Saw Shadows, a Cassavetes film from 1960. It's black and white and shot in a Fellini-ish, Goddard-ish spacey sort of way. Mostly people just talk to each other in halting sentences, adopting poses and attitudes, pretending and acting within the reality of the film. The central story is that a guy sleeps with a black woman who passes for white. He meets her more-visibly-black brother and freaks out. This destroys the little harmony of the woman's family, plunging her into an angry, defensive attitude, aggressively defying a world that has rejected her. It's an interesting, racially charged nucleus to an otherwise bleary and wandering film.
The film was also shot in New York City and it's neat to see the dirty, porn-theater-riddled Times Square of yesterday and see the city when it was beginning to shift from men in suits to hippies in paisley. I didn't really like the film very much. The central racial conflict is interesting and the setting is nice, but this is a slow film. Much time is spent in intimate shots of the characters being bored, drinking, fighting. It's very gritty and must have been utterly shocking in its time but today it's a bit too slow, a bit too pointless. Who are these people anyway?
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