The film was shocking to American audiences in the late 1950s and early 1960s because it turned the "concept of race upside down".[1] Two of the principal actors portraying African-Americans were not actually black: Goldoni was born in the U.S. to Sicilian parents, fully European in heritage, and Carruthers was only one-sixteenth black.[1] Carruthers used a sunlamp to darken his skin during the 1957 shooting of the film, but in 1959 for the new scenes, he abandoned this effort.[17] Carruthers and Goldoni were married in 1960, but quickly divorced.[1]
After Shadows was honored by the Venice Film Festival, the international publicity helped it become the first American film to see success outside of the Hollywood system. Shadows joined Pull My Daisy and Shirley Clarke's The Connection to establish a new wave of American independent films.[1]
In 1993, Shadows was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[21][22] In 1994, film critic Leonard Maltin said the film "was considered a watershed in the birth of American independent cinema".[2]
2003 rediscovery
The second version of the film, greatly reworked in 1959, is the one that Cassavetes considered to be the final product, and he refused to show the 1958 version. In time, he lost track of the first version's only print, and for decades it was believed to have been lost or destroyed. In the 1980s, Cassavetes said that he may have donated the film to a school far away. In fact, the 16 mm print of the first version had been left on a New York City subway train, taken to the subway's lost-and-found department, and then purchased by a second-hand-goods shop owner as part of a box of unclaimed items. The shop owner saw "Shadows" scratched into the leader on the first reel, but he did not recognize the film's name. The shop eventually went out of business, and the owner retired. The reels of film were stored in an attic in Florida, and in November 2003, they were given by the shop owner's daughter to film professor Ray Carney, who had been searching for the first version's print since the 1980s.[15] A digital copy was shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in late January 2004.[18] Since then, few people have seen this version, as Rowlands and the Cassavetes estate have been involved in a legal dispute regarding Carney's use of the film.[3][23]
