Tommy Reynolds (left) and Homer Nish.

British expat director Kent MacKenzie’s 1961 neorealist drama, The Exiles, played at the Venice and San Francisco film festivals, but it never received a proper threatrical release until 2008. Even now, this story about young Indians (as they were called then) trading in life on an Arizona reservation for a marginal existence in Los Angeles, feels strange enough to deny classification. It’s part ethnography, part urban history. part early-rock-era free-for-all. MacKenzie and his brilliant cinematographer Erik Daarstad follow the characters (all played by Indian non-actors) as they drink, gamble, carouse and brawl their way through a 12-hour night. (Cassavetes was shooting Shadows in Manhattan at roughly the same time, and both films share a freewheeling, improvisational look at hell-raising machismo.) The director refused to idealize his subjects, believing he had made an existential film rather than an Indian one.

MacKenzie died at age 50 and made just one other feature, but this film is an impressive legacy and Milestone has done an excellent job on the DVD. Also included in the extras is MacKenzie’s “Bunker Hill: 1956,” a 17-minute documentary about elderly pensioners gingerly making their way through life in a neighborhood marked for demolition and renovation. It’s an absolute treasure for the urban anthropologist. Just as much as the main feature, it confirms what documentarian Thom Andersen said of Exiles, “It proves that there was once a real city here before they tore it down and built a simulacrum.”

ALSO:

• The Exiles official site.
• Milestone’s official site.
• On Bunker Hill: A Lost Neighborhood Found site.
• Manohla Dargis’ 2008 review of Exiles, The.
• Moreabout Thom Andersen.