Husbands (1970, John Cassavetes)
Tuesday 10th of June, 6:45pm in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema
Join us on Tuesday the 10th of June from 6:45pm (film starts at 7pm) in the Richard Hoggart Building Cinema for a screening of John Cassavetes’s Husbands (1970). The film is 2 hours 22 minutes long so the screening will finish at 9:25pm.
Husbands is about three men, played by Cassavetes and his friends Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, who are nominally happy but in fact confronting midlife crises after the sudden death of their close friend. Falk went on to co-star in A Woman Under the Influence with Cassavetes’s wife Gena Rowlands, while Gazzara played a supporting role in Opening Night and then starred in The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. The film is one of Cassavetes’s more critically divisive: one contemporaneous reviewer described it as ‘trash with clothes on’, another as ‘one of the best movies anyone will ever see’. More recent opinion has tended to side with the latter: the Criterion Collection describes it as “perhaps the most fearless, harrowingly honest deconstruction of American manhood ever committed to film.”
In his essay for the Criterion release, Andrew Bujalski says, “The longer the movie goes on—and it seems to be composed of small eternities—the more it hurts. And like all the best of Cassavetes’s work, it feels as if every frame hums with astonishing life. No image or sound is ever employed just to convey information. Always, overwhelmingly, feeling.” For more on Cassavetes’s work, see Oliver Lunn’s guide on where to begin for the BFI.