Husbands Movie Review (1970)

A movie that seems to be rated highly, but I’m not sure why, Husbands is about three men who lose a friend and go on several unstructured misadventures.

I watch a lot of movies based on recommendations from random lists, people, and Letterboxd reviews. They run the gamut as far as theme and decade, but it’s not often that I expect to watch something interesting and find that all of my hopes are dashed.

Husbands is about three men whose friend dies and they spend time together afterward on some kind of staying awake and partying spree. That is it. That is the plot. There is no further structure.

I found this film endlessly irritating and uninteresting. After the first 45 minutes I was asking myself, what is this movie? I don’t know if it’s me and it went right over my head or if it’s the film, but this just didn’t work for me. I didn’t enjoy it, I didn’t connect with it, and it felt never-ending.

The vast majority of the film felt as if it was improvised. At one point, the three men are in a bar where people take turns singing little songs for fifteen minutes. During what ends up being the end of this sequence – and for no actual reason – they begin verbally abusing a woman trying to sing, talk at her, and then force a kiss on her. No one around them seems bothered other than this woman.

At another point, one of the men says that all of the three should clean themselves up (although two sit outside not listening to him), enters his own house, cleans up, verbally and physically abuses his wife, forces a kiss on her, and then makes her get down on her knees and tell him that she loves him.

These men have almost no personality other than misogyny and selfish tendencies and if all of this was coming from a place of grief over their friend, there might be some sort of story to connect to. Instead, they just seem like awful humans who irritate everyone around them – including me.

I spent the entire 2 hours 11 minutes (WHY was it this long??) either bored or annoyed by what I was experiencing. One of the men also increasingly gave me the ick, and every time he approached a woman… yeah, just no.

My favorite part of this movie was seeing how large the airplane tray tables were in 1970. Man, they had a lot of room in those seats! Other than that, hard pass.

If you watched and enjoyed this movie, please leave a comment explaining why. I am open, I just don’t get it. I found it utterly charmless other than some interesting camera shots. Don’t waste your time here.

Runtime: 131 minutes

Motion Picture Rating: PG-13

Languages Spoken In The Film: English

Should You Watch It? No

Did I Cry? Nope

My Rating: 0.75/5 Stars

Available: Free on PlutoTV, to rent on Prime Video, or may be available for free on other streaming platforms