Friend, colleague and sparring partner (check for our Tarantino point/counterpoint smackdown early April here at MSN Movies), David Fear reminds people why Charles Burnett's "brilliant" and underseen "Killer of Sheep" deserves to be watched.

 

From Time Out New York:

 

"Anyone looking over a list of films that were released 30 years ago would notice that 1977 was a banner year for influential American movies—'Annie Hall,' 'Star Wars,' 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind,' 'Saturday Night Fever.' But their eyes might skip right over one of the more significant titles, a little-seen work of art that arguably trumps its fellow class-of-’77 members in terms of profundity. That would be 'Killer of Sheep,' Charles Burnett’s brilliant, peerless look at working-class people in Los Angeles, whose vision of everyday life plays like an inner-city 'Song of Myself.'

 

"If you’ve never heard of Burnett’s masterpiece, you’re not alone. After a mere handful of public screenings, the independent drama failed to attract distributors and quietly disappeared. It would resurface periodically at random revival houses, museums and festivals. Fans such as Steven Soderbergh and David Gordon Green repeatedly referred to it as a classic; the movie was later one of the first to be admitted into the National Film Registry, in 1990. Henry Gayle Sanders, who plays Stan, the slaughterhouse worker whose trials and tribulations make up the story’s emotional center, remembers getting phone calls from friends. 'They kept teasing me: 'Henry, man, you’re a national treasure!’ ' the actor, 64, recalls from Southern California. “'I had no idea what they were talking about until they told me that 'Killer of Sheep' was going to be preserved. Here was this little job that I did when I was starting out, and now it’s in the Library of Congress.'”

 

Read the rest of Fear's terrific piece here.