The Exiles
The Seventh Victim
A Tale of Two Sisters
*** (A must see)
Two 1961 films showing at the Gene Siskel Film Center this week and one from 1943 that will screen there in January qualify as casualties of this neglect–and of lack of imagination in classifying them. One of the ’61 films, The Exiles–a low-budget independent feature that follows a few uprooted Native Americans over a 12-hour period in the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles–can hold its own next to John Cassavetes’s Shadows, which came out a year earlier. The Exiles was featured on the cover of Film Quarterly in the early 60s and was well received at the Venice film festival. It has beautiful high-contrast black-and-white photography, a dense and highly creative sound track, and moving portraits, and it’s refreshingly free of cliches and platitudes–all the makings of an instant classic. Yet it vanished for almost four decades, until filmmaker Thom Andersen revived it by highlighting it in his remarkable essay film Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) and screening it with his film at festivals and other venues.
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How does one label such a film? The Internet Movie Database calls it a documentary, which is about as misleading as calling it ethnographic because it deals with Native Americans. Calling it fiction isn’t quite accurate either. “You could call it neorealist, since it comes from outside the Hollywood studios,” Andersen notes in Los Angeles Plays Itself, though a little later he adds that it’s 15 years ahead of the Los Angeles neorealist movement spearheaded by black directors such as Charles Burnett. “You could call it independent,” Andersen adds, “but it’s not exactly Pulp Fiction.” You could also say that it stands outside any clear genre or movement, which undoubtedly helped condemn it to invisibility.
The film was produced at RKO by Val Lewton, who’d once been David O. Selznick’s story editor and who inspired parts of the producer hero played by Kirk Douglas in Vincente Minnelli’s Oscar-worthy The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), an insider’s look at Hollywood. Lewton invented a new kind of horror film that achieved its apotheosis in his first four features–Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie (also showing at the Film Center in early January), The Leopard Man, and The Seventh Victim–though his remaining five (The Ghost Ship, The Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead, The Body Snatcher, and Bedlam) are nothing to sneer at. The poetic cinema he conjured out of his minimal sets and literary ambience–The Seventh Victim, for instance, begins and ends with a quote from John Donne’s first “Holy Sonnet”–is largely the result of suggestion, calculated to coax the imagination into filling in all the blanks. Much of this subtlety was the product of budgetary, time, and thematic constraints: each feature had a maximum budget of $150,000, couldn’t run longer than 75 minutes, and had a lurid title the studio arrived at by test-marketing. Some of these films were sleepers: Jacques Tourneur, who directed the first three (as well as the Lewtonlike Curse of the Demon 15 years later), was fond of noting that Cat People did better at the box office than Citizen Kane. (The Seventh Victim fared less well, perhaps because audiences found it too upsetting.)
