Shadows

    Shadows
    1960

    Synopsis

    The relationship between Lelia, a light-skinned black woman, and Tony, a white man is put in jeopardy when Tony meets Lelia’s darker-skinned jazz singer brother, Hugh, and discovers that her racial heritage is not what he thought it was.

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    Cast

    • Ben CarruthersBen
    • Lelia GoldoniLelia
    • Hugh HurdHugh
    • Anthony RayTony
    • Dennis SallasDennis
    • Tom ReeseTom
    • David PokitillowDavid
    • Rupert CrosseRupert
    • Davey JonesDavey
    • Pir MariniPir the Piano Player

    Recommendations

    • 100

      TV Guide Magazine

      The film perfectly captured a specific time and place, illuminating simple truths regarding the human condition, while unveiling an important, powerful, and visionary new force in the American cinema.
    • 91

      The A.V. Club

      Even though its rough edges (the wildly mismatched acting, the scenes that never take shape) look rougher today than they must have at the time, watching Shadows still feels like witnessing a mold breaking.
    • 90

      Village Voice

      Arguably the founding work of the American independent cinema, John Cassavetes’s 1959 Shadows is the prototype for Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets, Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and all their progeny.
    • 88

      Chicago Reader

      This is the only Cassavetes film made without a full script (it grew out of acting improvs), and rarely has so much warmth, delicacy, and raw feeling emerged so naturally and beautifully from performances in an American film.
    • 80

      Film Threat

      The low-key, natural performances are dramatically offset by the mercurial and incandescent Lelia Goldoni, the emotional heart of the film.
    • 80

      The New York Times

      Shadows is an unfinished picture in every sense of the word. Yet it is fitfully dynamic, endowed with a raw but vibrant strength, conveying an illusion of being a record of real people, and it is incontestably sincere.
    • 80

      Time

      Caught in the ecstasy of collective creation, a handful of earnest amateurs have almost accidentally produced a flawed but significant piece of folk art.
    • 80

      Time Out

      With a blue and moody Mingus soundtrack and steel-grey photography, it's still a delight.

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