Shadows

John Cassavetes' first film, Shadows, is pretty awful.  However, it represents an attempt to create a new kind of cinema and, therefore, has some significance.  Cassavetes assembled a group of unknown actors and had them improvise a loose narrative involving jazz musicians and a young woman's first sexual encounter.  The movie glances uneasily at race relations circa 1957, the year of the production.  At the film's end, as if by apology, a title says:  The film you have just seen was improvised.  In effect, Cassavetes attempts to apply the improvisational esthetic of jazz to film-making.  He was to continue this quixotic effort in a number of later, much better films, many of them starring his wife Gena Rowlands and other actual movie stars.  (Peter Falk appears in several of these pictures.)  I'm not certain how you improvise a movie that involves sound crew, camera-men, and that will later be subjected to an editing process that can't be even remotely improvisational.  The problem that arises, I think, is that the final form of the film simply can't be improvised (are you going to show random scraps of footage cut together in a non-narrative manner?)  What is improvised, in effect, is the performances and the words spoken -- the dialogue doesn't have the crisp, concise lines we expect from a Hollywood production:  people say all sorts of stupid things in the movie because, in fact, this is how people actually talk.  But all of this stupid dialogue is "acted", often very poorly, by Cassavetes; players -- so the effect is that poorly contrived and dull dialogue is badly delivered; it feels like we're watching a rehearsal in which poor actors are struggling with poorly written lines.  This problem is compounded by a negligent soundtrack that, often, seems post-synchronized and is, usually, very hard to hear.  The leading lady, the twenty-year old virgin, who succumbs to one of the film's bargain basement actors, is named either Lana or Lydia or Nathan or Layla or Lilia -- the name was never articulated well enough for me to figure out what it was.  (The internet tells me that the girl's name was supposed to be Lelia.)  The camerawork is barely serviceable, mostly guerilla-style shots on streets or images taken in tight apartments or night clubs.  Cassavetes crams characters together in the frame -- a typical shot will show three people all within a few inches of one another talking frantically.   A scene near the end showing the heroine dancing in a bar is shot in such dark shadow that you can't tell where she is located.  Some scenes at the Museum of Modern Art sculpture garden are pretty obviously shot without permission -- the actors seemed poised to runaway.  The first draft of the film, as it were, released in 1958 was incoherent -- Cassavetes re-edited the picture to suggest a vestigial plot, although there's almost no real narrative.

Here is the situation:  a 20 year old girl is going out with an older man, David, who doesn't really interest her.  The girl looks a little like the SNL actress Maya Rudolph and might be partly Black.  David is an intellectual with a face and haircut like the young Mike Nichols -- he may be Jewish.  The girl humiliates David at literary gathering in which people smoke incessantly and debate Sartre -- I can't tell if this scene is supposed to be a parody and satiric or is seriously intended.  The girl, then, arranges to meet another man, Tony, while walking with David in Central Park.  She ends up at Tony's apartment where he forces her into sex.  She later says:  "I had no idea it would be so awful."  Tony seems like a callous seducer but, in fact, wants another date.  When he goes to the girl's house, he discovers that she has an obviously Black brother -- this horrifies him (he thought the girl was White) and he flees.  (Later, however, he feels bad about his apparent bigotry and tries to connect with the girl again.)  The heroine, then, uses her wiles to ask a Black man (also David) to take her dancing.  The idea seems to be that since Tony recoiled when he found she was half-Black (or, maybe, just had a Black brother), she will embrace her African-American side and go out with "Black David."  But she mistreats Black David terribly, ordering him around, and making him wait endlessly for her.  In one of the last scenes, we see her dancing with Black David, who announces that despite her bad behavior, he likes her.  The girl's brother, Benny, is a jazz musician.  He and several homely buddies are always trying to pick up girls.  They are pretty close to success in this enterprise when the young ladies' sic some burly Jersey-boy types on them.  Benny and his two hapless buddies get beat up -- but this is just the price you pay in the dating game.  Benny's obviously Black brother is a jazz singer but an incompetent one.  He and his partner have to play miserable strip clubs in Philadelphia and we last see them setting out for Chicago for an equally unpromising gig.

Charles Mingus and Shafi Hadi noodle around on the soundtrack, not too effectively, to provide a bare bones accompaniment to the action.  It's unclear why the apparently White heroine has an obviously Black brother and a brother who might be mulatto -- different mother one father or different fathers one mother, who knows?  This isn't spelled-out and the ordinarily sophisticated Eddie Mueller who introduced the film with Wynton Marsalis on TCM was baffled by this -- apparently, thinking that two White actors were playing Black characters just for the hell of it; this isn't the case:  the film has, as its background, an interracial marriage or marriages and this is the reason that a White character (or an ambiguously Black character) might have an obviously Black brother.  As is often the case with improvised films, the characters are irritating and you really don't care what happens to them.  But no worries -- nothing much happens anyway.  Parts of the picture look and sound like early Scorsese on a very, very bad day.  Marsalis, as host, seems to have been tricked in to commenting on this picture.  He observes that the jazz is mostly just early boogie-woogie and that the more sophisticated stuff is poorly played.