And that is the correct movie.
By future Indian, I meant American actor Fisher Stevens, who here plays a kid on a subway in a beautiful little short film within the movie.
https://youtu.be/lYs46BxweEU
Fisher Stevens later played an Indian engineer in the Short Circuit movies, which was not a big deal at all at the time, but in retrospect became problematic™ for reasons that are probably better mentioned in another thread.
- An immigrant to New York gets the job done
The Brother takes on a number of odd jobs. I wish I could find a clip of this, but at one point he heals a room full of busted coin-op arcade games. It’s Valhalla for arcade games. I thought maybe Tom Chick did a Gamespotting column on the scene here back in the day, but I couldn’t find it.
- When it came to finding out a director, a writer, an editor, an actor, and a producer for this movie, it was a pretty easy sa y le for each one.
John Sayles, independent movie legend, typically wears a lot of hats in his productions.
- One of the character actors in this has been in just about everything, including very tiny roles in Hudsucker Proxy and New Jack City, where the plots would have been hopelessly derailed without his input.
As Buckaroo notes, this is Bill Cobbs. He stopped Norville Barnes in Hudsucker from plummeting to his death by stopping time and gravity and stopped Nino the evil drug kingpin in New Jack City by shooting him to death in a courthouse.
As luck would have it, the alien main character looks a lot like a human man, except for his yucky three-toed feet.
- It’s kind of an escaped slave narrative
He’s lying low, staying ahead of his captors who want to re-captor.
- From before to Ellis Island and Harlem
The social commentary is juuust thick enough.
- There’s men in black chasing an alien here, but with a much smaller budget than anything starring the Fresh Prince.
The aforementioned John Sayles and David Straitharn (Good Night and Good Luck, L.A. Confidential, R.I.P.) play the two MiBs, which was an '80s urban legend before it became a late '90s cultural blockbuster.
- The actor who portrayed the titular character in this low-budget sci-fi film also had a role in another sci-fi flick seven or eight years later. His last line in that blockbuster: “I don’t know how much longer I can hold this.”
Joe Morton also played Miles Dyson in T2:JD. Unlike in this movie, where he was forced to expertly use pantomime, in T2 he was able to employ dialogue in his actor’s toolbox.
- This kind of story had as many competitors or compatriots in its decade as personality-swap movies, as the titular characters, in a sense, brothers from different mothers (such as ET: The Extraterrestrial, Starman, Mac [and Me], [John Carpenter’s] The Thing, and Predator) found out what it was like to be fish out of water, with varying degrees of friendliness and adaptability.
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There’s a ton of John Sayles movies I haven’t been able to track down, but I’ve really enjoyed every one I’ve seen. This is easy to overlook. The title sounds like a '70s Blaxploitation reject, and it certainly doesn’t wow with special effects. But it’s a splendid little examination of alienation and humanity set in the rotting Big Apple. You’re up, @Gordon_Cameron!
