Shadows
Director: John Cassavetes
Year Released: 1959
Rating: 3.0
Extremely "rough," improvised film that (thankfully) keeps its racial tones in check. It feels like a student film until you realize the warmth and intelligence and reality beneath it all - calling it fiction would be absurd - and its unquestionable effectiveness as a portrait of Beatnik New York City. The actors aren't the best, and the print is atrocious, but it's the visual equivalent of reading Kerouac or Ginsburg - constantly moving, constantly looking for the 'next big thing,' wandering the Negro streets at dawn, looking for a place to drink and pick up women (or get picked up). That it is so completely formless may be a turn off to some (the notes say it's about a relationship between a black girl with a white male but that's hardly a definitive description), but as a beginning of Cassavetes' controversial career, it's prophetic.
