The story of Wendell B. Harris, Jr.’s “Chameleon Street,” winner of the Sundance Grand Jury Prize back in 1990, validates the story in Wendell B. Harris Jr.’s “Chameleon Street”, insofar as they make a bleak portrait of Black American success spanning 1990 to 2021: If you don’t conform to social and cultural expectations, you fail, and if you do, it may only be but a matter of time until you fail anyway. You may take this reading well-salted given the source – I’m a career White Guy – but the way art reflects life and life reflects art within the film and without is flat out impossible to overlook.
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Harris wrote, directed, and stars in “Chameleon Street,” an interpretation of the life and times of the conman William Douglas Street, Jr., who between 1970 and 1980 passed himself off in an array of professions so accomplished that he deserved applause as much as he did prison: A physician, a lawyer, a journalist, a wide receiver, and a West Point general, not necessarily in that order and with countless other impersonations notched on his belt. The movie argues that Street’s facility for mimicry was the product of American racism, and his subterfuge spree was his way of getting even. Why toil at his father’s burglar alarm company when he could be somebody important? Why stay at the bottom when he can jump the line and get ahead without spending the resources needed to go through med school?
Warner Bros. bought remake rights for the film in 1990 before Harris had even found a distributor. 31 years later, no remake has happened, though since that purchase names including Will Smith, Wesley Snipes, and more recently Keegan-Michael Key have been bandied around as leading men candidates; one wonders where Harris’ career could have gone if Warner Bros. hadn’t functionally suppressed his movie and prevented it from seeing the light of day. Then again, the industry loves unrequited genius and unsung geniuses, so maybe it fits that Arbelos Films has conducted and now released a 4K restoration of Harris’ chaotic, complex work, which screened at the recent New York Film Festival.
The best way to describe Harris’ direction is “disruptive,” possibly “new.” “Chameleon Street” moves via mesocycle, picking up frightening speed within its opening minute, as Street attends a prison exit interview with a psychiatrist; he believes that Street behaves in complementarity. “You intuit what another person needs, and then you become that need,” the doctor explains. Right after, Harris cuts to a series of closeups of Street’s face, his face, accompanied by modulated voiceovers that end with a poem. “I think, therefore I scam / I think the air is sweet / I know not what I am / I am Chameleon Street.” Cue a title card. That’s the movie in a nutshell, fast-paced and embedded in its narrator’s point of view, such that nearly everyone he encounters feels like an object instead of a human being.
If you do not know what you are, it stands to reason you’ll have problems knowing who others are. Street typically sees others as means to his own ends. In a few specific cases, he sees them as nuisances, like his daughter, whose demand for a new toy he placates by spraypainting her Barbie doll black. “There. New toy. Black Barbie.” There is reason for contempt in Street’s actions: If a person is useful to him, he uses them, and if they aren’t then he dismisses them, though this is a great simplification of a man who Harris sees as intrinsically complicated. “Chameleon Street” doesn’t mean to characterize Street solely as a sociopath. It does mean to dredge his psychology. Think of this as an academic way of saying that Harris and his film expect the audience to take the bad with the good.
The Barbie incident is an example of “the bad”; Street two timing his wife, Gabrielle (Angela Leslie), a stone cold fox who puts up with him until she just can’t, is another. Street pulling a vocal racist’s card on a date with Gabrielle is an example of the good and a reminder of the world “Chameleon Street” is set in, America, a land of opportunity for better and for worse. The racist, for example, sees that date as an opportunity to toss out white supremacist epithets and proposition Gabrielle, and Street takes that opportunity to school him on the history of the word “fuck.” He pays for the sharp-witted lesson with unconsciousness. For the most part, though, the film portrays Street as one who inhales opportunities like oxygen: He’s constantly sniffing out new ways to pull one over on new marks.
“Make some money.” It’s “Chameleon Street’s” enduring refrain, repeated by Gabrielle, a drug dealer, and of course Street himself, who uses this capitalist paradigm to justify blackmailing Willie Horton about 17 minutes into the film. Harris moralizes only so far, because he understands the corrupting influence that money and its pursuit have on people, especially people like Street: People assigned their roles from birth and with little to no avenues for challenging their lot in life in ways that please the system. Do not mistake this as endorsement; Harris doesn’t believe Street a role model, or a hero, or even a fundamentally decent man. But he does believe Street a victim, and this, along with documentation of Street’s many offenses, allows Harris ample space to explore his humanity while rejecting his crimes.
Think of “Chameleon Street” as W. E. B. Du Bois’ version of “F For Fake,” and you’ll have a clear idea of Harris’ purpose. With this film, he exposes American social and class structures, pokes at the raw nerve that is the country’s foundational racism, and borrows the language of the French New Wave and makes it his own. What a raging tragedy that “Chameleon Street” was buried for decades and robbed of a chance to contribute to the practice of independent filmmaking; what a gift to see Harris’ work highlighted anew at a time when it’s as urgent as ever. [A]
The new restoration of “Chameleon Street” is in select theaters now.