The Complicated Necessity of Cassavetes' HUSBANDS by Craig Hammill

Last week we screened John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970, Columbia). Three people walked out. The rest stayed.

Walk outs are fairly rare for us but it got this programmer thinking. What does it mean when people walk out? How much should that be looked at as a good sign? That is-that the movie really touched a nerve and is still vital, confrontational, provocative? How much should it be looked at as a bad sign? That is-it was so offensive and/or boring and/or poorly made and/or out of step with the current times that people just would rather leave than see it through to the end?

This programmer isn’t even sure that’s the proper frame. Folks probably walk out of movies all the time for a host of reasons.

But the reason this programmer is writing this blog post is because, re-watching it a week ago with an audience,Husbands still feels like one of Cassavetes’ best movies. And a vital important powerful work. So this programmer had one reaction and other folks had their reactions (totally merited and important). And something had to get written.

For anyone who hasn’t seen and/or doesn’t know about Husbands, John Cassavetes had had a surprise hit with his independently made and financed feature Faces (1968, wri/dir by John Cassavetes), a harrowing, funny, humane brilliant work about a wife and husband who have a fight then go their separate ways for a night, each partnering for an extra marital affair, before re-uniting in the morning to try to patch things up.

The success of Faces sent studios knocking at Cassavetes’ door, willing to finance his next project. His next project was Husbands about a trio of middle aged male friends (Cassavetes, Ben Gazarra, Peter Falk) who, after the unexpected death of a fourth friend, go on a weekend bender after the funeral that then turns into an extended week long interlude including an impromptu trip to London before two of the three friends sober up and return to their wives.

It’s definitely a bracing work, even 50 years later. When American moviemaking is so concerned with likeable and relatable characters, Cassavetes often chooses to focus on very flawed human beings who engage in behavior (affairs, mental illness, divorce, domestic fighting, alcoholism, etc) most of us don’t like to be confronted with even though such behavior touches most of our lives.

Even more frustrating for American moviegoers raised on movies that stay in their lane, Husbands veers from hilarious comedy to unsettling domestic drama to God knows what in terms of tone and story (at one point, one of the main characters physically abuses his wife AND mother-in-law and we’re still asked to care for this guy). Add to that a pervasive throughline of toxic male behavior and you get a movie that might not make a hell of a lot of sense to 21st century minds, half an age removed from middle 20th century psyches.

But maybe that’s what’s so important about Husbands and works like it: it holds a mirror up to real-life whether we want to look in that mirror or not. And sometimes we have to look in that mirror.

One of this programmer’s litmus tests for the continuing relevancy of a movie is to ask if, given current sentiments, the movie reprehensibly glamorizes or excuses unacceptable behavior-racism, fascism, misogyny, you name it, so that it’s just hopelessly a by-product of a long ago time.

Husbands certainly doesn’t glamorize any of those things. You come out of the movie not really wanting to be any of those men. And you feel Cassavetes is certainly aware their behavior is problematic (even if he, Cassavetes, also acknowledges he engages in much of that behavior both on and off screen).

What Cassavetes does in Husbands as he does in all his best work (Shadows, Faces, A Woman Under the Influence, Love Streams) is refuse to pretend such behavior doesn’t exist. Cassavetes puts scenes and behavior that DO happen, all the time, to this day, in his movies and leaves it to the court of public opinion to discuss it, think about it, wrestle with it.

Bad behavior doesn’t go away because we decide not to address it. In fact, when we don’t address it, when we don’t make art out of problematic behavior, it continues, there’s just not a forum for it to be out in the open to be discussed and dealt with. And that feels MUCH MORE dangerous.

But even these thoughts don’t address the spiritual beauty of Husbands. The real strength of Husbands (as with much of Cassavetes’ strongest work) is in its affirmation of messy humanism.

Because through all this behavior, one character specifically realizes he’s made a wrong turn. He needs to get back to his children, back to his family, back to his wife. BECAUSE that’s what’s important.

It might be easy for us now to refuse to cut this character (or any character) slack. It might seem obvious that this is where our hearts and minds should be. But if life was that easy, we’d all be making way better life choices. But every generation-even to this current moment-makes a lot of really bad decisions.

Husbands has the bravery and temerity to suggest that people make AWFUL choices but then sometimes realize they were AWFUL choices. And that such people deserve another chapter.

Once you’ve made a bad choice, you can’t unmake it. Until someone invents that mythical time machine. So if we’re living linearly, all we can do is work to become self-aware, take ownership, and try to do better in the ever marching forward present. Truly. Not just pay lip service to becoming better people BUT truly try to change and BECOME truly better people.

But we’ll all stumble. We’ll all fail. Failure and success, at best, is cyclical. Cassavetes’ cinema is devoted to this truth. AND it’s devoted to the truth that the best thing we can do is pick ourselves up, be better people, re-invest in our love for others. It’s a powerful message. And Cassavetes more than almost anyone was able to express it cinematically.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.