Friday Night Flicks: Chameleon Street
Who is William Douglas Street?
Or rather: who wasn’t he?
Rumor has it he was once a reporter for Time Magazine. At another time, a naval officer. A VIP player for the University of Michigan football team. A medical student at Yale, and later a surgeon, who in his tenure at a Chicago hospital performed 36 successful hysterectomies. And lest we fail to mention his stint as a wide-receiver for the Houston Oilers.
Chameleon Street is a retelling of Street’s life and times as - yes, you guessed it - a con man, perhaps the most revered in American history, a man once dubbed “The Great Imposter.” Throughout the film we meet several of his most notorious pseudo-selves, guided along the way by a series of voiceovers from the film’s director Wendell B. Smith. His films are amazing, sure, but I think the man was really born for radio; his voice hits the ears like a conflation of James Bond and James Earl Jones.
The film’s plot outline is fairly conventional and covers Street’s most prolific era as a fraudster. But at the same time, Smith’s borderline-arthouse direction keeps things surreal and trance-like. Think Ocean’s Eleven meets Eraserhead. It’s also worth noting that Smith not only acted as writer and director for the film, but also starred as Street and each of his respective identities. Turns out, he’s a bit of a chameleon himself.
Embrace multiplicity. Surrender to each and every version of yourself. Buy the ticket, take the ride. Chameleon Street is this week’s Friday Night Flick.
—Jackson Todd
