Another Side of Cambridge

THERE ARE PEOPLE lurking around Harvard Square, especially around Saturday nights. They stand around listening to their radios, smoking cigarettes and watching. The Dark End of the Street looks at these Cambridge people whom we see all the time but do not know. In compassionate and evocative style, the film raises an issue in terms seldom explored in conventional media. Racism rages not only as an academic debate at Harvard, but as a coming of age reality for children growing up in Cambridge.

The emotional distress of racism stifles the expression of all but the most sensitive of our artists. A direct confrontation with it leave mouths open in surprise; it is this shock that The Dark End of the Street portrays. The children of Cambridge must learn about this problem while they hang out. Here at Harvard, factions can confront each other on an intellectual basis, but on the Cambridge streets, people have to take sides. Dark End catches a group of these teenagers before they've learned to call each other "white bitch" and "nigger". When the film opens, Billy and Donna and Marlene and Brian are playing baseball together, partying together and teasing each other. Not that they are innocent. They can freely indulge in the physical power they feel so keenly, but they have not yet matured to the experience of racial hatred. Donna and Marlene, in particular, are experimenting with their new femininity, and their common experiences outweigh the differences in their skin color.

Of course, in Cambridge's volitile racial atmosphere, this situation cannot continue for long. Boston's racially charged atmosphere quickly colors any interacial incident, regardless of whether prejudice was actually involved. Marlene's boyfriend brings this reality upon them when, drunkenly teasing Billy and Donna on a roof, he falls accidentally. Billy immediately perceives the implications of a white boy involved in the death of a Black boy. So he imposes a strict silence on himself and on Donna. The silence ignites an insidious explosion of cliches used to explain the accident. When Marlene's brother must flee because he is suspected by the police, the rhetoric grows even stronger. This sensitive film then centers on the conflict between silence based on fear of the truth's consequences, and angry mouthing off based on easily aroused sentiments. The sadness is that the cliches have so often proved true.

The history to which these people were born then takes over their thought. They remove their baseball jackets to put on the uniform of racial defense. "Yeah, they always put it on us", says one angry Black resident of the neighborhood when Marlene's brother is accused. Billy's fear of going to jail causes him to scream at Donna "who's gonna believe it? He's Black--I'm white. I got a record." It has all happened too many times before. Even the cop investigating the accident sees the police as actors with prescribed roles, "If we arrest the Black kid, we're racists. If we arrest the white kid, we're starting a race riot. If we arrest nobody, we're a bunch of jerks."

The cliches especially distort Donna and Marlene's friendship and literally reduces them to brawling in a bar. The mixture of sadness, anger and confusion on Donna's face as she tries to decide what to say and for whom to say it expresses the real emotions of what a racist society can do to those trapped within. No matter what she says, there will still be no answer to the problem. The responsibility for the issue belongs to nobody in particular, the film says, but everyone is a participant.

JAN EGLESON, who wrote and directed Dark End on location in Cambridge with a cast of unknowns, has made a touching film without a moral about a subject that long ago transcended morality. He presents a time when teenagers realize that sometimes there is nothing to ask, nothing to do and no place to run away. The cast's inexperience makes it even more natural and simple to be inarticulate about things for which there are no words and which glamorous, eloquent action would romanticize. Laura Harrington, as Donna, is a beautiful, unpolished young woman who makes the complex emotions she must portray believable. The sensual awkwardness of her and Michelle Green as Marlene render their strange position more poignant.

The scenery is awkward too: the uglier neighborhoods in Cambridge. D'arcy Marsh's camerawork shows an every-day, harsh, concrete environment inside the cramped rooms or outside in the projects. Yet Donna looks almost lyrical as she sits dejectedly outside a beer factory after fighting with a cop and slumping into the weeds, illustrating the beauty that can be found on Cambridge's starker side.

The Dark End of the Street refuses romance. The power of the film lies in its very recognition of the powerlessness which people face, when the explanations for death are too easily found in race and when this history of racial prejudice becomes so much a part of us--it becomes the easiest defense we can muster. Sadly, the cliches too often come true, especially in Boston and Cambridge. Egleson makes no pretense of solving the dilemma for this neighborhood. There were no guard railings on the roof the night the boy fell; there are none to restrict people's behavior when it comes to race. It remains all too easy to fall over the edge--into the rhetoric.

For just that reason, this is a film which Harvard students should see, to get closer to the city in which they live and to the other side of the issue which rings throughout newspapers and dining halls. Intellectual reevaluation of the politics of Harvard and America incites us, and rightly so, but the rhetoric we adopt can grow to overshadow the sadness and the personal alienation of the problem. The Dark End of the Street shows those very private feelings prompted by very public displays of racism and hate.