• Shadows

7/7/21 (Wed)

This short but rambling 1959 feature by John Cassavetes is supposedly a landmark in independent cinema, but I won’t hold that against it. He made a reportedly impenetrable improvised version two years earlier (which explains the background shot on Broadway showing The Most Happy Fella) but remade it with several re-shot scenes in a fuller and more scripted version. Given how disjointed the result is, I can’t imagine the original.

The story, such as it is, revolves around three mixed-race siblings, two of whom can pass for white (no surprise since the actors are as lily white as the black actor is black – no mixed-race talent was harmed in this filming). The dark-skinned brother is a wanna-be lounge singer who, blissfully unaware of his lack of talent, balks at being reduced to an announcer for burlesque dancers, causing conflicts with his manager; the light-skinned brother, a wanna-be trumpeter in a James Dean mold who spends less time playing music than running around with his mates on the street and picking up women; and the light-skinned sister, a wanna-be writer whose high society aspirations clash with reality when a suitor pulls away after discovering her mixed heritage. They are presented without fear or favor, none coming off as particularly angelic. They are ultimately sketches rather than characters, and the stories drift rather than develop. A bit more scripting might have filled in some of the large blanks. In the end, things seem to work out for all. The black brother has agreed to a gig in Chicago, suggesting a career ahead (he meets his manager in an eerily empty train station). The white brother, having been beat up in a fight over women, parts from his friends and wanders the streets alone in a sign that he is reconsidering his ways. Finally, the sister is paired up, albeit unwillingly, with a well-spoken black guy who seems determined to overcome her blatant disdain, and her white former beau returns to apologize sheepishly to the brothers for his insensitivity and leave a message for the sister, which they appear unlikely to convey.

The film isn’t burdened with great acting but does have a natural fly-on-the-wall feel that seems lived rather than created, caught by a cheap handheld camera (the quality even of the remastered work is spotty). The images of late 1950s New York are especially evocative. The film is refreshingly free of preachiness on race even as it makes the situation quite clear, which was much more effective than the sledgehammer approach of later works. (This was a time when whites were playing Hispanics in West Side Story and East Asians in Flower Drum Song just around the corner, so maybe things weren’t as race-conscious then.) While they might have found a more realistic combination of siblings color-wise, these three had a chemistry that worked. Lelia Goldoni as the sister had the most memorable look, and her story was clearly the centerpiece in what was apparently a change from the original film. Her condescension to the black man seems to have been a comment on her self-image as mixed race, though that is not dwelled upon. (She earlier dumped a white writer for the more glamorous beau who later rejected her, so race may not have been the only issue.) Ben Carruthers as the white brother had a brooding hunched-over approach that fit the character, and the final sight of him wandering the streets was the key image of the film. Others were adequate. The whole thing felt ramshackle, like a college experiment, but it did have its moments. An oddball film to say the least.