After FACES, Cassavetes embarked on HUSBANDS, in which he starred with Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. The film centered around three friends dealing with life and mortality after the death of a mutual friend.
Though neither FACES nor HUSBANDS were very popular with the mainstream moviegoing audience, both were pivotal in the integration of cinema verité traditions in future Hollywood films. This crossover of the experimental and popular was clear in Cassavetes most successful film.

Very Middle-Class Friendship:Cassavetes, Falk and Gazzara in 'Husbands'
"Husbands," John Cassavetes's first film as a director since "Faces," is a personal, almost private movie that is devoted to the exploration of the mysteries of a very middle-class American friendship. Like "Faces," which was rambling and funny and accurate, and which I admired, the new film demonstrates a concern for panicky, inarticulate squares that is so unpatronizing that it comes close to being reverential in a solemnly religious sense.

"Husbands," however, also puts one's tolerance of simulated cinéma vérité to the test. It is almost unbearably long. It is a narrative film without any real narrative, and although it is a movie about three characters, those characters are seen almost exclusively in terms of their limiting relationship. It's as if someone decided to photograph a tug-of-war and photographed only the rope between the contestants.

Gus (Cassavetes), Harry (Ben Gazzara) and Archie (Peter Falk), commuting cronies from Port Washington, L. I., meet at the funeral of the fourth member of their group, a man taken off before his time by a coronary. They are shaken up, not only by the loss of their friend and the awareness that it could have happened to any one of them, but also by their own survival into imminent middle age, that dreadful time when it is suddenly apparent that what is, probably is the way it's always going to be. Archie would have liked to be a professional athlete "You get sweaty and feel good and you're with guys you like."

In a four-day bender that follows the funeral. Gus and Harry and Archie start drinking and talking in New York and wind up in London, where they drink and talk some more and make out with three unusually attractive pick-ups. They continue to drink and talk and, finally, come to the end of a very expensive weekend. Archie would like to stay on, but Gus points out that among them they have "three garages, five kids and two lovely wives." The only problem, he adds bleakly, "is going home and making love to them."

"Husbands" seems not only to be about friendship, but also a product of friendship—that of the three stars who react to one another with an extraordinary intensity that seldom is as meaningful to us as it is to them. As the movie rolls on, through scenes of epic non-communication, including one extended interlude in a men's room where Gus and Archie take turns vomiting up a night's worth of beer, a kind of frustration settles over the movie, like that experienced by the three friends.

Harry beats up a telephone booth and then turns to his friends and admits that although his wife is good in bed, he loves Gus and Archie more. Archie almost ruins his night out in London when he recoils in horror to the open-mouth kiss offered by his girl. In Port Washington, that sort of thing is frowned upon, at least between strangers. They are frustrated not only by the dim present, but also by attitudes established in the past.

The movie, in turn, becomes frustrated by the form chosen by Mr. Cassavetes. He lets every scene continue long past closing time, as if in hopes of grabbing, perhaps accidently, some found truth. The effect of "Husbands" eventually is like that of being at a party, after the liquor and wit have run out, and when nobody can quite bring himself to leave.

With the exception of Harry, who is seen briefly in very funny, uproarious battle with his Wife ("I'm just not comfortable in front of you," she tells him, adding "it's nothing personal"), Mr. Cassavetes doesn't let us see the men except as a team, as effectively isolated from wives and family as Arctic explorers. This explains, I think, the sudden relief and effectiveness of a closing scene in which Gus returns home, where he is met by his 11-year-old son and his 2-year-old daughter who, for no visible reason, bursts into tears. It may not be the only spontaneous moment in "Husbands," but it is tender and sad, and it affected me more than anything else in the film.

t affected me, I suspect, because like Gus, I was exhausted by the manic horse-play with which the husbands react to one another, and which is the ritual that represents the exchange of their love. Gus and Harry and Archie cuff one another a lot, and, when drunk, they are given to sloppy kisses. When they swim, they dunk one another under the water, and when it's all over, they are tired, but not much wiser—which is pretty much the sum and substance of "Husbands."

Vincent Canby, NY Times, December 9, 1970

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