THE DOWNTOWN Los Angeles depicted in The Exiles isn’t there anymore. It’s long since been replaced by the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Dodger Stadium, and swanky pink skyscrapers. For that reason, the cheap apartments and rundown bars in the 1961 film The Exiles are historic, and the film is even more novel because, until now, it rarely made it out of the UCLA vaults.
The film’s incredibly lucid black-and-white photography—shot almost entirely at night, amazingly—and its focus on marginalized members of society have cinema buffs drooling for a long-overdue first proper release. Trouble is, apart from the photography, The Exiles isn’t especially compelling. The movie is an odd, contrived mixture of fake drama and real documentary—kind of like The Hills, but without glossy bimbettes prancing in the sunset. Instead, The Exiles unglamorously follows a group of inner-city Native Americans over a 12-hour period—they drink, they go to the movies, they gamble, they drink, they fight, they drink. They’ve abandoned the reservations for city life but still live communally, sharing food, clothes, booze, cigarettes, and apartments. Jobs are never mentioned.
We watch poor Yvonne, who’s pregnant and obviously neglected, but her inarticulate narration makes it difficult to care. Her husband Homer is similarly vacuous, and we watch him abandon his wife to carouse all night. Director Kent MacKenzie had a crush on Italian neo-realist cinema, and his attempts at emulation get bogged down in inconsequential minutiae. The post-sync soundtrack is also a distraction; the badly dubbed dialogue undermines the film’s vérité technique.
There’s a grandiose, worthwhile statement kicking within The Exiles, something like: “Robbed of his/her homeland, the proud American Indian is dangerously thrust into the whiskey-soaked urban wilderness of the white man.” But despite its poetic photography, The Exiles never goes all the way; like mumbling Yvonne, it stutters, second-guesses itself, and gives up.