When his feature film The Exiles was new, Kent Mackenzie could only get it shown at a few film festivals. The ex-USC film student then worked mostly in industrial films and documentaries. He died in 1980, not knowing that his unique picture would be rediscovered. That happened over twenty years later, a process helped greatly by Milestone Films. In 2009 The Exiles was admitted to The National Film Registry. It was remastered and preserved by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, and repremiered to considerable acclaim.
Offhand, we wonder if The Exiles might have been elegible for Academy consideration, if it had never been officially released until 2009.
The Exiles is as important culturally as Milestone’s more famous release Killer of Sheep. That insightful drama by UCLA graduate student Charles Burnett is an affecting drama about African-American life in South Central Los Angeles, filmed on location. In 1977 it was thought that nobody had made such a film before.
A culture within a culture that nobody knew was there.
Kent Mackenzie had already made a similar film, a 16mm USC student documentary about a group of Anglo pensioners living in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Bunker Hill, an area slated for civic redevelopment. He returned almost immediately to film a 35mm dramatic semi-docu about a different class of Bunker Hill residents. Mackenzie’s fictional slice-of-life narrative covers twelve hours in the lives of several young Native Americans living in rented rooms, in buildings already slated to be razed. The show has an Off the Cuff but needs made no apology, technical or artistic. The cast of unprofessionals give natural and unforced performances free of the problems we associate with low-end filmmaking. It’s like looking in on private lives hidden in a corner of the faceless city.
Capturing this kind of on-the-street reality was extremely rare in the 1950s. Mackenzie filmed between 1957 and 1960, years that predate the French New Wave, the New American Cinema and other movements credited with setting a trend toward naturalism. John Cassavetes would have flipped to see this show — the smooth trucking shots in the crowded downtown bars are polished and precise. The overall image quality surpasses Cassavetes’ often slipshod Shadows. Against a soundtrack of the pre-surf band The Revels, The Exiles plays like an underclass epic, American Graffiti for a less privileged stratum of Americans.
( 12.10.23: An interruption, courtesy of friend and advisor Malcolm Alcala. We don’t fault Kent Mackenzie for not avoiding the PC trap of generalizing all Native Americans as Indians, but the ‘Exiles’ transplanted to Los Angeles in the 1950s were Navajos. Most were lured from the reservations by, as Malcolm says, “the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ misguided voluntary Urban Indian Relocation Program. It started in the early ’50s: individual Navajos were given one-way bus fare and $80 for a single month, doled out a week at a time, not a lump sum. No services were in place to help them assimilate into white society. After that month was up, they had to fend for themselves. Those that didn’t succeed were too broke to go home, and many joined the homeless Angelenos on Skid Row. The UIRP was little more than a Federal dumping program. At the end of the day well-meaning liberals do almost as much damage as racists.” Malcolm has forwarded a 2010 paper by Carol Burns documenting the information. )
We follow several young American Indians that seem to have been swallowed up by the city. Many are unemployed, and carry an acute awareness of their outsider status. Sixty years before, their crumbling Bunker Hill neighborhood had been one of the city’s first exclusive neighborhoods. A couple of un-idealized flashbacks are set on an Arizona reservation. The young men left home out of boredom and may return for the same reason. One talks about having joined the Navy and not liking the experience. They lounge about reading comic books, listening to the radio and eating; when night comes they go out looking for excitement. They pay their way with pocket change lifted from their wives and girlfriends.
With barely enough money for gas (at 26 cents a gallon) the men first they drop off the wife Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) on Hill Street, where she wanders alone in search of a movie to see. Hours later she’ll be walking slowly home, gazing at the expensive consumer goods in the storefront windows. On their own, men spend the evening cruising bars, greeting their friends and trying to drink without paying.
Two inebriated buddies take a long walk through the Third Street Tunnel to a poker game, convinced that tonight they’ll be lucky. They aren’t. All the pedestrians frequently pass ‘Angels Flight,’ the funicular railway that offers a 5-cent alternative to climbing the steps up steep Bunker Hill. At its bottom is the Grand Central Market, a huge open-air venue jammed with customers at all hours. The 1957 prices definitely tell us that we’re in a bygone era.
(If you go to Los Angeles today, don’t expect to find Angels Flight next to the Third Street tunnel. Packed away for several decades, it was eventually relocated a block or so South, at the other end of the Grand Central Market, as commemorated in the fourth season of Michael Connelly’s popular Bosch TV show.)
Two non-gambling Casanovas pick up two girls by dancing to a jukebox; the dates act coy but begin making out as soon as they’re installed in the boys’ convertible. Cruising passes for carefree luxury; a passage through a tunnel captures the foursome smoking, drinking, and feeling no pain. The girls have also been invited for company, so they can be tricked into paying for a gas fill-up. When one of them plays hard-to-get and refuses to come out of the filling station’s waiting room, they just leave her stranded.
When the bars close at two a.m. The Exiles captures a depressing scene similar to that in Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery (also a Milestone Cinematheque offering). In what appears to be a nightly ritual, the L.A.P.D. arrives to haul drunks and troublemakers off to jail. We see real arrests; dozens of patrons with no place to go will loiter on the street ’til dawn, dazed and disoriented.
Having avoided this scene, a group of Indians with wheels cruise up to ‘Hill X,’ a drinking lookout and lovers’ lane adjacent to Chavez Ravine, then already years into its own forced redevelopment. They make noise, make out, start fights and beat tribal drums. When the sun comes up they retreat back to Bunker Hill.
Sometimes the soundtrack is given over to interior monologues. The ex- Navy man talks about running up to L.A. repeatedly to visit a girl. Yvonne voices her wan hope that her man will shake free of his lassitude and start thinking more of his family. Her hope is that her unborn child might go to college and escape to a better life. The wishful thinking is sincere but lacking in enthusiasm. Hers is a marginal existence with few opportunities for advancement.
An ethnographic study nobody expects to see . . .
There is now a vast subgenre of video documentaries made by filmmakers ‘recording what they know.’ As a document from an era where any presence of a movie camera was exceptional, The Exiles is a genuine eye opener. The 35mm cinematography will impress cameramen that know how difficult filming in low-light once was. The entire film is in sharp focus and devoid of excess grain, as if the cameramen had access to more modern high-ASA film stock. Downtown L.A. looks gritty, but not the image itself — even the night coverage of the real-life arrests is sensational. Mackenzie’s cameramen Eric Daarstad and Robert Kaufman have keen eyes for arresting compositions; their work betters many Hollywood B-pictures shot on the streets at this time.
. . . a slice of history swept under the rug.
The Exiles captures a piece of L.A. history that was swept away half a century ago. Civic improvement projects wiped out entire neighborhoods, to modernize the city but also to generate profits for developers. Bunker Hill was home to a large population of elderly retirees and pensioners, happy to be independent in apartments they could afford. Yes, many of the unimproved properties weren’t in the best shape. The neighborhood had already been pictured as the hangout of down ‘n’ outers in noirs like Criss Cross, Act of Violence and Kiss Me Deadly.
But neighborhoods just as old are still standing all over Los Angeles — ‘economic interests’ at City Hall had abandoned Bunker Hill even before WW2. The city eventually condemned the entire hill, graded it down and waited to take bids from big developers. The same thing happened to Chavez Ravine, adjacent to The Exiles’ ‘Hill X.’ The Mexican-American population there was all but forcibly removed. Instead of affordable new housing, part of the area was redeveloped as Dodger Stadium.
What was an ex- USC film student doing making a picture like The Exiles in 1957? Both UCLA and U.S.C. had film programs going not soon after the end of WW2 . . . see the CineSavant review for Arch Oboler’s 1951 feature Five. At the time neither curriculum was considered a conduit into the film industry. The obvious career destination for Kent Mackenzie was in industrial, educational and television documentaries.
The miracle is Mackenzie’s choice of subject, a place and a subculture that would soon vanish. The Exiles is not a documentary yet remains a one-of-a-kind ethnographic document, a vivid portrait of L.A. life outside the reference of commercial filmmaking. The ordinary street scenes are fascinating in themselves. Long rows of shopfronts include not a single corporate franchise. Many are operated by independent entrepreneurs. All the lettering on the signs and windows looks hand-painted. At one point the foursome in the convertible joy-ride through the Third Street tunnel, playing The Revels at full volume, drinking in the open and laughing their heads off. One angle shows the girl riding shotgun grinning while sparks from her cigarette blow back down the tunnel. It’s a key image of American independent filmmaking — it’s like we’re there.
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