The Beat scene is a frequent
hang-out for Aeolus 13 Umbra readers (see The Beatnik Café), and the 1959 films A Bucket of Blood and The Bloody Brood exemplify just about every Beat stereotype
possible. Both films were released in October 1959, just two years after the
publication of the quintessential Beat novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, in 1957, and show how quickly Beats captivated
pop culture. Both films are available on the Aeolus 13 Umbra YouTube channel
and are presented below.
A Bucket of Blood, directed by Roger Corman, is the more noted of
the two films. In this movie, the underrated classic character actor Dick Miller
plays a dull-witted busboy whose accidental plaster casting of a cat (killing
the poor creature in the process) makes him a hit with the hipsters. The café where Morris’
character, Walter Paisley, works makes the perfect venue for a parade of Beat
stereotypes complete with a jazz soundtrack, poetry readings, sculpture,
berets, and men with beards! The Beats are
presented as narcissistic and self-involved and push Walter into creating more
of his deadly masterpieces. At 95 minutes, the action is fast-paced and feels more
like a seedy pulp crime novel of the era come to life.
The Bloody Brood is a Canadian film with a young Peter Falk,
later better known as the TV detective Colombo, in an early starring role. In
this paean to the Beats, the film opens in a Beatnik bar/café with Falk’s character,
Nico, musing about what terrible shape the world is in. When an old drunk dies
before his eyes, Nico is enthralled and seeks to recreate the experience by lacing the
food of an unsuspecting young man with ground glass. The young man’s brother
sets out to solve the murder by entering the underground world of the Beats.
While Beats get a hard rap in this film, they ultimately help bring Nico to justice — with a special poem of
course!
Like A Bucket of Blood, much of the action in The Bloody Brood centers on a Bohemian bar/café filled just about every
Beat stereotype. Poetry, art, sculpture, jazz, bongos, hot chicks dancing with wild
abandon —The Bloody Brood enthusiastically plunges into the Beat scene. Like
Corman’s film, murder is at the center of the film, but whereas A Bucket of Blood has its tongue planted
firmly in cheek, The Bloody Brood
tackle’s its subject matter with the seriousness of a Perry Mason episode. The opening credits montage is among my
favorites examples of photo collages of the period. At 98 minutes, it clocks in
only three minutes longer than A Bucket
of Blood.
A Bucket of Blood and The
Bloody Brood are both examples of the film industry feeding off pop
culture simultaneously. Both films have similar crime-related Beat plots,
similar running times, October release dates, and an alliterative use of words
beginning with the letter “B” in its title. While I have a great love for these
films as Beat-related oddities, they are also blatant attacks on what society at the time saw as a threat. Mainstream pop culture took the Beat identity presented in On the Road and transformed it into an exaggerated
stereotype that diluted the potency of an
important post-war arts and literary movement. In doing so, however, they leave us with snapshots of the era and give us insight into how society viewed the Beats, and itself, on the eve of the 1960s countercultural revolution — an era that the Beats themselves helped birthed.
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