Sadness prevails on grim side of L.A.

Robert Denerstein, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, April 20, 2007

Killer of Sheep opens with a short but powerful prologue. A father lectures his son about standing up for his younger brother. It's a life lesson that ends with the boy's mother giving him a half-hearted slap in the face. Clearly, this kid is being schooled for hardship.

The movie then moves into the Watts neighborhood where its various episodes take place. What we see makes clear that the boy was being properly instructed. Desolate and full of rubble, the neighborhood becomes one of the movie's main characters, a forbidding landscape that offers little by way of relief.

We're in Los Angeles, but this is the L.A. that Hollywood typically shuns, and in director Charles Burnett's movie it has the self-contained, insular quality of inescapable impoverishment. And there's nothing "Hollywood" about Burnett; he's trying to look at this neighborhood and its people rather than exploit them.

Killer of Sheep was made in 1977 when Burnett was 33 and studying film at UCLA. Press material notes that because Burnett (To Sleep with Anger) couldn't obtain rights to the movie's music, the film seldom has been shown.

With that problem now solved, a restored version of this black and white movie (selected by the Library of Congress to be part of the National Film Registry) has become available, and its haunting images put you in mind of a time when directors adopted their skills to visions that were both socially relevant and poetic.

If you think this suggests that the movie has no real plot, you're right. A series of vignettes is loosely organized around Stan (Henry G. Sanders), a man who works at a slaughterhouse and struggles to keep a ramshackle life together. Stan has sunk into an interminable depression.

For his wife (Kaycee Moore), living with Stan is a bit like trying to visit a country for which she can't obtain a visa. Even when they dance together - to the sad tune of Dinah Washington's This Bitter Earth - Stan seems unable to wholly give himself up to pleasure.

Although the film's characters - a couple of street guys who want Stan to join them in a crime, for example - are vividly drawn by Burnett's amateur cast, the real accomplishment here has to do with the way Burnett makes us feel the painful expansion of time in this harsh environment.

Burnett knows how to let scenes breathe: He lingers over those in which kids scramble across piles of junk and throw rocks at one another, trying to turn debris into instruments of play, an activity doomed to failure. Rocks, after all, are dangerous.

The people in Killer of Sheep can be hard on one another. Their lives are intercut with scenes of Stan at work, where things get no better: Sheep are driven to their slaughter. Let's just say he probably has the world's worst job for someone mired in depression.

Attempts at gathering momentum constantly seem to dissipate. En route to an outing at a racetrack, a tire goes flat. Because there's no spare, the trip must be abandoned. The car returns to Watts riding on a rim.

As I watched Killer of Sheep, I began to sink into the feeling of despair that surrounds Stan, pressing in on him like low-hanging clouds. Purposefully uneventful and made in a minor key, Killer of Sheep moved me to tears. Contemporary audiences may not recognize it as a great movie. There's not an ounce of slick in it; it's neither manipulative nor hurried.

Yet its sadness, like Stan's, runs as deep as its honesty.

Killer of Sheep

A look at Watts in the '70s.

• Grade:A-
• Rated:Unrated
• Running Time:83 minutes