Filmed in 1957, just a few years after his outstanding USC student documentary Bunker Hill was released and taking place in the same run-down neighborhood in Los Angeles (even some of the establishing shots, at a busy supermarket and on a steep trolley car going up and down the hill known as "Angel's Flight"), Kent MacKenzie's The Exiles follows a day in the life of a small group of unemployed American Indians living more or less hand to mouth. The men spend their days sleeping and their nights drinking themselves into oblivion, while the women tend to their families or choose someone to spend the night with before the inevitable fighting breaks out. It wasn't released until 1961, and MacKenzie would only make one more movie before his death in 1980; but what he leaves behind in The Exiles is a fascinating film that blends a documentary subject with a narrative approach, traditional framing techniques with French New Wave camerawork, and neo-realist situations and dialogue with contemplative internal monologues.
Shown on a double bill at the Armand Hammer Museum's Billy Wilder Theater in Los Angeles recently, The Exiles follows the surly, overweight Homer Nish; his trusting, pregnant common-law wife Yvonne Williams; and the drunken, womanizing smoothie Tommy Reynolds through a typical day. Unsparing in its treatment of their character, but never failing to show the social and economic conditions that affect them, the film shows both the nobility and baseness of its subjects, and along the way creates one of the most fully realized portraits of the American Indian in film history. A brief interlude on the Arizona reservation that is home to Nish's parents provides a much-needed break in the action, contrasting what the 'exiles' left behind with their daily reality and segueing smoothly back into the contemporary action.
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