Out of Exile

A look at Park Chan-wook's vampire tale "Thirst" and Kent MacKenzie's '60s slice-of-life "The Exiles."

Kent MacKenzie’s “The Exiles” (1961) is a much more dour visit to fringeland — a lost-&-found time capsule of modern Apache twenty-somethings wandering the long night of Los Angeles outsider-dom, made on the heels of Cassavetes’ “Shadows” and utterly relegated, before its celebrated rescue and release last year by Milestone and the UCLA film archives, to the dustbin of cultural history.

What we have here is an authentic do-it-yourself piece of social historiography, dubbed wall-to-wall (and not very deftly, giving the film a dreamy distance from the real life it is unarguably documenting) but photographed (by no less than three DPs, including John Arthur Morrill, the genre vet who shot “The Hideous Sun Demon,” and Erik Daarstad, the still-busy journeyman who did the camerawork on Saul Bass’ “Why Man Creates”) in such breathtakingly beautiful and highly textured, high-contrast images that it often suggests Ansel Adams as much as it does Robert Frank or Walker Evans. I can’t tell how much credit should to go the restoration team, but perhaps some, and of course it matters little.

The story is deliberately wispy — a gaggle of cynical, drunken, unambitious Indians off the rez, “exiled” in the poor Bunker Hill section of the city, kill time, roam, booze, sleep in their cars, distractedly hunt for entertainment because they cannot find meaning. For one pregnant woman (Yvonne Williams), the restricted promise of nighttime store windows sum up her second-class-citizen status. Every infusion of drink inspires them to dance the old tribal dances; the present is empty, so the communal past is summoned to fill it. Narration, in the form of interviews of the cast members, often plays over the desperate shenanigans, and though the discourse can get preachy, there’s nothing like the sting of veracity to make you submit to unpleasant truths.

In the end, what MacKenzie got right (before his career quickly petered out with a few documentaries) was his subject’s iconic power. Image after image of the displaced characters amid the press of a modern LA and of vertiginous, dilapidated Bunker Hill itself (especially the Angels Flight trolley climbing up and down the hill all day in a Sisyphean cycle) has the force of a metaphor and the blade-edge of truth.

“Thirst” (Focus Features) and “The Exiles” (Milestone Films) are now available on DVD.

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