Shadows, Cassavetes' first film, burst on the scene in 1959 like a thief in the night, stripping the American screen of its most treasured possession-narrative closure-and leaving the ambivalence of real emotions. The film which won the Critics' Award at the Venice Film Festival owed a certain debt to neorealism. But with its poetry of immediacy, its Charles Mingus riffs shattering the silences and punctuating the dialogue, its racial theme already evolved into the existentialism of marginality, Shadows was as American as Lenny Bruce. Cassavetes hangs a tale on three young black Manhattanites-Lelia (Lelia Goldoni), her brothers Ben (Ben Carruthers) and Hugh (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 ignominy 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. He and his 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 (the dialogue grew out of improvisations by the actors in the Actors' Workshop) exists in a narrative universe that is anything but accidental.