Reviewed by: Arnold P.

Arnold's Score:
8.75

Plot/Story

9

Characters

9

Acting

9

Cinematography

8

Production Design

8

Soundtrack

8

Execution

9

Emotional Impact

10


Review:

In 1970, Husbands must have been an unfamiliar journey. To describe this film as groundbreaking and unique would not have been an exaggeration. And it holds up after half a century. The trigger for the emotional crisis would resurface thirteen years later in The Big Chill. In the film, Ben Gazzara's character, Harry says to his two best friends: “Apart from sex, which my wife is very good at, I like you guys better.” And that's the theme of Husbands, but how it is explored is the product of the genius of John Cassavetes and his collaborators, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. Using their own money and shooting over a two-year period, the three actors bonded over the experience. Underappreciated in its time, Husbands has been made available by the Criterion Collection. The Blu-ray release in 2020 includes the three actors' appearance on The Dick Cavett Show (shot on September 21, 1970). The words of Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara during the film's release would better approximate the film viewing experience than anything I could write about Husbands. "Can you recognize the difference between real sentiment and sentimentality? ...I made a picture that doesn't have any sentimentality in it but has a great deal of feeling in it. It has the kind of emotions that we've all experienced but we really don't see on the screen. The kind of emotions that kinda get lost because they're no longer contrived in our film. They're genuine. The like, hope, irritation, frustration, anger, friendship, love, bewilderment, confusion--they're all there." - Peter Falk. "It is a picture about, it is a picture, and the first picture made, from my point, that shows male love in, in the way it is, in life. The male affection, the male uh...what some guy, some intellectual wrote a book called Men in Groups. It shows that without intellectualizing, or without, without preaching. It shows it on the most tender, beautiful level of any film ever made." - Ben Gazzara

Whoops, looks like something went wrong.

1/1 ErrorException in Filesystem.php line 81: file_put_contents(): Only 0 of 283 bytes written, possibly out of free disk space

  1. in Filesystem.php line 81
  2. at HandleExceptions->handleError('2', 'file_put_contents(): Only 0 of 283 bytes written, possibly out of free disk space', '/var/www/fadviews/vendor/laravel/framework/src/Illuminate/Filesystem/Filesystem.php', '81', array('path' => '/var/www/fadviews/storage/framework/sessions/2f1d5249a9557f74fefc5aff29f8eec35dad0046', 'contents' => 'a:4:{s:6:"_token";s:40:"bLqsp5iYwmEmQHZuHwp5q7RJUefVcLCkY7wy5oNI";s:9:"_previous";a:1:{s:3:"url";s:46:"https://www.fadviews.com/reviews/film/40/52105";}s:9:"_sf2_meta";a:3:{s:1:"u";i:1711706702;s:1:"c";i:1711706702;s:1:"l";s:1:"0";}s:5:"flash";a:2:{s:3:"old";a:0:{}s:3:"new";a:0:{}}}', 'lock' => true))
  3. at file_put_contents('/var/www/fadviews/storage/framework/sessions/2f1d5249a9557f74fefc5aff29f8eec35dad0046', 'a:4:{s:6:"_token";s:40:"bLqsp5iYwmEmQHZuHwp5q7RJUefVcLCkY7wy5oNI";s:9:"_previous";a:1:{s:3:"url";s:46:"https://www.fadviews.com/reviews/film/40/52105";}s:9:"_sf2_meta";a:3:{s:1:"u";i:1711706702;s:1:"c";i:1711706702;s:1:"l";s:1:"0";}s:5:"flash";a:2:{s:3:"old";a:0:{}s:3:"new";a:0:{}}}', '2') in Filesystem.php line 81
  4. at Filesystem->put('/var/www/fadviews/storage/framework/sessions/2f1d5249a9557f74fefc5aff29f8eec35dad0046', 'a:4:{s:6:"_token";s:40:"bLqsp5iYwmEmQHZuHwp5q7RJUefVcLCkY7wy5oNI";s:9:"_previous";a:1:{s:3:"url";s:46:"https://www.fadviews.com/reviews/film/40/52105";}s:9:"_sf2_meta";a:3:{s:1:"u";i:1711706702;s:1:"c";i:1711706702;s:1:"l";s:1:"0";}s:5:"flash";a:2:{s:3:"old";a:0:{}s:3:"new";a:0:{}}}', true) in FileSessionHandler.php line 71
  5. at FileSessionHandler->write('2f1d5249a9557f74fefc5aff29f8eec35dad0046', 'a:4:{s:6:"_token";s:40:"bLqsp5iYwmEmQHZuHwp5q7RJUefVcLCkY7wy5oNI";s:9:"_previous";a:1:{s:3:"url";s:46:"https://www.fadviews.com/reviews/film/40/52105";}s:9:"_sf2_meta";a:3:{s:1:"u";i:1711706702;s:1:"c";i:1711706702;s:1:"l";s:1:"0";}s:5:"flash";a:2:{s:3:"old";a:0:{}s:3:"new";a:0:{}}}') in Store.php line 262
  6. at Store->save() in StartSession.php line 88
  7. at StartSession->terminate(object(Request), object(Response)) in Kernel.php line 138
  8. at Kernel->terminate(object(Request), object(Response)) in index.php line 58