This forgotten 1990 movie, now showing at Brooklyn Academy of Music, introduced a Black confidence man who played with the assumptions of a white world.
Praised but marginalized, a Sundance winner and a commercial flop, Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s “Chameleon Street” is unique, not just because it was the first and so far the only 35-millimeter film Harris has written and made. This 1990 independent feature — funded by his parents and a group of Flint, Mich., businessmen — is also a hall of mirrors that does not exclude the viewer’s reflection.
A new 4K restoration print opens Friday for a run at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Neither “Chameleon Street” nor its flurry of aborted star-vehicle remakes jump-started Harris’s Hollywood career, but the revival should further burnish his reputation.
Based on the exploits of a con man, William Douglas Street Jr., with Harris playing the title role and narrator, the film was initially described as a Black equivalent of Woody Allen’s “Zelig.” The comparison is facile but not inapt.
Both movies are psychodramas in the sense that their filmmakers are their own on-screen subjects. (Harris is a trained actor with a flair for deadpan one-liners.) Both comment on cinematic illusion. Both concern the nature of group and individual identity. As the insouciant protagonist quips, “I think therefore I scam.”
Beginning with a shambolic attempt to blackmail the Detroit Tiger slugger Willie Horton, Street’s trickster scams include posing as a journalist, a French-speaking exchange student, a human rights lawyer and, most alarmingly, a graduate of Harvard Medical School improvising a hysterectomy. (According to Harris, Street performed 36 such operations.)
“Chameleon Street” progresses from riff to riff. Street never loses his savoir faire, is seldom at a loss for words, and generally psych-outs all adversaries, at one point instantly solving a Rubik’s cube. (In another scene, his civilized sarcasm gets him punched out by a frustrated white racist who propositions Street’s wife in a bar.) Street’s picaresque stunts, and occasional incarcerations, do not occur in a vacuum. No less than Harris’s performance, the movie is underscored by an understated fury. “I’ve never met a Black male who’s happy with the way Black people are regarded and treated in the United States,” Harris remarked in a 2007 interview upon the movie’s DVD release.
Harris, noted the film scholar Michael Boyce Gillespie, “enlivened the racial passing tradition”; his Street displays the particular self-awareness of a Black man performing in (or for) a white world. More than a landmark indie, “Chameleon Street” contributes a character to American literature. The film critic Armond White, an early champion, almost immediately compared the movie to Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” It can also be bracketed with James Weldon Johnson’s “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” and Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man.”
Reception is part of the story. Despite winning big at Sundance, garnering useless Hollywood meetings and supportive but ineffective reviews, “Chameleon Street” was, Gillespie writes, “disavowed as a weird, uppity, Black, arty thing lacking real value” — the latest trick of the ultimate “trespasser” William Douglas Street.
Unfolding in a world of constant pretense, “Chameleon Street” demands an alert and self-aware viewer. It is Harris’s coup and his curse to have “faked” a movie that might be a performative masterpiece.
Chameleon Street
Oct. 22-Nov. 4 at Brooklyn Academy of Music; bam.org.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
