"The film you have just seen is an improvisation," reads the postscript to Shadows, John Cassavetes' first film. The statement is accurate-the dialogue grew out of improvisations by the actors in Cassavetes' Actors' Workshop-and at the same time it is misleading, for the film has a structural elegance that belies its reputation for raw naturalism. Cassavetes hangs a tale on three young black Manhattanites-Lelia (Goldoni), her brothers Ben (Carruthers) and Hugh (Hurd)-living on the margins of Midtown marginality. Light-skinned Lelia and Ben more or less "pass" for white, she in literary circles and he among his fellow toughs, while Hugh pursues the lifelong ig- nomy afforded to a second-rate black nightclub singer. To say that each suffers an identity crisis, to use the lingo of the day, is to minimalize the breadth of these truly remarkable performances. Carruthers helped define a new range of film acting in his portrayal of the pathetically insecure Ben, whose fellow vitelloni ("what'll it be, boys, da Modern or da Metropolitan?"), in spite of themselves, articulate the themes of the film-if not of Cassavetes' career: "If you feel it, you feel it, stupid." Perhaps Lelia, the aspiring writer, is the complementary part of the artist who, once burned, wards off close encounters with her intense but naive theatricality. In any case, this sad, funny, most famous of "improvised" films exists in a narrative universe that is anything but accidental. Witness Lelia's short story, which painfully prescribes her own life. Look for the ironic details of an "anonymous" cityscape. Listen to the soundtrack, in between Charles Mingus compositions. "...And now, the Happiness Boys will sing for you, 'If I Didn't Care'..."