Cast

Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Jenny Runacre, Jenny Lee Wright, Noelle Kao

Film description

The opening credits of Husbands roll over a series of shots of four family picnics. Wives talk and take care of the kids, husbands fool around and make funny poses. Suddenly, one of them dies. Husbands tells the story of the three friends who remain: the way they try to cope with the experience of death and the unexpected loss of a very close person. Husbands, like other Cassavetes works, is inspired by reality. Nicholas, John’s elder brother, died unexpectedly at the age of 30.

The film confused audiences. Young people who came to see the three leads (Peter Falk, Cassavetes, and Ben Gazzara) together in a film booed and called them fascist. Marshall Fine suggests they were unable to handle Cassavetes trying to observe his middle-class characters without judgment, rather than being merciless (M. Fine, Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film. New York: Miramax Books, Hyperion, 2005, p. 231). The heads of Columbia, who co-financed and distributed movie, removed 11 minutes from a drinking and vomiting scene stressing that it was impossible for the audience to stand. Some critics wrote that Husbands confirmed Cassavetes’ status as an independent maverick. Others saw it as proof that he was an impostor. Betty Friedan, a feminist activist, said, Strangely enough, Husbands, a movie made by men about men’s love for other men, is the strongest statement of the case for women’s liberation I have ever yet seen on stage or screen. (‘New York Times’ 1/31/71).

Elżbieta Durys