Husbands

American lo-fi pioneer John Cassavetes (‘Shadows’, ‘Faces’) already had his no-frills, improvisatory style locked down in 1970 when he made this boozy, sweaty drama about married Long Island commuters in crisis. Cassavetes joins Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara as one of three buddies who launch themselves from a pal’s funeral into a period of destructive hellraising, including a detour to London, its women and its casinos (the rain is convincingly nonstop, although the interior scenes could have been shot anywhere). 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.