Check Out the Trailer

Up until last year when UCLA restored it and Milestone Films released it, few people had seen Kent MacKenzie’s THE EXILES since it played three film festivals in 1961. MacKenzie had recently graduated from the UCLA Film School and was hanging out in Los Angeles with a group of Native Americans who had left the reservation for the big city. He decided to tell their story in this fictionalized documentary where the actors play versions of themselves.

Homer Nish is married to Yvonne Williams. She’s pregnant and he’s a drunk. The film chronicles a typical day in their lives. Homer sleeps most of the day until his friends show up. Tommy Reynolds is the instigator of the group, always trying to pick up girls, find some way to score some extra cash. The boys go out on the town and drop Yvonne at the all-nite movies. She often ends up sleeping at a friend’s apartment just so that she doesn’t have to sleep alone.

Both Homer and Yvonne tell us their thoughts in voice over. Homer talks about just wanting to go out and find some action. He’s looking for some fun or a fight. After an already long evening, he watches the men at a bar as the intoxicated men nurse another beer. Some are older, haggard looking men and we fear that Homer is staring at his future. Homer might be thinking the same thing, but wouldn’t say. He’s been drinking since dropping out of high school and seems bored with the drinking scene, but the alternative is even more boring. When he punched a loud mouthed guy, who is he really lashing out against? Yvonne dreamed of a better life for her unborn son, but has resigned herself to the fact that will never happen. She talks about how she doesn’t go to church anymore and some nights she even forgets to say her prayers.

With its rockabilly music and gorgeous black & white photography of a Los Angeles that looks completely alien to the one that exists today, the film works as a time capsule. And yet, the somber story of the dead end lives of its characters is still as fresh today as it was then. The poor and uneducated drift through life on a sea of intoxication. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll numbs reality. That’s Homer’s life. The cheery soundtrack only makes it seem all the more pathetic. Yvonne’s story is heartbreaking. Her voice drips with her loneliness and depression for a dim future. Her sobriety is far more painful than Homer’s drunkenness.

MacKenzie died in 1980, having never achieved the recognition he might have received for a film that could have been an important entry in the works of the American New Wave. It has the feel of a John Cassevetes film, and captures a modern look at Native American lives, which are rarely seen on screen. The film ends on a powerful sequence of shots that sums up the point of the whole picture. Yvonne’s eyes speak a thousand painful words that she will never speak out loud to her husband.

Support the Site

Buy “The Exiles” on DVD Here!