screening of Husbands. He stated that the only other film made about men feeling their lives had hit a dead end, since Husbands was made, has been Fight Club, which arrived thirty years later (perhaps he can elaborate more on the idea below in the comments section). Watching Husbands in between it's moments of hilarity can sometimes feel like a slog and it's a long film with overly drawn out scenes but it's possibly the most important film ever made about men.
Here is another clip from Husbands
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Comment by David O'Connell
Screen Fanatic
Comment by ShaunK
Screen Adventure
Husbands is a remarkable example of a film that was trying to achieve something that ultimately couldn't even be contained by the medium itself.
Really hope you keep reading as most of these films completely changed cinema forever. Many of these films were revolutionary and made demands on viewers that forced them to change the very way they processed meanings.
Film critic Adrian Martin said that thirty years later, modern masters like Mike Leigh or Lars Von Trier still havn't managed to reach the breakthroughs in their study of human experience that this man achieved, in fact only one other person came close and I will be writing about that film tomorrow as part of the series, where I'll explain why it's being included.
David, please also check out my review for Faces, which is essential viewing and a master piece as well as Blast Of Silence which was also a key film by one of the original New York film makers who originally pioneered independent film in the late fifties!
Comment by Matt Shea
20/20 Filmsight
Comment by ShaunK
Screen Adventure
Man time indeed!
when this was only available on deleted VHS I took place in a fierce E-bay bidding war for it - landed up shelling out 150 clams for it and a an old VHS with torn cover is just what I got. Cant wait to get the DVD of this (complete with vomiting contest scene back in again - yeeeeuck
Comment by JohnDoe
Film & TV on DVD
Will return once I have had a screening.