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Out of the Vaults: “Shadows”, 1959
Meher Tatna
In 1957, John Cassavetes corralled a few students from the acting workshop he started in New York City to make a film as an exercise. There was no script, no permits for locations, just a 16mm camera and an idea for a theme on which the actors were to improvise. Scenes were shot guerrilla-style on the streets and in public places, or in borrowed apartments for interiors. When the cops appeared, either they were bribed to leave the production alone, or the crew just picked up stakes and moved elsewhere. When money ran out, Cassavetes went on a radio program to ask for help and raised $2,500 from the listeners. More donations were made by William Wyler, Hedda Hopper, Charles Feldman and others.
In the book “Cassavetes on Cassavetes,” based on interviews and discussions with the director compiled by writer/editor Professor Ray Carney, Cassavetes explained the problems he ran into. “When I started, I thought it would only take me a few months; it took three years. I made every mistake known to man. I was so dumb! Having acted in movies, I kinda knew how they were made, so after doing some shooting, I’d shout out something like ‘Print take three!’ I’d neglected to hire a script girl, however, so no one wrote down which take I wanted – with the astounding result that all the film was printed. We began shooting without having the slightest idea of what had to be done or what the film would be like. The technical problems of the production were endless and trying. The ‘sound department’ often looked at the recorder, only to see no signal whatsoever! So we had a couple of secretaries who used to come up all the time and do transcripts for us. They volunteered their services, they had nothing to do, we had all silent film. So we went to the deaf-mute place and we got lip-readers. They read everything and it took us about a year.”
For a total of $40,000, ten weeks of shooting, and a year and a half of editing, Shadows was made. This was Cassavetes’ directorial debut.
A screening was arranged at the Paris theater in New York in 1958 that did not go well: the audience walked out in droves. Undeterred, Cassavetes decided to redo the film with reshoots and re-edits, clarifying the storyline and removing most of Charlie Mingus’ music which was specially written for the first version. The new film – the version now in circulation, which has been restored with funding by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation – was released in 1959. (The first version was lost for almost 50 years.)
Although the 1959 version ends with the card “The film you have just seen is an improvisation,” it was extensively rehearsed in reshoots. There are three Black protagonists, siblings, named after the actors who portrayed them: Ben Carruthers, Hugh Hurd and Lelia Goldoni. The timeline is two weeks in their lives, but there is no linear story. Hugh is a failed musician, reduced to introducing the chorus line at gigs in tawdry nightclubs. Ben is a ne’er-do-well, sponging off his older brother, chasing girls and hanging with his buddies. Lelia is beautiful and light-skinned; she falls in love with a White man who rejects her once he realizes her race. Circumstances beat them down and force them to face the prejudice they cannot escape. (Both Cassavetes and wife Gena Rowlands have uncredited cameos in the film.)
To Cassavetes’ surprise, the film did very well on release on the art-house circuit, and he was hailed as a pioneer of experimental cinema in the US, while in Europe, Jean-Luc Godard was getting kudos that same year for Breathless, which heralded the French New Wave cinema. Shadows won the Venice Film Festival’s Critics Award in 1960. What was appreciated by critics was the fact that the film reflected ordinary life with all its intermittent drama, even though there were stretches of banality, and veering off on random tangents while staying true to its purpose of revealing reality. The interracial relationships, kinetic black and white photography, and sheer energy of the film were enough to transcend the amateur acting, disjointed sequences and editing shortcomings. Cassavetes was offered two studio movies to direct following Shadows – Too Late Blues starring Bobby Darin for Paramount in 1961, and A Child is Waiting with Burt Lancaster and Judy Garland in 1963 for United Artists – and his career as a director was on its way.
What is surprising to find out is that no mention is made or shock expressed in the film reviews that Goldoni’s heritage was Sicilian and that Carruthers was only 1/16th Black. The fact that race was addressed at all in the film seems to be enough to have made this a non-factor.
Again from “Cassavetes on Cassavetes” in the Shadows chapter, Carney explains that the director’s intention was not to make a race film per se but to explore the search for identity. “We tried to do Shadows realistically – not Andy Hardy,” Cassavetes tells him. “I just was as tough and as mixed up and screwed up as anyone else, and made a picture about the aimlessness and the wandering of young people and the emotional qualities that they possessed. The story is of a Negro family that lives just beyond the bright lights of Broadway, but we did not mean it to be a film about race. It got its name because one of the actors was fooling around making a charcoal sketch of some of the other actors and suddenly called his drawing Shadows. It seemed to fit the film ... Everyone will get the wrong idea and say we’ve got a cause. I couldn’t care less about causes of any kind.”
Many of the hurdles he faced ultimately contributed to his avant-garde reputation. “The things we got praised for were the things we tried to cure,” he explained. “All those things were accidents, not strokes of genius.” For instance, there was no dolly, and long lenses were used to photograph movement on the street, contributing to the cinema verité style. The sound was lauded as realistic because it was all shot on the fly and not looped to clean up the track as was customary at the time. “But we recorded most of Shadows in a dance studio with Bob Fosse and his group dancing above our heads, and we were shooting this movie. So I never considered the sound. We didn’t even have enough money to print it, to hear how bad it was. So, when we came out, we had Sinatra singing upstairs, and all kinds of boom, dancing feet above us. And that was the sound of the picture. So, we spent hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to straighten out this sound. Finally, it was impossible and we just went with it. Well, when the picture opened in London they said, “This is an innovation!” You know? Innovation! We killed ourselves to try to ruin that innovation!”
Carney has an interesting description of the filmmaker that he spent years studying. “There is no question that he is one of the great twentieth-century artists – in any medium. He was a visionary and a dreamer, a passionate, nonstop talker who was exciting to listen to. He was a born charmer, with the charisma of a Svengali. People loved to be around him. They basked in his energy. He inspired them and could talk people into doing seemingly anything. It took those qualities to make the movies. He had to throw a lot of magic dust around to keep people working long hours without pay. He had to play with their souls to motivate them.“But as I dug deeper, I was forced to recognize that you can't have the positive without the negative, the virtues without the corresponding vices. Cassavetes was a super-salesman, a Pied Piper, a guru – but he was also most of the other things that come with the territory. He was a con-man. He would say or do almost anything to further his ends. He'd lie to you, steal from you, cheat you if necessary. He could be a terror if you got in his way. If he liked you or needed you, he was a dream – kind, thoughtful, generous; if you crossed him, he was your worst nightmare.”
The film is preserved in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1993 for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
The picture’s restoration version (the one viewed on HBO Max) features the following pre-film statement: “SHADOWS (Cassavetes’ release version, 1959) has been restored from the original 16mm negative, a 35mm duplicate negative, and a 35mm positive print. The original elements are in extremely poor condition. This print integrates selected sequences utilizing digital picture restoration tools. An alternate version has been made using solely analog picture restoration methods.” The HFPA and The Film Foundation are credited with funding the restoration.
Out of the Vaults: “The Long Voyage Home”, 1940
Meher Tatna
The instrumental strains of “Harbor Lights,” the popular song from 1937, sound over the opening prologue: “With their hates and desires men are changing the face of the earth – but they cannot change the sea. Men who live on the sea never change – for they live in a lonely world apart as they drift from one rusty tramp steamer to the next, forging the life-lines of Nations.”
The camera moves back across an iridescent sea with a hulking ship in the background to the shore where native women undulate to a haunting melody. The scene then shifts to the Glencairn where rough-hewn men with weather-beaten faces listen to the music.
So, begins John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, starring John Wayne. But neither men are the real star of the picture. That star is cinematographer Gregg Toland. It’s rare that a director shares credit on the same card with his cinematographer. Ford does it here, as did Orson Welles on Citizen Kane a year later, again with Toland.
This black and white film is a masterpiece of visual expressionism, with Toland experimenting with various lenses to achieve deep focus, using high contrast lighting and hardly moving the camera so every action is captured within its frame. We see the decrepit ship become a thing of beauty with the moonlight on its rails and splashed across its deck, the fury of a storm battering shimmering water against the window of the bridge, the cobblestones of a backwater city gleaming through the legs of the sailors passing, the light and shadows falling on the faces of the sailors as they huddle in their cramped quarters below decks, the camera locked on the foot of a sailor as he falls backward to his death.
Wayne told his biographer Maurice Zolotow: “Usually it would be Mr. Ford who helped the cinematographer get his compositions for maximum effect ... but in this case, it was Gregg Toland who helped Mr. Ford. The Long Voyage Home is about as beautifully photographed a movie as there ever has been.”
Based on four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, the screenplay was written by Dudley Nichols, a friend of O’Neill’s. O’Neill was a seaman himself in his early days, and his own experiences informed his plays. He said that this was one of his favorite films and that he wore out the print presented to him by Ford from multiple viewings.
The action in the story was moved from WWI to the beginning of WWII. The Glencairn is bound for England from the Caribbean and stops in Baltimore to pick up ammunition, then has to pass through a no-man’s land in the Atlantic patrolled by Nazi ships and aircraft on its way to Southampton. The loneliness of these lifelong sailors is shown in their lives aboard, discounted by their captain, unable to protest the dangerous cargo or the hazardous route through the Atlantic, cramped into meager quarters, sustained only by the friendships among them, doomed to repeat the voyages over and over as none has a family to go back to, save one.
That one is the Wayne character, a young Swede named Ole, a very different role from the cowboys he was used to playing, but later considered it one of his best performances. He had to be persuaded to take the part by Ford as he was worried about the Swedish accent. Thomas Mitchell (Scarlett’s father in Gone With the Wind), is really the leader of the ensemble, the old Irish salt Driscoll, who keeps the band together through the drinking and brawling. Other standouts include Ian Hunter as Smitty, the Englishman who is accused of being a German spy in a heartrending scene, and Ward Bond as Yank, who exemplifies the struggle to live that these men are up against every day. Mildred Natwick has a fine turn as a prostitute.
The film was not a big success on its opening, due perhaps to its downbeat story and lack of a love interest. Its poster is actually quite misleading, featuring the seamen hoisting up several brightly dressed island girls onto the boat under the caption “The Love of Women in Their Eyes ... THE SALT OF THE SEA IN THEIR BLOOD!” It actually lost $225,0000 in its initial run. But it received excellent notices and earned several Oscar nominations – Best Black and White Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, Best Special Photographic Effects, Best Sound, Best Screenplay, and Outstanding Production (Best Picture). (Ford won for Best Director for Grapes of Wrath that same year; Toland was his cinematographer on that as well.) The National Board of Review named it one of the ‘ten best’ of 1940.
As a publicity stunt, producer Walter Wanger paid $50,000 to nine well-known artists of the time to paint scenes from the movie and the actors in character. The paintings were featured in ‘Life’ magazine and displayed in museums across the country as a traveling exhibit.
The Long Voyage Home was restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and The Film Foundation. The Archive holds excellent safety preservation picture and sound master positives made from the original elements; however, there are no 35mm prints of the film currently available. The sound was re-recorded from the variable area and variable density track positives to WAV files, and was sequenced and synchronized. Once the digital restoration of the soundtrack was completed, a new optical soundtrack negative was created along with a mag track for preservation. A new polyester 35mm duplicate negative was created from the fine grain master positive and that, along with the restored track negative, will be used to create new 35mm prints for archival screenings.
An excellent Criterion print is available on HBO Max.
COMMEMORATING 30 YEARS OF TFF
As people around the country are about to celebrate Thanksgiving away from their loved ones, I suppose that many of us are contemplating the meaning of the holiday in the abstract, formed from memories of Thanksgivings past. The cultural trappings are one thing, but the understanding of what sets this day apart from Christmas or Passover or Eid is something entirely different. I suppose that Thanksgiving is notable for being an entirely secular national holiday that is observed as reverently as a religious holiday. When I was young, it embodied a spirit of generosity. I wonder if that’s still the case. What it has come to mean is family with a capital F, with all its contradictions and heartbreaks and glories.
There are a couple of movies that The Film Foundation has helped to restore that bring the spirits of past and present to mind. When I was young, Alfred Hitchcock’s Saboteur, restored by the Library of Congress, was written off as a lesser film by many people, including Hitchcock himself. It was a dry run for North by Northwest, it had too many ideas in it, the lead and the villain were miscast, and so on. At this point I’ve seen the film many times, and it seems to grow with each viewing. Robert Cummings’ defense plant worker, wrongfully accused of committing sabotage and killing his best friend, goes on a cross-country journey much like Cary Grant’s in NBNW, but along the way he is met by good Samaritans who discard all doubt as they recognize the goodness he emanates—a long haul trucker, the members of a circus troupe and, most movingly and magically, a blind man who lives alone in the wilderness played by a wonderful old theatre actor named Vaughan Glaser.
In the matter of family, I’m thinking of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, restored by UCLA, in which family is the bedrock and the stumbling block, the crucible and the sustaining power. It’s family that drives Gena Rowlands’ Myrtle to madness, and it’s family that grounds her and lights her from within. The miracle of Cassavetes’ film is that it embodies these opposing forces and states all at once. Myrtle waiting anxiously for her kids to come home from school…Peter Falk as her helpless touching husband trying to decree that everything be normal again, Falk’s mother (played by Cassavetes’ own mother) casting a cold eye on her daughter-in-law one minute and later urging her son to go easy on her, the entire extended family rendered speechless as they watch Myrtle fly off into the stratosphere once again…it’s all the chaos and swirling and criss-crossing impulses and emotions of family in one movie, joyous and unkempt and terrifying, and you just want to dive right into it because that’s where life begins.
Happy Thanksgiving…and happy belated 106th birthday to Norman Lloyd.
- Kent Jones
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SABOTEUR (1942, d. Alfred Hitchcock)
Preserved by the Library of Congress with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Foundation and The Film Foundation.
A WOMAN UNDER THE INFLUENCE (1974, d. John Cassavetes)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive. Restoration funding provided by Gucci and The Film Foundation.
COMMEMORATING 30 YEARS OF TFF
In 1923, William Carlos Williams wrote an untitled poem that he included in his remarkable Spring and All. When his first volume of collected poems was published 15 years later, he had given what is now his best-known poem a title. “To Elsie” is named after Elsie Borden, a disabled woman who grew up in an orphanage and who worked for the Williams family in New Jersey. The poem famously begins: “The pure products of America / go crazy…” And it ends, less famously but so hauntingly: “No one / to witness / and adjust, no one to drive the car.” Dr. Williams’ great work was a beacon for the young Allen Ginsberg when he wrote his longer clarion call “Howl” in 1955: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical / naked…” And, a few lines from the end, “O starry-spangled / shock of mercy the eternal war is here…” Ginsberg was read closely and later befriended by Bob Dylan, who sounded the call in a rougher and rowdier register in “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” and, later, in a more plangent tone in “All Along the Watchtower.” And roughly concurrent with Dylan, from another side of America, came Sam Fuller’s bargain-budget Shock Corridor, restored by UCLA with the help of The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. In Fuller’s independently made tabloid vision of America-as-madhouse, the pure products have all gone crazy, as Robert Polito observes in his Criterion essay on the film. The best minds have all been destroyed by madness, the hard rain is already falling and there is no way out of here. A reporter pretends to be a madman in order to gain admittance to an insane asylum to investigate a murder. In the asylum, he encounters a nuclear physicist who thinks he’s a little boy, a traitorous Korean War vet who thinks he’s a Confederate General, and a black man who has integrated a Southern university who thinks he’s the founder of the KKK. In the end, the reporter himself actually does go mad…and wins the Pulitzer Prize. Shock Corridor was not greeted warmly when it was released in September 1963. Two months later, the President was assassinated, and the endless high-profile convulsions of the decade began.
But when did the convulsions begin? And did they ever really end?
- Kent Jones
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SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963, d. Samuel Fuller)
Restored by UCLA Film & Television Archive with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
