Rating: 4/5
Criterion Challenge 2024 | 30/52 | Charlie Day’s Closet Picks
A rock band performs at a Manhattan bar. The crowd goes buts for it, crawling over each other in riotous dancing. Bennie, a light-skinned black man, leaves the gig to meet up with his white friends, Dennis and Tom. They hit up a jazz bar to pick up women. Bennie’s a little awkward but handsome, talking to Nancy about his jazz musician career as a trumpeter. The other guys are more forward about their intentions to varying degrees of success.
Bennie finds his brother, Hugh, who is more dark-skinned, at the club where he plays. He begs Hugh for $20 to pay off a guy. Rupe, Hugh’s manager, talks Hugh into a gig where he has to introduce a girly line — embarrassing, but good pay. Hugh’s crooner style isn’t in vogue, so jobs are tough.
Bennie and Hugh’s younger sister, Leila, who is more light-skinned than her brother, sends Hugh off to the train station. Hugh begs her not to walk home alone at night in the city, but nothing’s happened before. What’s going to happen now? A guy stalks her for a bit, but Bennie’s around and pushes the guy away.
Leila’s a writer dating an older white guy named David. They go to a literary party, and David can’t help himself critiquing Leila’s writing. At the party, she meets Tony, who changes everything for Leila.
The film follows these three as they navigate a city where blackness is relative to the situation. Being white-passing grants some opportunities but also some misunderstandings that can unveil racial prejudices they didn’t know were there.
You never break your pattern, you'll never go anywhere in life.
As Cassavetes’ first film, its road from conception to the final product is complicated. It started as an improvisation exercise and went through endless practices to arrive at a concrete script. They reworked the film after the first version didn’t land how he wanted it to.
Charles Mingus did three hours of music for the movie. Cassavetes removed most of it from the final version of the movie. According to him, it didn’t follow the tone of the film.
The film’s presentation of race, while simple by today’s standards, was shocking for its predominantly white audience. Most were not aware of white-passing black folks, let alone that race could be so functionally fluid.
The film also looks at NY intelligentsia — the bubble of self-righteousness that pops when women are anything other than what men project onto them. You’re a dancer, that’s great! Oh, an exotic dancer? That’s pretty regressive, but I’ll still fuck you. Classic liberal posturing.
Lelia Goldini’s performance is heartbreaking and honest. She’s desperate to arrive where she wants to be. At 20, it feels like too much life has passed and that you must figure it all out immediately. That rush pushes you to be adventurous and open, but the cost can be immeasurable pain.
Ben doesn’t grasp the racial complexities the way Hugh does. His performance is a little more broad and unfocused. Hugh Hurd’s performance is tremendous — he holds a world of awful understanding in his eyes.
The film is rough around the edges. These frays are both a first-film issue and a part of the unresolved tensions. It’s hard to state how important this movie was to the independent film world in the US. It’s a conversation piece in the truest sense. The film is incomplete without the audience talking about it afterward.
I like that Bennie spells his name like mine!