REVISITING CASSAVETES'S "HUSBANDS"

John Cassavetes Husbands Among his critics, the rap on John Cassavetes's films is that they’re endless gabfests punctuated with bursts of drinking and smoking. Such elements are present in "Husbands" (1970), which arrives on DVD for the first time this week (courtesy of Sony). But as with most of his films, there’s also a great deal of physicality: it’s stuffed with off-key singing and spasms of vomiting. A simple pickup basketball game becomes (in the tradition of Rabbit Angstrom) a determined communion with fading virility. There’s good reason the film was not called "Husbands and Wives".

Here’s the plot: after attending the funeral of their friend, three middle-class Long Islanders—Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara—go on an all-night bender (this accounts for nearly half of the film). Then, they fly to London and bring women back to their hotel room. Finally, two of them fly home.

Along the way, there’s a frightening domestic scuffle, and two bedroom scenes that end in tears. The men team up against each other, and unite to bully others—one infamous sequence has them haranguing middle-aged patrons of a bar about their respective singing abilities. (In the BBC’s "Making of Husbands" documentary—sadly, not included in Sony's DVD—the lines of performance get blurry, and it’s difficult to tell how much bullying was confined to the screen. Still, you can see the actors teaming up against poor Dick Cavett here.)

These scenes are also—no kidding—very, very funny. The title card announces "Husbands" as “a comedy about life, death, and freedom,” and it’s an enormous credit to the charisma of Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara that we keep our affection for them. According to legend, this challenge was intentional; Gazzara claims there was a four-hour version that was pure audience-pleasing jokiness.

But even in its current form—ten minutes have been restored to the theatrical version, bringing the total to 142 minutes—"Husbands" is, in its way, filled with joy. One could easily label it a film about suburban, middle-class malaise. But it resists that title, laughs it off. "Husbands" would rather be about the unpredictability of human interactions, about singing contests, and making a scene at the craps table, and trying to charm a woman who doesn’t want to talk to you, and what happens, finally, when you have to come home.

~ SEAN HOWE