Soul and the City: Kent Mackenzie's The Exiles

A "lost" classic makes its long overdue theatrical debut

A A A Comments (0) By Jim Ridley Wednesday, Aug 13 2008

The most immediately striking thing about The Exiles, shot through with humor and nerve and keyed to the throb of Anthony Hilder and the Revels’ thrillingly seedy garage rock, is its look. The black-and-white camerawork (by Erik Daarstad, Robert Kaufman and John Morrill) is so starkly high-contrast that the outdoor shots have the muscular definition of a graphic novel. The black has surprising depth, catching hard edges within shadows; the white burns a halo around every liquor-store sign or streetlight.

“You could call [The Exiles] independent,” Andersen wisecracked, slinging an elbow at the deep-pocketed Miramax “indie,” “but you couldn’t call it ‘pulp fiction.’” Yet, the area that Yvonne, Tommy, Homer and their many friends wander is a literal film noir neighborhood: Its crooked angles and night-splitting neon also served as the backdrop for the atom-age apocalypse of 1955’s Kiss Me Deadly. It’s also film noir in that the city is inevitable, inescapable. As in Mean Streets and American Graffiti, two films about the confinement of community that seem influenced by The Exiles’ incidental sprawl, every night out or stroll away circles back to the neighborhood. Even when Tommy gets behind the wheel of a car — in a sequence that’s pure foot-to-pedal exhilaration, all whipping hair, cranking tunes and gear-jamming low angles — he’s back by daybreak. And the cycle of mooching, scuffling and hanging starts all over again, on to the next dawn.