‘Killer of Sheep’ review: Unvarnished side of 1970s L.A. life

For decades, Charles Burnett’s best film was little more than a rumor. Shot over weekends in the early 1970s with a mostly nonprofessional cast and a budget that didn’t hit five figures, “Killer of Sheep” wouldn’t receive its first public screening until the fall of 1978 at New York’s Whitney Museum. Sporadically playing only at festivals, colleges and museums, the movie failed to garner a proper theatrical release until 2007, its complicated music clearances seemingly dooming it to obscurity. Before then, many of us had never seen “Killer of Sheep” but, in fact, we still hadn’t fully seen it.

Now hitting theaters in a gorgeous 4K restoration, “Killer of Sheep” is, at last, complete, with Dinah Washington’s version of “Unforgettable,” which couldn’t be cleared for the 2007 release, returned to the movie’s poignant final stretches. Because of its towering reputation — lauded as one of our city’s finest films, a hallmark of American neorealism and the pinnacle of the Black independent filmmaker movement dubbed the L.A. Rebellion — the movie can confuse first-time viewers who assume that all masterpieces must be swaggering, visionary totems. Not so. Some can be gentle and tender, attuned to the rhythms of the everyday. According to the program notes that accompanied the film’s Whitney premiere, Burnett sought to “try to recreate a situation without reducing life to a simple plot.” Many small things happen in “Killer of Sheep,” nothing of much consequence. But the enlargement of life itself is profound.

Burnett was a UCLA graduate student in his late 20s when he fashioned his story of Stan (Henry G. Sanders), a Watts-dwelling husband and father of two who’s employed at a slaughterhouse. His grim work handling dead sheep gives the movie its title, but little time is actually spent at Stan’s job. Those juxtaposed scenes of bleating livestock and skinned carcasses still leave an impression, but they’re just one strand in a tapestry of threads, none of them given more importance than the others.

Instead of a conventional narrative, “Killer of Sheep” presents us with a mood. Stan’s face is one of perpetual exhaustion, matched by that of his unnamed wife (Kaycee Moore), who projects a silent sadness. In fragments, we get a sense of a family and the impoverished community around them. There’s a scene in which Stan’s friends unsuccessfully recruit him for an illicit scheme. In another, Stan and a different friend try to move a heavy car engine onto the back of a truck, with comically pathetic results. Elsewhere, a white store owner flirts with Stan, suggesting he ought to work for her.

Each scene is a separate tiny episode, but they all connect back to the nagging pain and resilience that define Stan’s existence. Early on, Stan complains about his woes to his pal Oscar, who replies, “Why don’t you kill yourself? You’ll be a lot happier.” Stan resists that notion, although as he looks at his young daughter wearing a goofy rubber dog mask, he admits, “Got a feeling I might do somebody else some harm, though.” The tone is more bone-tired than menacing, and it carries throughout “Killer of Sheep,” which contains no tragedies or major twists, just an unerringly calm remove as its black-and-white 16mm images, shot by Burnett himself, chronicle working-class people getting by.

The film’s deceptively modest approach belies a radical strategy to depict ordinary Black life at a time when such images were hardly in abundance. Shots of kids aimlessly throwing rocks at passing freight trains are plainspoken, presented with documentary-like simplicity. And the dialogue is largely functional, Burnett never building to some grand thesis, refusing to reduce Watts to inner-city clichés or its denizens to doe-eyed saints.

In the place of stereotypes, “Killer of Sheep” offers an understated paean to the Great Migration and the Black families who made their way from the South to Los Angeles, seeking a fresh start but finding an inhospitable landing spot. Featuring blues, R&B and jazz on the soundtrack (the music often expresses the sorrow and joy that the characters bottle up), the film is a marvel of accidental beauty, the occasional stunning sequence manufactured with a minimum of fuss.

Sanders, who had appeared in a few films before “Killer of Sheep,” deftly plays a man whose depression extends beyond a lack of money. Adrift and emasculated, Stan is less a patriarch than the defeated captain of a sinking ship, drowning in his futility. But the performance allows no room for pity, a feat even truer of his costar Moore, a crucial figure in future L.A. Rebellion films such as “Bless Their Little Hearts” and “Daughters of the Dust.” Moore, who died in 2021, could say everything with a look, and as Stan’s wife, she communicates both the disappointment and sturdy love this woman feels for her embattled husband. When she takes a second to examine herself in the reflection of a pot lid, she illuminates so many unappreciated mothers. And when Stan and his wife quietly slowdance in their living room, scored to Dinah Washington’s “This Bitter Earth,” their brief respite devastates. “Today you’re young,” Washington laments. “Too soon you’re old.”

Burnett selected his film’s songs with care, curating a fittingly soulful counterpoint to his critical portrait of inequality — not just in L.A. but in the country as a whole. Political activist and singer Paul Robeson, who died a year before “Killer of Sheep” was completed, is all over the soundtrack, his booming voice serving as a moral compass, never more so than on “The House I Live In,” which hovers over a scene of Black children playing in a Watts littered with dirty streets and abandoned buildings. “What is America to me?” Robeson wonders. “A name? A map? Or the flag I see?” The film asks the same question and Robeson provides the answer: “All races, all religions / That’s America to me.” “Killer of Sheep” shows us a part of that America, the invisible rendered visible, from sea to shining sea.