John Cassavetes

The three protagonists – Harry (Ben Gazzara), Archie (Peter Falk) and Gus (John Cassavetes) – are middle-class professional and family men, living in suburban New York.   Gus is a dentist (we see him at work) and I assume Archie is too (at least Harry says that both his friends have their ‘hands in people’s mouths all day’).  Harry appears to be an art director in an advertising agency.  The prologue to the film is a montage of photographs of the trio fooling around by a swimming pool with a fourth man (David Rowlands – Cassavetes’ brother-in-law).  The live action starts with the funeral of this friend, named Stuart.  After the funeral, Harry, Archie and Gus go on a bender which lasts the best part of two days.  Harry returns home, has a violent row with his wife (Meta Shaw) and decides to go to London.  Gus and Archie decide to accompany him.   After what looks to be less than twenty-four hours there, these two return to their homes.  Harry stays behind.   The movie’s title presumably indicates how the men see themselves primarily and that identity is ruptured when Harry – playing away from home in more ways than one – doesn’t come back to New York.  He ceases to be a husband (temporarily at least – there’s no suggestion how long he’ll be gone).  ‘What’s he gonna do without us?’ Gus and Archie ask.  They also mean ‘What are we going to do without him?’

Harry, Archie and Gus are physically affectionate towards each other – it’s probably true to say that they love each other.  This may be sufficient for Husbands to be included in BFI’s ‘Out at the Movies’ features one of these months (if it hasn’t been already), even though the three men are emphatically heterosexual.   Cassavetes’ technique means, however, that the dominant subject of the film is not friendship or love between male friends or the capacity of men to use their adult strength and sexuality to behave irresponsibly and childishly.  The subject is acting and, specifically, what actors create through improvisation.  (According to the BFI programme note, the improvisation in Husbands was worked out in lengthy rehearsal.)   Sometimes, Cassavetes’ camera makes this nearly explicit:  in a London casino it stays on the faces of the three principals – you never see what’s happening on the gambling table.  You’re watching the reactions of Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara rather than what winning or losing their bet means to the characters they’re playing.  Cassavetes combines apparent super-realism of performance with frankly improbable plotting – it’s not clear why Harry chooses to go to London or believable that Gus and Archie would go too.   The idea seems to be that the cinéma vérité camerawork (the DoP is Victor Kemper) and the acting style reveal essential truths about the people in the story in a way that more conventional approaches could not.  But the result isn’t revelation of character.  It’s a display of skilled actors working up enough heat to strike sparks off one another.

This is often achieved by concentration on and swapping of repeated or very similar lines.  Here’s an example from Husbands that pursues the combustion metaphor.   After Stuart’s funeral, Gus and Archie are talking and Gus takes out a cigarette.

Gus  I need a light.  Gimme a light.

Archie  You wanna light?

Gus  I need a light.  Gimme a match.

Archie  Do I have a match?  [Looks to see if he has.]

Gus  I need a match.

Archie  I’m not sure I have a match …

Gus  I need a match!

Archie  I don’t have a match!

This isn’t verbatim but that’s the gist of it.  The exchange isn’t realistic:  it greatly exaggerates the tendency of people to say things more than once and unnecessarily.  Nor is the situation – Gus’s need for a light – particularly urgent.  (He could ask one of the many other mourners.)  But the insistent repetition enables John Cassavetes and Peter Falk, by investing their energies in the lines, to build up an urgency that suggests that both men’s lives depend on a match being forthcoming.   Once this kind of routine has been gone through a few times (as happens pretty soon in Husbands), the effect reminds me of an art form which, on the surface, couldn’t seem more different from the cinema of John Cassavetes.  A ballet performer conventionally describes emotion by elaborating in dance a character’s response to a particular event or situation.  This tends to make me say to myself, ‘Get on with it’, but that’s simply an expression of the difficulties that I have tuning in to this mode of performance, and the fact that I prefer the rapid economy of screen acting.  Ballet doesn’t, however, claim to present emotional truth in a realistic way:  the acting in Cassavetes movies, which also amounts to dynamic circumambulation, is widely seen as remarkable, and has been much praised, for its exceptional realism.

I nearly walked out of Husbands (as Sally and I walked out of Faces a few years ago).  I’m glad I didn’t because, in spite of the inherent unlikeliness of the trip to London, the film improves somewhat on this side of the Atlantic.   Cassavetes’ view of London is almost affectionately mocking:  it pours with rain continuously and room service in the hotel never arrives.   When the trio start trying to pick up women in the casino, Archie’s conversation with an elderly woman (Delores Delmar) is grotesquely incredible.  Why would he try it on with her, except to give Cassavetes the chance to dwell on the woman’s raddled face and incongruous false eyelashes?   (Cassavetes has already shown he’s not averse to a cheap (unrealistic) laugh when it suits.   In the fight between Harry and his wife, her mother (Lorraine Macmartin) joins in.  ‘You keep out of this!’ yells Harry until his wife starts brandishing a kitchen knife.  ‘You get that!’ he then tells his mother-in-law.)   Archie’s eventual partner in the hotel is a young Chinese girl (Noelle Kao) but it’s the girls picked up by Harry and Gus, particularly Gus’s one night stand Mary (Jenny Runacre), who transform proceedings.  Harry and Gus become more challenging characters here because they’re offensive, ridiculous and charming  at the same time – and there’s much more variety in the playing, especially from Cassavetes himself.  (He is a superb actor.)   The British performers in these small parts are good:  as well as Runacre, there’s Jenny Lee Wright, who Harry starts the night with, and an older woman called Peggy Lashbrook (I’d never heard of her before), who’s in his hotel room with two other girls by the next morning.  Husbands ends with Gus arriving home to be greeted by his kids – played by Cassavetes’ own children, Nick and Alexandra.   ‘Boy, are you in trouble!’ says the boy.  If you didn’t know that Gena Rowlands was the wife in waiting, this might almost be the writer-director’s own return home, after completing a long-winded and self-indulgent movie.

9 October 2012