Director's Chair: Husbands

Tell me, where are we with Cassavetes, eh? Is he in, or is he out? Or was he out but on his way back or in but on his way out? Or hovering in mid-air somewhere between the two with a class of film-school students snapping at his heels?

"HUSBANDS" - this is ART, PURE CINEMA, ARTISTICALLY GRUELLING, MEANINGFUL, GRITTY REALITY.

Why am I SPEAKING in CAPITALS? Because THEY do. Everyone in this movie SHOUTS. Well, not everyone - there are a few quiet Brits, but that's because they're British and we all know British don't do shouting, except sometimes.

Don't turn down the volume, man - this is REALITY.

OK, it's New York, 1970. There's these three husbands, right (see the title, duh!) - Ben Gazzara, Peter Falk and Cassavetes himself. And, man, are they cut up by the death of a friend, so they go out all-night DRINKING. They don't tell their wives, who are quite unreasonably just a little cool about this. So they bunk off work, drink, take a plane to London (again not telling their wives), drink, shack up with three loose swinging-London style women and drink. And SHOUT SOME MORE. It's a metaphor for the hopelessness of their lives, geddit? ("Husbands" is full of metaphors).

This is the end of the sixties, yeah? Men are men, marriage is hell, free love has been and gone and women are bored, unfeeling, abused, slaves, sex objects, man-traps or all of the above. No clichés here.

About five and a half hours into the movie, my mate Derek (aka Hedgehog) opened a second six-pack, scratched himself in various places and observed that somehow watching people drinking, singing, throwing up, shouting and pulling birds turned out to be less fun than doing it.

Another three hours passed. The acting was GREAT - you could tell because the volume was even greater, the reality even more real, you could smell the stale beer, and the sweat of three men who haven't washed for twenty-four hours.

I read in a book once that Cassavetes went through the film in the cutting room taking out all the jokes and re-edited the movie to make it less "funny" and "entertaining". I'm so pleased.

Hedgehog, now on his third six-pack, and supplementing it with a second deep-pan pizza, hazarded that it was a meaningful exposé of middle-class mores. He also wondered what the Noise Abatement Society was doing in those days.

Charlene, his life partner and soul-mate, who was straightening her hair in a corner of the room at the time, opined that the deliberately long-held close-ups and uncompromising editing style were designed to challenge our complacent acquiescence in the face of conventional narrative. She also said she preferred Pulp Fiction.

There's just no pleasing some people.

© CH October 2007