Two particularly scabrous sequences stand out in John Cassavetes’s “Husbands” (1970), his film about three middle American men on a bender following the death of a friend – the singing contest and the vomiting scene. As Marshall Fine points out in his new biography of the actor and filmmaker,both illuminate aspects of Cassavetes’s exorbitant, character-driven, starkly emotive filmmaking style.

“Husbands” features Cassavetes (who also wrote and directed) in one of his finest performances, alongside Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara, as the three flail about drinking, smoking, fornicating, running amok, playing basketball (so vigorously, in fact, that Mr. Falk’s glass eye went askew) – anything to help themselves through the pain of their loss and the pangs of mortality. For the singing contest, devised after an earlier scene failed, Cassavetes instructed the extras in the bar to sing their favorite songs as the three men listen and respond.

As Mr. Fine writes in “Accidental Genius: How John Cassavetes Invented the American Independent Film” (Miramax Books, 482 pages, $27.95), the three “gave the hardest time to a former stripper named Leola Harlow, middle-aged and primly dressed in a wool plaid jumper; every time she started a frail little tune called ‘It Was Just a Little Love Affair,’ one of the stars was right in her face, telling her they didn’t believe her, that they wanted it sung with more feeling.” Harlow persists in the scene, but not without tears. It’s a heartbreaking and horrible moment. The viewer is at once floored by this expression of unmediated feeling and rattled by how it was achieved.

Cassavetes, who died of cirrhosis of the liver in 1989 at the age of 59, was by his own admission not beyond bullying actors in order to break down their self-censoring emotional blocks: “I was brutal to actors,” he tells Ray Carney in the highly informative “Cassavetes on Cassavetes” (Faber & Faber), “because I had to get it, to me it was really the most important thing. I insisted on the characters revealing themselves much more obviously than characters usually would reveal themselves in any other movie.”

Of the vomiting scene, which sent many initial viewers of the film flocking to the exits,perhaps the less said the better. Cassavetes included it because “when somebody dies [as happens in the film], I want to feel something. I want to be so upset that I could cry, throw up, feel the loss deeply.”

Cassavetes’s brand of catharsis is unlike anything else in American cinema. You get the feeling watching him and his repertory actors – Mr.Gazzara, Mr.Falk, Seymour Cassel, and his wife, the magnificent Gena Rowlands – that they were constantly working to enter into the present moment, to surprise themselves and each other.

Despite the raw immediacy and impressionistic storytelling in much his work, Cassavetes was not a crude or sloppy filmmaker. As a writer, actor, and director, he was extremely sensitive to nuances of behavior, and vigilant about working as truthfully and deeply as he could. Unabashed about chaotic, dangerous emotions, his films obsess over people in crisis: breakdowns, strained marriages, families in disrepair. Such harsh views notwithstanding, the tonic chord in his work is not despair but life lived fearlessly and with love. There are as many memorable scenes of manic hilarity and unbridled laughter in Cassavetes’s films as there are of tears and violence.

Mr. Fine’s contention that Cassavetes began the independent film movement is seconded by the director Peter Bogdanovich, in his excellent essay on his friend in “Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations With Hollywood’s Legendary Actors” (Ballantine Books, 528 pages, $16.95), recently out in paper. Mr. Bogdanovich’s 30 well-written pages provide a portrait of Cassavetes that rivals Mr. Fine’s nearly 500-page book for its sensitive and touching appreciation of Cassavetes’s particular genius (though Mr. Fine does provide many interesting shotby-shot details about how each of the movies was made).

Mr. Bogdanovich reminds readers that the second self-financed American feature was Cassavetes’s “Shadows” (1960); the first was Orson Welles’s “Othello” (1952). Like Welles, Cassavetes acted in Hollywood films to pay for his own productions. Remember the husband in “Rosemary’s Baby,” the guy (named Guy) who works with the Upper West Side coven to trick Rosemary into giving birth to the anti-Christ? Cassavetes once predicted that he would be known more for his acting – in movies like “The Dirty Dozen,” for which he received an Academy Award nomination – than for his landmark films. Fortunately, this has begun to change.

The films (some of them in desperate need of restoration) now crop up regularly in art houses and small retrospectives. A tribute to Gena Rowlands at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November included “A Woman Under the Influence,” “Gloria,” “Minnie and Moskowitz,” and others. This weekend, Anthology Film Archives will show an extended cut of “The Killing of a Chinese Bookie,” featuring Mr. Gazzara, and two Cassavetes masterpieces, “Opening Night” and “Love Streams.”

In keeping with his desire to shake things up – he loved to make mischief and turn peoples’ expectations inside out – Cassavetes cared little about whether audiences liked his work. In fact, he was disappointed if people liked it too much.It made him feel that he wasn’t challenging them enough, forcing them to face troubling feelings. For him the stakes were always ultimate ones: The aim, as he put it, was “to find out the delicate balance of living and dying. I mean, I think that’s the only subject there is.”

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