Burnett was fortunate in the casting of Stan and his wife. The man who was supposed to play Stan wound up in prison, and Burnett came across Henry Gayle Sanders by accident in an elevator. “I thought Henry was [the] saddest-looking man I’d ever seen,” Burnett has said. “I asked him if he’d ever done any acting” (Kapsis 2011, 143–44). Sanders had recently returned from two tours of duty in Vietnam, where he was injured, and was attending college under the GI Bill; his original ambition was to become a writer, but in Los Angeles he had begun to take acting courses. In Killer of Sheep he radiates gentle strength and thoughtfulness, performing in a quietly naturalistic style. Kaycee Moore, on the other hand, had appeared only in theater (after Killer of Sheep, she acted in two films directed by Burnett’s “students”: Billy Woodbury’s Bless Their Little Hearts and Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust). She’s a more vivid, ostentatious performer, and the slight difference in acting styles helps bring out the contrast between Stan’s depression and his wife’s vitality.
Moore’s intensity is evident in one of the more improvised moments in the film, when a couple of gangster types—characters who seem to have entered from one of the blaxploitation pictures Burnett disliked—try to recruit Stan for one of their jobs. A shiny Cadillac with whitewalls comes to a lurching halt in front of Stan’s small house, and in comic but sinister fashion, two slicked-up dudes named Scooter and Smoke exit the car and strut up the walk, calling out, “Hey, Stan, can you come out and play?” Laughing, bumping fists, acting cool, they knock on the door until Stan grudgingly emerges. They’re wearing shades, leather, and bling; he’s barefoot and wearing an undershirt and shabby pants. He sits on the front step, frowning while they gather around and tell him he’s been recommended as a “third man.”
In a ghostly close-up, Stan’s wife is seen through the screen door as she watches Stan telling the two men he doesn’t want to hear about their proposition. Scooter says he and his pal are looking for somebody “who wouldn’t blush at murder” and asks to borrow Stan’s “roscoe.” When Stan says that he doesn’t have a gun, the wife emerges. “Why do you always want to hurt somebody?” she asks loudly. Burnett frames the four actors as a group, and their postures and movements tell us everything: the wife stands in an assertive position, arms akimbo; Stan sits on the step, his head hanging down, lighting a cigarette, and picking at his toe; the two hoods sway almost like dancers, gesturing with an air of flashy, easy confidence. Scooter speaks to the wife in a patronizing tone: “That’s the way I was brought up! A man got scars on his face for being a man . . . me and Smoke are going to take our issue [i.e., what’s ours].” Turning to Stan, he says, “You can be a man if you can, Stan.”
At this, the wife marches down the steps and gets in Scooter’s face, gesturing passionately and making a fiery speech, much of which Moore made up on the spot: “You wait just a minute! You talk about being a man if you can . . . scars on your mug!” Her finger points assertively. “Where do you think you are? In the bush or some damn where? You are here! You use your brain, that’s what you use. You’re not an animal. And both of you nothing-ass niggers got a lot of nerve coming here to ask him to do something like that!” When Smoke reaches out to grab the wife’s arm and turn her toward him, she becomes nearly wild with anger and fear, jerking free and wordlessly rebuking Stan for doing nothing. Smoke and Scooter give up and wander off, complaining: “All we trying to do is help the nigger.”
A threat of violence against the woman hovers throughout the scene, becoming evident in the veiled contempt Smoke and Scooter feel toward Stan’s wife and their attempt to shame Stan into ignoring her. Ironically, the domestic male is the true “man,” even though he looks shabby, passive, and worn down (we may recall that the theme of manhood was introduced in the film’s opening sequence). Stan’s job and his consequent depression have sapped his energy; he’s in an inferior, seated position when his wife takes charge. There’s also irony in the wife’s speech. She passionately criticizes certain ideas about black manhood, but does so with the same language and imagery racists use: Smoke and Scooter, she says, are primitives who think they’re in the jungle “bush.” They’re “nothing-ass niggers” with ugly mugs. They’re “here,” meaning the big-city United States, far away from Africa or the South, and they should be using their small brains. Smoke and Scooter deserve this abuse, but the wife has internalized racial images and language created by a long tradition of oppression.
Stan has better sense than to join up with thieves and killers, but it isn’t clear that Stan Jr. will grow up to think the same way. Soon after Smoke and Scooter leave, the boy unsuccessfully asks his father for a dollar; in a later scene he broods about the rejection of his request. We see Stan’s little daughter putting on a dress in the bathroom and going into the kitchen, where her brother is eating cereal. “How clean I must be,” she says, then sits at the table watching him. He scowls, pours what looks like half a box of sugar on the cereal, munches ferociously, and in close-up mutters, “I need some money.” “What?” his sister asks. He pauses, stares at her with near hate, and speaks distinctly: “I need some money!”
Lack of money determines everything in the film. At one point Stan confronts a man who owes him money, and the man walks away, saying, “I ain’t got anything but my good looks.” At another point Stan gives a dollar and a can of peaches, wages he’s received from “Miss Sally” for “cleaning up behind the garage,” to his poor friends Gene and Dian. But the local economy is most evident when Stan goes to the only bank available to him—a liquor and convenience store—and tries to cash his paycheck from the slaughterhouse. Burnett introduces the episode with a striking image and a sad joke about the people hanging around on the street outside the store. A drunken man is reflected in a bewigged young woman’s aviator sunglasses. “You a no-good woman,” he says. “You get yourself in line,” she sneers, and a close-up of her high heels shows her walking away to the sound of blues music. He follows, and the two squeeze into a beat-up car where four others are already sitting; there’s a beer can on the hood of the car, and a fellow in the front seat reaches straight out to get it, revealing that the car has no windshield.
The only white person in the film is a big, tough-looking woman who manages the store. (Burnett found the woman working in a post office.) When a customer asks to cash a check, a middle-aged clerk behind the counter calls to her and she emerges from a back room, seen in a floor-level shot that makes her look imposing. Shoving the clerk aside, she glances at the man’s check and says “hell, no.” Then the younger, better-looking Stan comes in with the same request, to which she responds with a sexual come-on. She might be able to cash the check, she says with a smile, and asks, “Why don’t you come work for me?” Henry Gale Sanders does a nice job of conveying Stan’s struggle to hide his discomfort and remain politely subservient; he shyly smiles and looks away, saying that he fears getting held up and shot. “Oh, I’ll protect you,” the woman promises. “You’ll work in back with me.” She nods toward the middle-aged clerk: “He takes care of the register.” A close-up shows her hand stroking Stan’s wrist. Stan doesn’t pull away and manages to get out with his check cashed.
Possessed of a little money, Stan tries to help his friend Gene buy a used auto engine. This results in the longest episode in the film, a self-contained drama that serves as a virtual allegory of Stan’s precarious situation in life. It’s by turns bizarre, comic, sweet, suspenseful, and almost tragic. At the beginning, we see the two men, accompanied by Stan’s daughter, drive an aged pickup to the edge of Watts and park on a steep hill outside