A Great James Earl Jones Role That Can Finally Be Seen

Burnett remembered how Jones threw himself into the part. (Jones so much enjoyed eating the curried goat that Fish cooks, Burnett said, that he would continue eating after a cut was called, risking continuity issues — but it was fun to watch.) And even though Jones had knee troubles, he worked to make the demon-wrestling visceral. “He did most of his stunts himself,” Burnett said. “Not the real, real hard ones, but the ones that he was on the floor with — we worried that he might hurt himself, but he was a real trouper.”

It’s an unusual film, and it’s understandable that some original viewers couldn’t sync with its peculiar wavelength. Heller, who died in 2020, blamed its distribution woes on a pan in the trade magazine Variety. Writing in 1999, the critic Todd McCarthy described “The Annihilation of Fish” as “a drear moment in the careers of all concerned” that “will go over big with everyone who ever craved seeing a bed scene with James Earl Jones and Lynn Redgrave.”

Yet the film’s off-center depiction of isolation and a search for connection holds up much better than that in “American Beauty,” which played at the same Toronto festival to a swell of critical support.

Burnett said that “Fish” went over well elsewhere — he recalled showing it near San Diego in 2001 after the Sept. 11 attacks, when the audience seemed eager to embrace its portrait of love and compassion — but until now, it has been a film that got away. A quarter-century later — thanks to the restoration efforts of Milestone Films, the U.C.L.A. Film & Television Archive and Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation — audiences have a chance to discover it. (Milestone and the U.C.L.A. archive also revived “Killer of Sheep.”)

Burnett’s early films have been credited for their honest rendering of Black working-class life in Los Angeles, a milieu rarely shown, or at best sensationalized, by Hollywood. In “The Annihilation of Fish,” he sought to show characters who live in their own world, but to keep it serious, to make them real. “You see people on the street here in Los Angeles, and it’s become such a thing that you see all the time now,” he said. “You wonder about who these people are.”

He recalled an experience encountering a man on public transit in New York who told him a story about having to make a scene to get medication that he knew he needed. “It was a way to function in this country,” Burnett said. As with the characters in “Fish,” he added, “There’s some logic to this madness, you might say.”