Synopsis
A common friend's sudden death brings three men, married with children, to reconsider their lives and ultimately leave the country together. But mindless enthusiasm for regained freedom will be short-lived.
Votre Filmothèque
Cast
- Ben GazzaraHarry
- Peter FalkArchie Black
- John CassavetesGus Demetri
- Jenny RunacreMary Tynan
- Jenny Lee WrightPearl Billingham
- Noelle KaoJulie
- John KullersRed
- Meta Shaw StevensAnnie
- Leola HarlowLeola
- Delores DelmarThe Countess
Recommandations
- 88
Slant Magazine
One of Cassavetes’s greatest and most daring films. - 83
The A.V. Club
John Cassavetes’ films ostensibly explore what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real, but his conception of stark, unvarnished reality sometimes feels awfully artificial. - 80
The Guardian
A brilliantly textured film to be savoured. - 80
Time Out
The film’s relentless masculinity and shouty attitude is tempered by a disorientating, troubling sense of characters tragically adrift. Equally powerful as what we do see is what we don’t – jobs, families, kids, colleagues – as the entire film exists in a selfish interval from real, daily life. - 80
Village Voice
Husbands confirms, if indeed any confirmation were needed, that John Cassavetes is one of the major American film-makers of the past decade, and one of the most tortured and turgid as well. [10 Dec 1970, p.69] - 75
TV Guide Magazine
Most of Cassavetes's cinema verite films as a director are invariably accused (and with some justification) of being rambling, self-indulgent, and unfocused, but it is precisely those elements that make his best work so affecting and memorable, and Husbands, though deeply flawed, is one of the finest examples of that. - 60
The Observer (UK)
Highly uneven, painfully drawn-out, deeply sincere, wildly misogynistic and at times agonisingly tedious. It is also intermittently brilliant, with moments of piercing honesty. There is, however, not a single memorable line of dialogue or anything that might pass for wit. - 60
Chicago Reader
This 1970 film is John Cassavetes's most irritating, full of the male braggadocio and bluster that mar even some of his best work. But it's impossible to dismiss or shake off entirely, and the performances—as is usually the case in his work—are potent.
