Husbands – review

John Cassavetes died in 1989 at the age of 59, having acted in a number of extremely popular mainstream movies (Martin Ritt's Edge of the City , Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen , Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby and Brian De Palma's The Fury ), which helped subsidise the freewheeling, semi-improvised independent films on which his reputation ultimately rests. The best of these perhaps, and the least improvised, is A Woman Under the Influence (1974), for which he (as director) and his wife Gena Rowlands (as best actress) received Oscar nominations. Most characteristic is Husbands (1970), a much derided study of three well-heeled New Yorkers (Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara) experiencing a shared midlife crisis and confronting the emptiness of their lives following a fourth friend's early death. After the funeral they take off on a drunken, truth-seeking spree in New York and London. The result is 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. On the other hand, Cassavetes's gifts as a director of actors are evident not just in the three central roles but in a remarkable, sensitive performance by Jenny Runacre as a neurotic, middle-class Englishwoman Cassavetes picks up in a London casino. It was her movie debut and she was never so good again, though she was not unimpressive as Jack Nicholson 's wife in Antonioni 's The Passenger .