The disc: Husbands

The details: Your feeling about John Cassavetes’ Husbands probably depends on your tolerance for overgrown man-children. Once you get past the hurdles that Cassavetes perversely erects for his audience — there are a couple of scenes in the first third of the picture that go on past the point of self-parody, not to mention endurance — the film settles down to a character study with teeth that almost overcomes the initial wave of self-indulgence.

Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara play three friends whose best pal suddenly dies. Bereft but unable to process anything in the conventional way, they go off on a binge and then head for London, leaving their families and lives flat. After more long nights of the soul involving alcohol and women, two of them return home, and one stays behind to (presumably) start a new life.

What makes Cassavetes’ films remarkable is the fact that he didn’t take his rhythms from movies but from life, which accounts for the occasional repetition or even deadness. Second, he made movies solely to please himself, with absolutely no compromise for the sake of commercial return. These are actor’s movies, which means that people laugh, cry, drink, vomit, sing, lash out and do it all intensely. Beneath mountains of strangled desperation and emotional violence, Gazzara and, especially, Falk give some delicate, almost poetic line readings.

The Sony DVD of Husbands has a commentary by Marshall Fine and a half-hour featurette on the making of the film that features Gazzara, producer Al Ruban, and cameraman Victor Kemper.

Out this week:

Miley Cyrus: Hannah Montana: The Movie

TV on DVD: Dexter: The Complete Third Season, Gossip Girl: The Complete Second Season, Sons of Anarchy: Season One and The Simpsons: The Complete Twelfth Season.

On the horizon:

Tuesday: Duplicity; Thirtysomething: The Complete First Season; Adventureland; Sunshine Cleaning