John Cassavetes' Husbands
June 30th 2008 08:53
Meet the men of Husbands
Last week I wrote about ‘Faces’, Cassavetes first crowning achievement.. This week in the 5th part of my series on Cassavetes films I get to the film which simultaneously gives me the most amount of thrill and frustration, joy and irritation, as an experience in life itself does. ‘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 themselves that inhibit this film.
Written and directed in 1970, the film starts Peter Falk (Columbo, Wings of Desire), Ben Gazzara (Anatomy of a Murder, The Big Lebowski) and John Cassavetes himself (The Dirty Dozen, The Killers) as three middle aged men who aren’t just having a midlife crisis but are having a down right ‘what-has-been-the-point-of-m y-entire-life meltdown’. 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, which was financed independently and distributed through Columbia.
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 we see that the dissatisfaction they have won’t go away.
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. 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 any objectivity over what is happening.
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).
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.
Here is a clip from Husbands
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