Ths significance of John Cassavetes's Shadows

In some ways John Cassavetes's Shadows (1959) is a curiosity, but it's one worth watching, especially for its open spirit and its inventive cinematography. The story line, such as it is, follow a group of young men in Manhattan, kind of well-dressed thugs and party-boys whose life seems to involve drinking, clubbing, and trying with varied success to pick up women in clubs and at parties. We follow a few story lines that intersect at points: an aspiring jazz singer and his agent head off for an out-of-town club date, at which the singer badly fails; one of the young men meets and pursues a 20-year-old woman who aspires to become a writer and begins a sexual affair w/ her - her first sexual experience as it turns out; the same young man later learns that the woman he's been w/ is either black or of mixed race, and he's visibly disturbed by this information; the group of guys spends aa rainy afternoon in the MOMA sculpture garden, to hilarious effect; and so on. This film was one of the first and one of the few to use a mixed-race cast and to touch on issues of racism, inter-racial relationships, and bi-racial families. The photography is mostly done in close-up b/w, probably w/ handheld cameras, shot mostly in often-crowded interiors - which makes the few open-air sequences, such as a walk through Central Park and nighttime scenes on the garish 42nd Street all the more striking by contrast. The dialog is rough and awkward, and it's not surprising to read on the closing credits that the scenes were improvised by an acting group (which JC led, I believe). The film captures a mood of a NY long gone - a time when the city was rougher and more affordable; the group of men reminded me of the "boys" in early Fellini films such as I Vitteloni; the women seem to be the precursors of some of the artistic aspirants in early Woody Allen comedies. The movie has a great jazz score - mostly solo tenor sax - and the jazz melodies are perfect counterpoint to the improvisational nature of the whole enterprise, which has an open conclusion rather than a plot build-up and wrap-up, much like the short fiction that was beginning to emerge in American literature that was emerging at that time (e.g., Salinger) and shortly thereafter - influenced in part by this film and others like it from Europe.