Review: Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s Chameleon Street on Arbelos Films Blu-ray

It’s often said that one of the greatest injustices of American movies is that Wendell B. Harris Jr. failed to become one of the legendary progenitors of the indie cinema renaissance of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Or, rather, that a craven industry failed him. While it’s certainly true that he and so many other Black filmmakers of his generation deserved more than they were given, Harris’s reputation needs nothing more than Chameleon Street to secure his place among the greats. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at the 1990 Sundance Film Festival, the film is a fleet, nimble, and knowingly slippery portrait of infamous con artist William Douglas Street Jr. (dazzlingly played by Harris), who at the height of his gamesmanship posed as a surgeon and, so legend has it, performed three dozen successful hysterectomies before being found out, and has spent large swaths of his life in and out of prison.

A prime example of form melding with function, the film consistently feels like it’s making up the rules midstream, anchored entirely to Street’s subjectivity. You might call it the autodidact’s equivalent of a bildungsroman—one that eludes enlightenment but still arrives at an embittered purgation, a clear-eyed, furious precis. (It’s not for nothing that the closing credits are accompanied by a montage of cast members retelling the story of the frog and the scorpion.)

Chameleon Street kicks off with Street’s comparatively innocuous machinations, such as him impersonating a journalist from Time magazine and attempting to extort money from the wife of baseballer Willie Horton. The film frames at least the earlier cons within the context of his marriage to a woman, Gabrielle (Angela Leslie), who begins their days urging, “Go make some money.” But it doesn’t take long to realize that it’s the thrill of the game that’s fueling Street’s engine, not the financial outcome, which usually doesn’t materialize anyway.

Street’s stint impersonating a Harvard Medical School grad and faking his way through EKG charts and surgical demonstrations finds him almost incredulous at what he’s being allowed to get away with. On the flip side of the coin, when he’s later attempting to pass himself off as a French exchange college student, having busted out of the clink and briefly abandoned Gabrielle, he’s tickled when the ruse doesn’t work. His short-term co-ed girlfriend, Amina Tatiana (Amina Fakir), lets him in that his faux-polyglot scam isn’t working by translating a bystander’s insult aimed at him: “You can take that straw and go suck lukewarm cat’s piss, you transvestite.” Street’s priceless response: “I wish I could speak French like that.”

Harris’s irreverence is, though, quite political. In two key scenes, his incarnation of Street drops the mask and lets loose on the racial strictures that make hustling, despite his self-knowing gamification of it, well-nigh the only viable option for Black Americans. The first episode, early on in his marriage, happens when a greasy white barfly walks up to Street and Gabrielle and propositions the latter, presuming her to be a sex worker and Street her pimp. Rather than punch the guy’s ticket, Street lectures the man on his ungrammatical use of the word “fuck” until the man, annoyed at his inability to goad his target into an easy brawl, punches Street out.

The second moment occurs near the film’s end when, while posing as a high-powered lawyer and making the most of getting a seat at the table—in this case, at a much more expensive bar than the earlier episode—Street lays into the fact that one of the other lawyers arguing against him in a case just came from a tanning booth, Harris’s silky baritone underpinning every dig. “It amazes me that whites avidly seek after all the accoutrements of Black style. You pickle your bodies in gallons of tanning lotion. You broil your pale flesh brown in the tanning spas at great expense. And all the while maintaining such a marvelous contempt for Black people. You wily Caucasians, here’s to you.” Game recognizing game, with the precision of a chess master.

Contemporary critics rightly compared Street to the protagonist of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And while the freewheeling nature of Harris’s film (a debut rivalling those of Orson Welles or Charles Laughton in invention) keeps the mask affixed, there’s no mistaking that book sitting on Street’s desk the moment the hammer comes down in the end, just as Street is contemplating parlaying into a new career in politics: Haki R. Madhubuti’s Enemies: The Clash of Races.

Image/Sound

Recently restored, Arbelos Films’s presentation of Chameleon Street comes from a 4K master from the original 35mm negative, and while it doesn’t mask the limitations of Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s budget, it also puts the film’s inherent vibrancy front and center. The color timing is warm enough, given the tendency of ’80s movies toward more muted palettes, and there’s a nice level of delineation in some of the trickier scenes, such as the bar sequences, which at times look as though they’re set in the middle of deep space. The sound mix isn’t out to beat the world, and there are a few scenes where the muddiness of the source material makes some of the dialogue close to incomprehensible, but it’s otherwise solid.

Extras

And speaking of sound, fans of Harris’s sonorous instrument get not one but two commentary tracks’ worth of extra mellifluousness to savor. One features Harris speaking alongside critic Ashley Clark, and the other features Harris on what sounds like an edited Zoom call with roughly a dozen members of the cast and crew, of whom probably the most time gets devoted to Angela Leslie and Amina Fakir, who played the two main loves of Street’s life.

If the former track packs more information and analysis into its hour and a half, the latter is by far the more freewheeling listen. In it, one crew members notes the set dressing, which boasts a few comic books, and calls Chameleon Street “the first Marvel movie.” Also, at one point Harris still sounds salty that it cost them $7,000 to use all of 14 seconds of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast (which is framed in Chameleon Street as Street’s favorite film).

Another revelation: Harris really goaded the two actors who hit his character in the movie (first the racist barfly who propositions Gabrielle, and later on Gabrielle herself after a particularly bad marriage counselling session) to go for broke and really deck him, casting Harris as something of a glutton for punishment. Finally, one cast member tells Harris (apparently for the first time ever, to hear his reaction) that none other than Samuel L. Jackson loved Chameleon Street so much that his then-roommate Bill Nunn claims he watched it day in, day out.

The commentary tracks carry the weight of providing context, and the rest of the clips and features offer up the historical raw elements, from an extended interview with the actual William Douglas Street Jr., to an archival documentary on the making of the film, from Harris’s earlier short film Colette Vignette, to an archival clip of Harris discussing the art of making independent film. Rounding it all out is a booklet reprinting an IndieWire interview with Harris by Tambay Obenson, which is worth the read if even just for Harris’s unequivocal observation that “the monstering of the Black image in media lasted 400 years, from 1620 to 2020.”

Overall

Chameleon Street’s triumph at Sundance should have been the launching point for a great African-American film talent, along with a new direction for American independent cinema. Arbelos’s new restoration of the film can’t rewrite history, but it does illuminate a way forward.