Synopsis: The Brother is an alien who has crash-landed on Earth, in New York City. While mute, strongly empathic, and able to fix things, he resembles a black man with strange feet. His attempt to make a place for himself in Harlem is an allegory for the immigrant experience in the United States. Meanwhile, two bounty hunters from the Brother's home planet arrive and try to capture him.

Cast:
Joe Morton .... The Brother
Daryl Edwards .... Fly
Steve James .... Odell
Leonard Jackson .... Smokey
Maggie Renzi .... Noreen
Rosetta LeNoire .... Mama
David Strathairn .... Man in Black (alien bounty hunter #1)
John Sayles .... Man in Black (alien bounty hunter #2)
Bill Cobbs .... Walter

Favorite Quotes:
• [about Harlem] "I'd rather be a cockroach on a baseboard up here than the Emperor of Mississippi." - Fly

• Odell: "Look, you fellas got any kind of i.d?"
Man in Black (#2): "I.d.?"
Odell: "Your badges, man."
Man in Black (#2): "Badges?"
Man in Black (#1): "What badges?"
Man in Black (#2): "We don't have to show you any badges."
Odell: "Look, if you're dicks, you got badges."
Man in Black (#1): "What makes you think we're 'dicks'?"
Fly: "I could answer that."

• Man in Black (#2): "Mam, have you ever looked at his feet?"
Carter: "What are you, sick?"

Notes:
• David and John Sayle's "men in black" characters influenced the later, popular Men in Black films starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones.
• To get their strange, awkward movements, David and Sayles actually walked and did their movements backwards for most of their scenes. The scenes were then flipped and gave their bodies' the strange movements they have in the film.
• Joe Morton (the Brother), a classically-trained actor, does not say one word in the entire film. He would also appear with David in Sayles's City of Hope.
• The Brother From Another Planet was the second of seven collaborations between David and writer/director/actor John Sayles.

Critical Praise & Commentary:
• "What follows is a shambling, good-natured urban odyssey as the humanoid, three-toed Brother learns the ins-and-outs ways of Harlem life, romantically pursues a once-famous soul singer (Dee Dee Bridgewater), discovers the horrors of hard drugs and evades a couple of pre-Will Smith 'men in black'--a pair of extraterrestrial Joe Fridays played with pitch-perfect, Pythonesque silliness by David Strathairn and writer-director Sayles." -Bob Westal, Film Threat

(John Sayles On David:)
• "This is a sequence that David Strathairn and I worked on. We wanted a strangness to their movements and, so, we did everything backwards where you put the camera upside-down so the emultion stays on the proper side, and the film is flipped so that later on you can play it in the opposite direction and it's right-side up. But what we did is we started on those stools, and then we backed out of the room, and you see we do some other actions that way. Originally, we thought we might be able to do our dialogue, but the only thing we could really say backwards and have it sound right was beer, which is 'reeb' backwards. There's just sounds you can't really make backwards with your voice, although David Lynch has worked on [that]. And we had the idea that these are kind of like narcs, FBI guys, or whatever. They think they're a little more invisible than they are. And David Strathairn is the one actor who, when I act in a film, I'll let act behind me. I don't have to see what he's doing, I just kind of give him an idea [of] what to do and he always comes up with something interesting; whereas, generally, everybody else I want to have them in front of me because you're still directing even when you're acting, and this is many years before there was video assist." -John Sayles, co-star (Man in Black #2) & director, DVD commentary

• "Once again, we were doing everything, so we actually at this point backed into a room and David put the cookies back in the bowl. And it does give a strang, you know, feeling to all the movement. You know, your weight just hits in a different way, and we talked about that we were from a planet that had a different gravity, more like Jupiter, so that we were very dense, and this planet seemed like we could spring all over the place like human beings can on the moon." -John Sayles, co-star (Man in Black #2) & director, DVD commentary

• "The music had been something that Mason had been able to write beforehand, and we played it on the set so David and I had an idea of the rhythm of the scene when we were running. And David, who's a great acrobat, was able to do some nice kind of midair perauetts to it... And at this point, when they're trapped, I feel like the guys do what the Romans used to do when they surrendered, of falling on this swords, and this is the intergalatic version of it." -John Sayles, co-star (Man in Black #2) & director, DVD commentary

Related Links:
John Sayles Retro - The Brother From Another Planet (off site)