How a significant movie could fall through the cracks of film history is sad, but not completely mystifying: The 1961 picture “The Exiles,” which played at a few festivals and then all but vanished outside of classroom showings, is a sober, plotless effort without any recognizable actors.
Recently (and beautifully) restored, “The Exiles” takes its place as a key work in the American independent cinema, back in the days before they had a name for such a thing. It’s the creation of a director named Kent Mackenzie, who completed one other feature before dying at age 50 in 1980.
The exiled ones, in this scenario, are not foreigners. They were here first, in fact. Mackenzie looks at a group of American Indians who have been removed from their reservations and relocated to the Bunker Hill neighborhood of Los Angeles.
The film plays out over the course of a long evening and early morning. Some American Indian buddies go out to drink, meet women or gamble. After a while, the quietly seething Homer (Homer Nish) breaks off to roam around with another friend, while live wire Tommy (Tom Reynolds) finds an available woman to pursue.
A few characters provide voice-over narration — sounding almost documentary-like in their descriptions of their everyday rounds. One of these is Yvonne (Yvonne Williams), whose words are like a cry for help — she cooks for the men, cleans up after them, but is relegated to a night at the picture show while they go out for kicks. She’s the exile among the exiles.
Also revealing is Homer’s voice-over, a soliloquy of frustration and dislocation. He admits there are times when he looks for a fight in a bar — just to have something happen.
This is not a movie that stoops to offering easy caricatures; there are few dramatic showdowns with bigoted white people, say, which a blunter film might have invented. The opening moments tell a story: a series of Edward S. Curtis photographs of American Indians, quickly replaced by the grittier realities of the modern city.
And what a city: The views of Los Angeles, in absolutely stunning black and white, are a historical record unto themselves. The neighborhood, especially a funicular railway stop called Angels Flight, is fantastically well captured.
The actors aren’t actors, of course, and the improvisation gets repetitive (not helped by the hollow-sounding dubbing, a common problem of low-budget filmmaking). But those same problems are shared by John Cassavetes’ “Shadows,” which was released the same year and is considered a landmark movie. Let’s hope “The Exiles” comes to equal status — it deserves it.
“The Exiles” ½
Found: A 1961 independent film that had fallen off the cinema map, now beautifully restored. It’s a mostly plotless look at one night in the lives of a group of relocated American Indians, improvised by non-actors and brilliantly shot on location.
Rated: not rated; probably PG-13 for subject matter
Now showing: Northwest Film Forum, 1515 12th Ave., Seattle; 206-329-2629
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