Husbands

Saia on Film

By Jonathon Saia

Husbands (Columbia, 1970) – Director: John  Cassavetes. Writer: John  Cassavetes. Stars: Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk, John Cassavetes, Jenny Runacre, Jenny Lee Wright, Noelle Kao, Noelle Kao, Meta Shaw Stevens, Leola Harlow, Delores Delmar, Eleanor Zee, Claire Malis, Peggy Lashbrook, Judith Lowry, Eleanor Cody Gould, Lorraine MacMartin & Sarah Felcher. Color, Rated PG-13, 131 minutes.

“It’s not a question of understanding it. If you feel it, you feel it, stupid.” – Dialogue from Shadows (Cassavetes)

If the work of John Cassavetes – the father of American Independent Cinema – could be summed up in one word it would be Freedom. Freedom from structure. Freedom from capitalism. Freedom from traditional staging. Even Freedom from the director’s own will. Everything was in pursuit of Emotional Truth. Nothing else mattered. 

The critics of his films would describe them as “embarrassing,” “boring,” and like “being at a party after the liquor and wit have run out and when nobody can quite bring himself to leave.” John’s attitude: “If it doesn’t give you an answer, f*** you. I didn’t make it for you anyway.” While other filmmakers were kowtowing to the pressures of a studio, high profile backers, or distributors, John, his family, and friends were working on their passion projects for years at a time for free (using non-union crews to boot). Not only that, but John and Gena Rowlands (wife, muse, and one of the greatest actresses of all time) would mortgage their home, four-wall theaters, and pass out fliers to get people to see their films when the major studios refused to back them. Shadows (1959), Faces (1969), A Woman Under the Influence (1974), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), and Opening Night (1977) were completely funded outside of the studio system and for Woman, Bookie, and Opening Night, John and Gena even distributed the films themselves. 

They did anything they could to get their projects made and made the way they wanted: in order to get funding from Universal for Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), John had his secretary read the entire script to the executives; to get free labor for Woman, John agreed to be a mentor at AFI so he could use the students as his crew; when he didn’t like the posters Universal had made for Minnie and Moskowitz, he printed his own – and took out a two-page ad in The New York Times to advertise it himself; he even turned down a very lucrative offer to videotape his plays because he was afraid the camera would taint the experience for the actors. 

While filmmakers such as Stanley Kubrick or Terrence Malick would spend take after take obsessively trying to perfect the technical elements of the shot or the version of the performance they wanted, John instructed his camera operators to follow the action (even if that meant the actors were out of focus, out of light, or even out of frame) and refused to give the actors motivation (or even let them discuss their characters with the other actors!); the actors were in charge of the scene and their characters. So much so in fact that his screenplays didn’t even contain stage directions. He gave them total freedom to move anywhere and do anything they wanted; as long as it felt True to the scene and True to the character they – not Cassavetes – were creating. No fancy editing tricks. And in many instances, no music. He even shot his films in sequence to give the actors a sense of continuity. Nothing was to take away from the power of the performance. 

His films were family affairs, quite literally home movies. Gena appeared in nine of his twelve films (starring in six of them); his brother in law, David, in six; his eldest daughter, Xan, in four; his mother, Katherine, and mother-in-law, Lady, in three each; his son, Nick, in two; his youngest daughter, Zoe, in one. Parts of Faces were shot at Lady Rowlands home; Love Streams shot at John and Gena’s. Each film began with a workshop reading of the screenplay at their home, attended by good friends and creative partners like Peter Bogdanovich and Elaine May.   

Though John Cassavetes began as a very successful television actor in the height of TV’s first Golden Age – and got that way by sheer determination (chaining himself to a radiator at CBS to get one of his first walk-on parts) and chutzpah (jumping on agents’ desks and grabbing them by the collar when they dared to impugn his talent) – it’s interesting to note that a man so committed to actors and acting didn’t find that much fulfillment in acting himself. He got into acting to meet girls (which is how he met Gena, so it definitely worked out for him in that department) and as soon as fame hit, he became bored and tried to find new ways to make the whole experience more exciting. 

After being rejected by the Actor’s Studio, he and friend Burton Lane founded the Cassavetes-Lane Workshop as a sort of rival program, countering the Studio’s rigidity of The Method and embracing a more improvisational, collaborative approach; something that would prove invaluable in his success as a filmmaker. (Sidebar: after John started to become more high profile as a film actor in the mid-’50s, the Studio did invite him to join. But John insisted on auditioning so he and Burton Lane performed a scene from a made-up play – i.e., an improvisation. The panel was so impressed they admitted him on the spot. John’s response: “Screw you. I don’t want any part of you. I’ve got my own school and I’ll drive yours out of town!”)

Cassavetes’ first film, Shadows (1959), grew out of an exercise at The Workshop. He would assign actors characters and relationships and over a period of several classes, they improvised a world that could form a story. John thought it would make a good movie so in order to get funding for gear (but not for crew or actors; this was the first of many films he would make on a volunteer basis), he went on the radio and asked people to send in money if they were inspired by the story of a trio of African-American siblings and their place in a racist society. This was not only an incredibly progressive story to be making during Jim Crow, but probably the first instance of crowd-funding. By the end of the week, John had $2000.

Shadows was shot at The Workshop and the students were the crew. He borrowed money from famous friends (including Hedda Hopper) and got some of the gear donated by filmmaker Shirley Clarke. They would knock on doors of strangers to see if they could plug in lights and use their electricity. They stole shots. They exposed 250,000 feet of film (roughly what was shot for Gone With the Wind), which took months to synchronize because the sound was off and they had no script supervisor. Cassavetes encouraged the leads to hang out in certain neighborhoods, have dinners together, and do anything they could to bond as siblings. He was already cultivating his passion for intimacy and authenticity. The first cut took two years to assemble because they had no script and no story. It was guerrilla filmmaking in every way. 

If you see Shadows today, it still claims to be “improvised” in its final frames. Yet after test screenings of the completely improvised version, Cassavetes and his cast and crew returned to filming for a few more weeks, leaving what worked in the film and using the rest as inspiration for new scenes that were then scripted by John. This “improvised” title card dogged Cassavetes for years and allowed critics to dismiss his work as rambling indulgences, or worse, elaborate home movies when in truth they were heavily scripted pieces. His screenplays would begin with long dictation sessions with his secretary in where John would act out all the parts, and continue revisions through the rehearsal process (even during and up to the filming of the scene) with heavy input from the actors. Sometimes he would spend a week on a scene: writing, rewriting, improvising, shooting, reshooting, and even then it would get cut from the film if John didn’t think it worked. Ben Gazzara, a frequent co-star, found this process extremely helpful in creating his characters because even if the scene were cut, “that kind of backlog of remembrance about the situation is invaluable.”

Over the next ten years, Cassavetes directed two very conventional Hollywood films (Too Many Blues, 1961; A Child is Waiting, 1962) and acted in his most acclaimed and famous TV and film work: the series Johnny Staccato (1959) and the films The Dirty Dozen (1967, for which he received his only Oscar nomination for acting) and Rosemary’s Baby (1968). He used the paychecks from these projects to fund Faces (1969), a film he spent five years workshopping, filming, and editing and what many have called his masterpiece; though my vote would go to A Woman Under the Influence (1974) in where Gena Rowlands gives arguably the greatest performance by an actress in the history of film. 

While Faces continues the style and desire for Realism and Truth John started in Shadows, it still feels rough, like a master honing his craft. For me, his next film, Husbands (1970), is his first masterpiece.

Husbands: A Comedy About Life, Death, and Freedom (there’s that word again…) is the story of Gus (Cassavetes), Harry (Gazzara), and Archie (Falk); three best friends sent into a tail spin of domestic panic and midlife crisis when their fourth musketeer Stuart (played by Cassavetes’ brother-in-law, David Rowlands) suddenly drops dead. We meet them through a series of photographs at a pool party (notice Gena Rowlands as Gus’ wife in one of them). They laugh, they cajole, and they flex, trying to prove who has the biggest muscles. I dislike words like “masculine” and “feminine” because I think they box people into corners of prescribed behavior, but I want to draw attention to this “masculine” act in the flexing photo. Cassavetes’ films, particularly his male characters and particularly in Husbands, ooze behavior that can best be described as “masculine”: aggressive and volatile, trying to connect through yelling, physical posturing, and dominant assertion; it’s no wonder that Martin Scorsese was so attracted to his work. This photo (in where Cassavetes himself seems to have the largest muscle – read into that what you will) is emblematic of John’s energy and work and serves as a great symbol of the friendship of these men: playful competition. 

Cut to the friends at Stuart’s funeral. None of them know what to say or even how to behave. They are in shock, lost in perfunctoriness. Gus and Archie are so out of it that they yell to Harry for a match for their cigarettes even though he is walking Stuart’s bereaved grandmother (Lowry) to the gravesite. 

After the funeral (which oddly and importantly none of their wives attended even though their families had been friends for a number of years), Gus, Harry, and Archie decide they are not ready to return home. So they don’t. Over the next two days, the friends play in the New York streets like kids, race each other up and down the block for a dime, ride the subway from end to end, have existential conversations about aging, play basketball and swim at the YMCA, and have a singing contest with a bunch of drunks at a bar. All without so much as calling their wives to tell them where they are. 

The longest scene of the aforementioned action, and the most compelling I would argue, would be the singing contest. Perhaps it’s because it was one of the truly improvised scenes in the film, giving it a freshness, a life. It doesn’t progress the narrative (although what scene really does in a film of somewhat disjointed exercises in male bonding and vanity), but it is a great example of Might Makes Right and the men trying their best to overpower their pain with dominance. The table is filled with expressive faces of men and women, mostly older than our leads; yet the friends are so clearly in charge of the moment. They have all been drinking for what appears to be a long time – the numerous pitchers and empty glasses intimate this – and as the men get drunker and drunker, they begin to get more confrontational, particularly to a singular woman. 

“It was just a little love affair,” she sings. “I never thought you’d grow to care.” Each man yells in her face: “More feeling!” “I don’t believe you!” “Again!” Eventually, Archie forces a kiss on her, stripping to his underwear, and stealing her red (raspberry?) beret. This exchange is a great metaphor for their marriages. Three husbands struggling to communicate, attempting to control their lives (and wives) in crude and desperate ways. 

The following scene is dubbed as its most “controversial” although it is humorous to think of as shocking in a modern context. The alcohol has begun to get to them as the men cram into a stall together to get sick. Archie is embarrassed that he might puke in front of his friends, which sends Harry over the edge. “First there were four of us. Now there are three of us. And you want to be alone.” It’s like if they left one another for even enough time to vomit, they may lose each other forever. Audiences were disgusted by even the intimation of vomit (even though you don’t see anything) and many walked out during this scene. John’s response was typical Cassavetes: “When somebody dies, I want to feel something. I want to be so upset that I could cry, throw up, feel the loss deeply.”

When Harry (though not Gus) is ushered out of the stall so Archie can throw up, he finally calls his wife. They quarrel. Combined with rejection from all angles, he destroys the phone booth. He confesses his jealousy of their closeness and admits in one of the film’s most humorously tender lines, “Apart from sex, which my wife is very good at, I like you guys better.” This line has two layers to it: Harry is simultaneously confessing love for his friends, yet defending his heterosexuality by reminding them that he has sex with his wife and that it is good; he is also commenting on the place and necessity of a wife, or at least his wife, as a sex object and not a person in which to confide.   

Harry thinks it is time to return to real life. He wants a shower and a shave and vows to go back to work. Gus and Archie agree to work, but refuse to bathe, taking pride in their stench. The three of them first go to Harry’s house. While there he gets into an altercation with his wife (Meta Shaw, one of the producers’ daughters) and mother-in-law (MacMartin), forcing a kiss on the former and choking the latter. Gus and Archie run in just in time to break up the fight. Harry knows his marriage is toxic (clearly his anger management is a factor) and decides to run away to London. Gus and Archie are welcome to come or not. But he is out of there.

Instead of going straight to the airport, Harry and Gus decide to go to work first (Archie presumably is unemployed or apathetic to his job and follows Gus to his dental practice). Harry sits at his desk, trying to work on blueprints; Gus tries to work on his patient’s teeth, after not bathing or brushing his own teeth for two days so I'm sure that was a pleasant experience for her. Archie complains about Harry breaking up the rhythm and forcing them back to ritual. He encourages Gus to leave his patient (and maybe even his practice). Harry will need them in London, they think. And rush to his office. 

Before they can board a plane, Gus and Archie need their passports. So do they go home, greet their wives, apologize, and explain the situation? Nope. Gus calls his wife (without apology) and tells her to bring him his passport because he is going to London to get Harry settled in. Oh, and if she could go over to Archie’s house and get his passport from his wife too. Cassavetes is smart and doesn’t give us the satisfaction of this scene. The next shot we see is the three friends on the plane. We never see the wives. Not even at the end of the film.

In London, the men rent tuxedos and head to the casino where their first order of business is – what else? – finding girls for the night. Gus and Harry are much smoother with this than Archie. While Gus and Harry’s women flirt in coy and expected ways, Archie’s desired flirts back aggressively, grabbing his hand and promising him pleasure. He panics and changes his mind. This moment is a great window into Archie. Deep down, he probably misses his wife, and is not the kind to cheat. Perhaps he is going along with all of this for the benefit of his friends. 

When they do convince the girls to join them upstairs, we get a window into all three of their marriages (and since the characters were based on and shaped by the actors, perhaps the marriages of the actors playing them). The woman Gus picks is argumentative. He is aggressive with her, manhandling her, on the border of what looks like date rape, yet she replies in kind with her own form of aggression, seduction, power, and grit. Harry is impotent with the woman he chooses, mirroring the emasculation we previously saw with his wife. And instead of the eager and receptive woman in the casino, Archie chooses a woman who does not speak English, perhaps mirroring the lack of communication he has with his own wife. And when she finally kisses him back and slips him the tongue, he is livid and disgusted that someone so “innocent” could know how to do something so “dirty.” 

With their failed sexual experiences, Gus and Archie decide it is time to return home. “We got lovely wives,” Archie says. “The problem is we have to go to bed with them.” But not Harry. Harry will remain in London. He implores them to stay, but they know this moment is over. Like a funereal hymn, a eulogy to their friendship that will never be the same again (and maybe never could be after Stuart’s death), Harry sings Sinatra’s “Dancing in the Dark,” his profession of love to his best friends.

Outside their homes, which we learn are down the street from one another, Gus and Archie inventory the identical gifts they have bought for their wives and children. Each one says to the other, “What is he going to do without us?” The more appropriate question is obviously, “What are we going to do without him?” Stuart is dead. Harry is gone. What will they do without them?

Cassavetes doesn’t give us a moment to say goodbye to Archie, but does give us closure with Gus. Why? Perhaps it’s because he is the director and wanted to give himself the last moment. But more than likely it’s because the idea for the film came from the premature death of John’s brother at 30, and he wanted to pay deference to this tragedy. His son, played by Cassavetes’ own son (and future director) Nick, greets him in the drive way. “Dad! Oh boy, you’re in trouble.” The last line is once again a double entendre: Gus will clearly be in trouble with his wife. But perhaps even more importantly, he is in trouble with himself. Lost without his safety net and trapped in a world that eventually and at any moment could end in death, Gus slowly walks to his back yard and we cut to black.  

Afterwords

Husbands never leaves the men’s side or vantage point (physically or metaphorically) and despite their apathy for the pain they have clearly caused their families, we side with their struggles of fear and complacency. Per usual, the camerawork is up close, personal, and unrelenting.

The film was originally an independent production, funded by Italian producer Bino Cicogna, as well as monies from the three leads. But when the film began running out of money, due in part to John’s long rehearsal process and overshooting, Cassavetes sold the rights to Columbia, which guaranteed they got their investment back and that the film would get a large release. By demand of the studio, Husbands used a “professional” crew, anathema to Cassavetes’ freewheeling shooting style. “The most boring thing in the world is to direct a film, set the camera here, mark the actors, get your focus and light it...professional accuracy seems to me to have nothing to do with content, and since the only people in the film that are truly interested in what the film has to say are the actors, it seemed to me the best choice to make an alliance with them rather than the usual alliance with the crew.” Though Cassavetes need not have worried so. Husbands, union crew or not, still screams John and is his first polished, yet still very personal film. 

The editing process was long and arduous. Having shot 280 hours of footage, Cassavetes whittled it down to four. Further cuts got it to three hours and test audiences (and studio heads) were thrilled despite this long run time; Erich von Stroheim would have been on Cloud Nine. However, John was unhappy with it and spent another seven months reediting the film. With so much material, the focus could go in vastly different directions. The first version focused on Harry. Subsequent versions focused on Gus and focused on Archie. The editors were so confused on the meaning of scenes or even who the characters were that Cassavetes ended up dictating a 400-page novel to his secretary, full of back story and interior monologues, to serve as a guide to the editors. Peter Falk was stunned by the amount of detail John had thought about the characters and was annoyed that he didn’t share these ideas with him when they were filming. Falk and Cassavetes fought frequently on the set over this very issue: Peter wanted to be directed; John wanted him to figure it out for himself. 

The first released version of the film was 154 minutes (further whittled down to 138 minutes) and found audiences and the studio less enthusiastic then ironically the three-hour version; Columbia essentially buried the movie. Critics were torn, but mostly negative. While Jay Cocks called it “one of the best movies anyone will ever see,” famed critics like Andrew Sarris, Rex Reed, and Pauline Kael referred to Husbands as respectively “tortured and turgid,” “a deadly little bore,” and “deliberately banal.”

But I have to disagree. I find Husbands glorious in its “torture,” riveting in its “boredom,” and don’t think that “deliberately banal” is necessarily a bad thing. Cassavetes’ intention was to show regular, middle-class men, suffering, lost, and reaching for connections in their own way, desperately clinging to the familiar while trying their best to escape it, in the wake of a tragedy. And he did.

The film’s celebration – or rather exploration – of normalcy and flawed characters hit the 1970 audience by surprise. People were used to glamorous characters, leading glamorous lives; heroes were heroes and villains were villains. Previous films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Bonnie and Clyde (1969 and 1967 respectively) definitely celebrated the anti-hero, but Husbands created a new kind of anti-hero: the plain, ordinary, American male. “Husbands,” Cassavetes said, “depicts the American man without any camouflage...I think that people in films are expected to be heroes...I try to have the actors try not to be better than they are...you have to have the courage to be bad and really express what you want to say. Did you ever notice how in Hollywood movies even the villains are charming? But we are all crazy. We’re never nutty on film. That’s the trouble. On the screen everyone is perfect….that’s boring.” Husbands, and films like Five Easy Pieces and Diary of a Mad Housewife (both 1970), cut their audiences too close to the bone, but helped shepherd in the personal, moody filmmaking of the auteur movement, highlighting the ordinary people that would populate films for the next half decade (until Star Wars took hold). 20 years later, it would find its renaissance in the second independent wave of the 1990s with Steven Soderbergh, Kevin Smith, and Kenneth Lonergan. 

Cassavetes subsequent films rival Husbands for their bravery, unpretentiousness and poetry. In addition to the aforementioned A Woman Under the Influence, I would highly recommend two other Gena Rowlands lead films: Opening Night, in where she plays an actress losing her touch with reality, and Love Streams, in where she plays the divorcee sister of Cassavetes’ character, who had begun his own slow decline from cirrhosis by this point. The film takes on a melancholy beauty as we essentially watch Cassavetes begin to die on screen as his wife looks on. He died six years later.

“Without individual creative expression, we are left with a medium of irrelevant fantasies that can add nothing but slim diversion to an already diversified world.”  – John Cassavetes

AUTHOR’S NOTE: My sources were varied and all entertaining for this piece. I would recommend the documentaries Making of Husbands and A Constant Forge as well as the behind the scenes footage of A Woman Under the Influence and a Charlie Rose interview with Rowlands, Gazzara, and Bogdanovich from 2004. My main literary sources were Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film by Marshall Fine and Cassavetes on Cassavetes by Ray Carney.