John Cassavetes | Husbands / 1970

where do you go when you can’t find the love you really want?

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Cassavetes (screenwriter and director) Husbands / 1970

 

The three heterosexual husbands at the solid if not stolid center of John Cassavetes’ 1970 melodrama Husbands—Gus (Cassavetes), Archie (Peter Falk), and Harry (Ben Gazzara)—remind me of the sports oriented boys of my high school, who quickly married, often in their senior years, had children, and moved to the suburbs, in this case in a working class neighborhood of Long Island, remaining nonetheless part of the large US population of men who never quite grew up, and still long for those high school years which terrified young gay men like me simply because of their swaggering presence. I didn’t like them then nor do I now, nor does Cassavetes make you want to draw anyone but the most sympathetic whore and perhaps some of their long-suffering wives to their bosom.

 

    Almost every woman who has written about this film—and the word “almost” is carefully chosen in this case—and most adult males who outgrew just such teen-like conceptions of the world built around sports, fucking women, and running around drunk or drugged while alternately verbally and physically abusing one another and in their deepest inebriation putting their arms around one another’s shoulders or rubbing their napes in the deepest of affection, have expressed their almost total disgust of even having to sit through this 2-hour and 10 minute spectacle, far too long to even bear for many of them.

      Except a select few males—one imagines those who just couldn’t get enough of John Updike, Saul Bellow, and John Cheever (the latter perhaps very representative of the issue I am about to speak*), who present us with various versions of these full-grown bully boys—who make claims of this being one of the most remarkable films they’ve ever encountered about male heterosexual masculinity, the others have been thoroughly disgusted. While Jay Cocks of Time magazine wrote “Husbands may be one of the best movies anyone will ever see. It is certainly the best movie anyone will ever live through,” solid and stolid critics such Roger Ebert sniffed, “Seldom has Time given a better review to a worse movie.” Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, as tough a critic as she was saw it only as “infantile and offensive.” Vincent Canby of The New York Times not only commented on the film’s unjustified length, but pointed out that when it finally drew to an end, the characters were “tired, but not much wiser.”

      Tony Mastroianni of the Cleveland Press, a substantial newspaper in its day, complained almost righteously that “the film’s dialog is undisciplined and what has been given us is unselective. The camera runs and simply photographs everything that passes before it. The microphone listens. It is like a big budget home movie.” The self-proclaimed arbiter of high-class culture, writing in The New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann declared Husbands as being “trash with clothes on.” Indeed, given Kauffmann’s homophobia, his review comes as no surprise.

     Like many an LGBTQ+ individual, who in the very struggle it took to accept ourselves, forcing to give up the childish things that these adult adolescents never got over in their dreams of becoming athletic heroes and bonking the most beautiful Barbie’s of their class, I long-ago parted

ways with such heterosexual struggles with masculinity, while as a cis-gender person still being attracted to the breed. And I agree with most of the above statements. I too found it truly difficult to watch Cassavetes, Falk, and Gazzara basically play out their autobiographical selves on screen, the director encouraging as he has in almost all his films improvisation. In this case you almost painfully wait for one of the three seasoned actors to come up with something that might lead the film in a new direction.

      Yet their very slow, almost sticky and, even as they declare, “sweaty” determination of keep close to the bone of their confused world of masculine adolescence, creates a strange theme and tone to the film that helps it gradually to transcend almost any other picture (and literary work) that I have encountered dealing with these issues. And shockingly, in the end, I too cried while watching these tortured men who have just lost the center of their previous quartet, their best friend Stuart who has just died of a heart attack.

      The standard plot summary, repeated over and over in the media, is presented similarly as a kind of summary on the Wikipedia site—actually in this case an imaginary notion of the reality the film expresses:

 

“All are professional men, driven and successful. The three of them have known each other since their school years. They have grown up together and have now had enough time to discover that their youth is disappearing and that there is nothing they can do to preserve it. They are shaken into confronting this reality when their best friend Stuart dies suddenly and unexpectedly of a heart attack.

     After the funeral, they spend two days hanging out, playing basketball, riding the subway, and drinking, including an impromptu singing contest at a bar. Harry goes home, has a vicious argument with his wife, and decides to fly to London. The other two decide to go with him.”

 

    Most reviews and essays suggest this trio simultaneously encounters a mid-life crisis which puts them all into a kind of mutual nervous breakdown. But, in fact, there is no evidence that any of them are driven or even successful in their businesses—one is a kind of media representative selling products to other such representatives, another a dentist—and although we might very well understand why Harry, whose wife is determined to leave him and with whom he has a truly violent encounter (along with her mother) from which his friends prevent him from continuing, might be suffering a nervous breakdown, there is no real reason to presume the other two totally share his psychological difficulties—although they most certainly do participate in Harry’s angst, previously described as “anxiety” (as in W. H. Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety” writings) a common disease of the US 1950s and 60s which for these men, who have missed out in the swinging 60s, has spilled over into the early 1970s. 

     Clearly, in their post-funeral responses, and even in their immediate reactions to the funeral speech that sounds something that might have come out of Hal Asby’s 1979 satire Being There, suggest something far deeper and more troubling is going on in their mutual psyches. Stuart is more than just a good friend who they can’t believe was described in the funeral speech made him sound like a clown. “Lies and tensions. That will kill you,” announces Archie early on, clearly referring to their friend Stuart.

     Soon after, when after the funeral before they totally abandon themselves to their alcoholic binge, they play a basketball game, wherein Harry admits that if he’d had the opportunity to do it all over again, “I’d be a professional athlete because they make you feel good. They get sweaty and they’re with guys you like.”

      When he leaves his home after the violent encounter with this wife, he makes clear his truly misogynistic relationship with his soon-to-be ex-wife: “I hate that house. I only live there because of a woman. You know, the legs, the breasts, the mouth. Well, not anymore.”

     Their sudden re-bonding, their close attending to one another after their dear friend’s death represents something far deeper. As anyone with operative LGBTQ+ “gaydar” can tell you, there problem is about something deeper than mid-life angst or a crisis. This is true love, emotional and physical, expressed in a manner that only heterosexual boys who never truly grew up can demonstrate it, like buffaloes turning in to surround one another as a protection from the rest of the world.

       Fortunately, I’m not the only one who perceived this. In Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the Movies, the quite brilliant gay film and social critic Parker Tyler devotes a chapter on 6 short essays, which he titles “Five Homosexual Mystery Stories and a Very Queer Non-Mystery Story,” in which he poses some very deep questions regarding a number of clearly heterosexual films, describing them “Conscious,” “Subconscious,” “Deliberately Heterosexual,” and Deliberately Homosexual” films. This particular work he titles as “Deliberately Heterosexual,” but discusses it in a manner that reveals its obviously homosocial and homosexual subtext.

       Frankly, even I wouldn’t have immediately chosen the Cassavetes work as a text I’d be ready to argue for its homosexual themes. But then neither does Tyler, who simply asks some very important questions that reveal more than what can be simply answered. Frankly this is not his best essay in that series, and his questions are often vague and unanswerable, but he poses serious enough inquiries into the subject, that I find it hard to ignore.

       He describes it as a homosexual mystery story that is neither in any sense truly homosexual or mysterious by the conscious intent of its director, Cassavetes, but since it has the “air of being a working collaboration among its chief actors,”—their collaboration confirmed, he argues, in an interview with Virgina Graham—extends to several seminal scenes in the film, particularly their general “nonsexual affection for each other [as being] much worthier, more worthier, more tangibly enjoyable, than their sexual affection for their respective wives.” Connecting their situation to the ancient Greek relationships between men, Tyler goes further by likening the film to male stag-like drunken evenings that bring to the movie what all such stag-gatherings inevitably call up, the “homosexual issue,” wherein as the group, getting drunker and drunker, grow more and more open about that secret love finally creating a situation in which Gus and Archie give Harry a “smacking kiss on the cheek,” describing him as “Fairy Hairy, as he also brands himself, commenting, “Except for sex, and my wife’s very good at sex, I like you guys better.” In short, if he weren’t for his heterosexual drive, he’d be queer, or maybe is queer despite his heterosexuality. And perhaps that is the mystery, even for himself.

     Soon after, as the two figures, Gus and Archie gather in the bathroom to vomit, Harry, who obviously holds his liquor better, attempts nonetheless to join them, the pair, now in a kind of truly homosexual sympathy for their out-of-control condition, basically rejecting him, at least

temporarily. Bathrooms throughout this fable seem to be the meeting-up place of these men who like heterosexuals throughout history find the toilet perhaps the only place of sacrosanct separation from the opposite sex, a world where they can fart, piss, scream, and even ejaculate safe from the female world. (Women, I might add, have always had the equivalent “ladies’ room, wherein they spend long evenings making themselves up and, at least according to the movies, talking about the problems of the male sex.)

     What these multiple scenes of male kisses and slightly homophobic appellations gently tossed out to one another suggests, so argues Tyler, is the fact that their missing “blonde, crew-cut god,” Stuart was not just a figure that permitted them a kind of homeros (from an erotic combining of the noted Greek poet Homer and the notion of “eros”) relationship, but actually, so Tyler suggests at one point, may have been homosexual, allowing them at least to psychologically engage in the male love relationship that their totally conventional upbringing and heterosexual desires cannot permit them.

        Increasingly, as the movie progresses and the characters join the now completely sexually ousted Harry’s wild escape to London, long after its swinging 60s society, we perceive these self-described “husbands” as utterly, painfully, and quite ineffectual in their abilities to develop relationships with women. Bringing home bar girls, one by one the “boys” make clear their inability to actually deal with the sexuality with which more open-minded women might provide them. Archie, angry with the Chinese woman who apparently doesn’t speak English and refuses to speak with him, is terrified that when he finally begins a gentle kissing session with her, she begins tongue-kissing him. He is highly offended and demands she stop. Archie, we discover, is a heterosexual prude, whose love-making might be far better expressed in homosexual engagement.

 

       Although Gus is totally intrigued by the lanky and aggressive woman he attempts to bed, she refusing every attempt he makes to traditionally “fuck” her, he realizes that he cannot properly deal with such a wild and independent female. And most of the night, so it appears, he spends drunkenly talking about what she can provide him that his own wife cannot, which leads the women to believe that he has truly fallen for her. In fact, what he defines her as being is not even something that truly fulfills him: “Art, theater, music, language,” but merely a notion of what women might offer men like him that his friends cannot.

       We don’t fully know what happens to the woman Harry attempts to bed, but by the time the two friends have lost the women whom they now claim they love, he has brought together a totally unwieldly contingent of three new women together, one an elderly woman named Diana and two others of younger ages to which he sings a drunken but still delightful version of “Dancing in the Dark,” turning his attention quickly to his male colleagues—who have returned only to tell him that they intend to return home to their wives—hugging, kissing, and dancing with them in a manner that he is incapable of with the other women.

      If nothing else, it is clear that these men are in love with one another, even if they have never been able and will never be able to express that love fully. As heterosexuals, they must demean their own homosexual expressions, mocking the love by locating it in the world of bathroom frolics and homophobic terms—actually the way from childhood on they’re learned to sublimate that love into dirty locker talk and occasional violent rejections, the very actions that terrified and so utterly intrigued me as a young gay man sharing those shower experiences.

      It’s all so very sad that I simply couldn’t control my tears, these grown men still playing out the gay intrigue between themselves that they never have been able to accept, but so very much dependent upon the very love it offered. When the two men return, guiltily to their families, sacks of airport-purchased presents in hand, without Harry, and with wifely punishments surely in the offing, they can only wonder what will happen to their friend without them. Perhaps, like their former “gay” or at least symbolical lover Stuart, he too may now be freed to engage in sexual situation in which he had never before allowed himself. Or just as likely he will still remain a boy desperately wanting what he cannot allow himself.

     Oddly enough, Tyler was not the only major figure, along with a few other critics and me, who saw something else in this “heterosexual mystery.” Feminist Betty Freidan wrote a memorable piece, “Unmasking the Rage in the American Dream House,” describing it as an obvious statement for male disenfranchisement and the failures of the feminists to realize their lovers’ dilemmas. On the surface this essay seems to be a wonderful acceptance and realization of males who feel pulls in other directions from simple heteronormativity. Freidan, indeed, even brings in a very strange and—given her long history of homophobic statements throughout her career, a truly revelatory moment.

     She writes of the film:

 

“Why on this night can't they bear to go home to their own wives? The Immediacy of death demands an urgent palliative of human intimacy and love which the three friends clearly don't experience with their wives. Without quite understanding why, the men feel that the human intimacy and love they get and give to each other is more valuable than what they receive at home in bed.

     ‘Except for sex, and my wife's very good at sex, I like you guys better,’ Harry says. “I love you.” Whatever this ‘love’ means, this is real. Are they homosexual, then? There's the inevitable worry about it: “Fairy Harry,” he calls himself, when, in a moment of emotion, he kisses Gus. ‘Fairy Harry,’ Archie calls him, ‘You're out of line.’”

 

    Yet Freidan cannot ever fully accept the possibility that these heterosexual men might ever wish or actually have crossed over that line, and even blames her feminist sisters for the fact that they might have never even imagined it, and attempted to keep their men at home through fuller sexual and verbal intercourse.

     “But they are not homosexuals,” Freidan continues, “and that's not what this film is about. In the marvelous scene at the bar, where the woman (Leola Harlow) sings, “It was just a little love affair …I didn't really know you cared …,” they show what they want but don't get from their wives. They keep making her sing it again and again, to get it “real,” “not so cute,” “Where's the warmth?”, “No feeling, no love.” “Sing it at least as if you're having fun.” Archie finally threatens to take off his clothes, and does, to shock her out of the phony, false cuteness. This night they will do anything not to return to those expensive suburban homes they're working so hard to pay for; but where else is there to go for what they want? ‘I hate that house,’ Harry says, ‘I only live in it because of a woman—breasts, legs, mouth, lips.’”

 

      For Freidan, alas, there can be no real homosexual feelings between such men. The problem must be with their wives who have not been able to realize their own equal sexual pulls, and mostly their inabilities to rush to their husbands offering the fuller kinds of love these men seek.

     Sorry, Betty, but men, even straight men, often have desires outside of the sexual world that females might not be able to offer them, while still retaining their heterosexual sense of identity. Why can’t we as a culture possibly imagine that gay men might once in a while desire sex with a woman and straight men sex with a man? Where do you go in our strangely closed off world when you can’t find the love you really want? Women have long been able to slip into close female relationships, and almost every gay man I know has close female friends even if that doesn’t fully translate into sexual contact. Is it any wonder that straight men long maybe not just for their childhood football game as much as for the shower after?

      Yet, Freidan’s strange diatribe against her own sex, reveals just how powerful the homoerotic and even homosexual feelings that this movie offers despite what Tyler admitted was truly an intentionally heterosexual film.

     Sometimes reality gets expressed in the oddest of manners, and Cassavetes’ open work, encouraging the full expression of his tough actors has told us about a reality that, frankly, neither the LGBTQ+ community nor the feminist worlds really want to fully hear about or embrace. Straight men love one another, desire each other, even might want to share one another in sex, but can’t given their own sexist limitations and those still prevalent in the society at large, even after all these years of so-called gay acceptance and feminist awakening. How does a straight man, even in the world in which it often seems exotically delightful to imagine a gay relationship, tell another friend, I love you without endangering his friendship, his love, and his own sense of identity? There is no easy answer for that even today.

 

*Despite Cheever’s mostly male suburban tales about the difficulties of male identity in that world, he himself, it was later revelated was mostly gay or bisexual, having affairs with Ned Rorem and his long time-friend, student Max Zimmer as well as an affair with actress Hope Lange.

 

Los Angeles, January 29, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2024).