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Most Hitchcockian is the disconnect and interplay between the charm, charisma, wit and performative playfulness of the three leading actors – whose often uproarious hijinks (and apparent improvisation and corpsing) make Husbands the most purely enjoyable of Cassavetes’ films – and the often vile characters they play.

A remotely affecting experience, one difficult to pin down or to easily digest. It exudes unrelenting movement and talk, and Cassavetes' probing camera, which remains observational and subjective, records with an uninhibited, almost random realism.

It focuses on the damage of masculinity. The chummy schoolboy antics reduce the whole world to a middle school playground and the three old buddies are the rulers supreme. Reducing all women to objects in this reality has motivations of self-preservation as wives and lovers seem to be the only ones capable of bursting their middle-aged bubble. Women become objects to acquire, but also ones to handle with care, as the peripheral power they hold can shatter their fantasy immortality.

Despite Cassavetes's obsessive attention to faces in his signature soul-wrenching closeups, here he reveals himself to be a poet of inhabited space—even the open air seems to be closing in on these conflicted swingers. Few films capture with such life-affirming wonder the despair, hatred, and incomprehension that drives the sexes together and apart.

The film focuses on the intense emotions at the center of these friendships in a linear, vérité style that could only stem from Cassavetes's heightened awareness of the human condition.

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.

Made soon after his first commercial success (Faces), this 1970 film is John Cassavetes's most irritating, full of the male braggadocio and bluster that mar even some of his best work. But it's impossible to dismiss or shake off entirely, and the performances—as is usually the case in his work—are potent.