Shadows' most charmed moment is that in which Ben Carruthers and two pals careen through the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art, humorously critiquing the works-only to be caught short by the reflection of their own pain in the statues. Husbands brings that romp out of the Modern into middle-age. In the buddy film to end all buddy films, Cassavetes, Ben Gazzara and Peter Falk go off on a forty-eight-hour bender after the funeral of a fourth friend brings them within uncomfortable range of their own mortality. The spree takes them as far from their suburban backyards as London, but only brings them closer than ever to the death's-face they dread. Falk and Gazzara, consummate actors both (far better than television deserved) were never better than in their work with Cassavetes, and Husbands puts their method (capital M) in focus: it is less a question of improvisation than of a collective search for character. The resultant film is savagely funny and most inescapably expressive in its characters' failed attempts at expression. The film was not universally adored by mainstream critics-they felt curiously "left out" of the camaraderie, the intense love between these characters, these actors and this director-but Larry Cohen wrote for Hollywood Reporter, "Husbands is a great film in that it subtly stresses that relationships between people are not static enterprises...that feelings are strangely evasive creatures...The rewards of such an approach consist of individual moments of amazing grace, of private declarations of need, frustration and personal affection."