I am a great fan of this movie too, but for different reasons. It captures the great barreness of LA working class in the period I knew. My art stepfather and errant mother did their best to counteract this empty effect. Not so for me father and stepmother. When they still lived in the basin, they rented the upscale verion of the apartments you see in the film. The outsides were nicer, the insides had better plumbing and there was some wood flooring inside instead of vinyl. The furniture was nicer and we had more things, but that was about it.
For fun I looked up the address listed on my birth certificate photostat from LA County. 4479 West 60th St, Los Angeles. It was a one story place stucco with a small lawn of grass instead of dirt. I once saw a photograph of my mother holding me on the concrete steps of the bungelow apartment at this address. I googled it and I`ll be damned it is still there, looking the same after 68 years! Fuck me. They added the screen door. Knock on the door, Hi, I was born here or taken home from County. So, how are things doing in the old homestead? Maybe a homage?
In the photograph the whole LA nostalgia, flashy print dress in nylon or unlikely statin with some Hawiian theme. henna plus permenant, lipstick, finger nail polish. There was another of my father with the same bundle sitting inside on a rattan couch with Hawiian or Philippine or South Pacific decor, including an exotic bird done in hammered copper and framed. The old man looked like he was holding a toxic package, slightly away from him in case something happened to spoil his laundered white shirt, before he left in the afternoon for the swing shift at the Examiner.
Last night for fun I watched the original Naked City, a quasi-documentary shot on location which is set in NYC in 1948. What struck me most were the kids running loose on the street.
Killer of Sheep was shot in Watts and City of Commerce in deep southcentral where the big manufacturing industries, warehouse and shipping areas fed into Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles.
It's hard to explain this, but Killer of Sheep is LA more than it is Black Cinema, from the girls jump rope songs, to the vacant lots and abandoned factories, to the scary allies, to the bored parents in the kitchen, to the boy games of macho and anti-macho, to the rock fights... I still have Bobby Salt's rock nailed as a scare on my forehead. The bee-bee gun solid sting and blue welt, the whole manner of boys and the girls in the era. For Turner it was late 60s black america LA, for me it was mid-50s mixed america, but it all rounds into a period of urban America.
Among other things Turner is Urban American Anthropology. Fuck if I am not jealous.
George Kennan after his dismissal from the State Department found himself in Pasadina in 1953, late in the year standing on a fancy deck overlooking the LA basin west toward the ocean. I know the view, it was pink and gray and brown from the smog, and the glittering Pacific beyond. He wondered in Sketches of a Life, whatever will become of these people, speaking of me (at ten) and the great mass of Angelino humanity he surveyed.
Guess what George. You class ridden asshole. You think because you went to school, the rest of us didn`t. You think that because you could see the world, the rest of us couldn`t? I love the regret and implied darkness of the early post-war, Graham Green and so, but I have a hard time with the class arrogance.