• Produced and directed by Roger Corman
• Written by Charles B. Griffith
• Starring
  • Dick Miller
  • Barboura Morris
  • Antony Carbone
  • Julian Burton
  • Ed Nelson

You remember the Beat Generation or “beatniks,” right? Often people think of them as the proto-hippies, but they were really just a single chapter (before the hippies, after the Jazz Age) in a long line of youth rebellions that think that they’ve invented sex, inebriation, music, and Truth. The Beats’ great claim to fame is the literary pretentiousness that dominated their culture — Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs… You have to fast-forward to the Goths to find another social rebellion with the same level of pretension.

I’m not saying that the artistic output of the Beats it without intrinsic worth. It just wasn’t nearly so special as its purveyors thought it was. The line between serious and hilarious is a fine one indeed, and Roger Corman manages to skewer the Beat Generation in A Bucket of Blood mostly just by showing it.

The tone is set for us in the opening scene at The Yellow Door, a Bohemian club (and one of two major locations in the movie), where Poetic Genius in residence Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton) is on stage, reciting a meandering extemporaneous poem while a saxophonist improvises behind him for minutes on end. Against this backdrop of MEANING MEANING MEANING pounded into our heads, our protagonist shuffles between the tables: desperate, slow Walter Paisley, one of the few starring roles for the mighty Dick Miller.

“I feel TRUTH coming on! TRUTH! TRU– No, wait, that was a belch. False alarm.”

Miller, a short ex-boxer from New York, was one of Roger Corman’s stable of regulars, and by dint of hard work and a face that looks just mean enough to be tough but not so mean as to be reprehensible, Miller became one of the most recognizable character actors in Hollywood, racking up over 150 film and TV credits. Not bad for someone who never intended to work in front of the camera. As he recounts in Corman’s book How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime:

I came West from New York to be a writer. A beached it for a year and a half before anything happened — sold short stories, did one-page outlines for a science fiction anthology, partied. Then my New York buddy Jonathan haze told me he had just done his first picture — an undersea monster flick — with a guy named Corman. So he brought me to Roger’s office over the Cock ‘n’ Bull. And the conversation went something like this:

“What do you do?”

“I’m a writer. Need any scripts?”

“No, I’ve got scripts. I need actors.”

“Fine, I’m an actor.”

“Want me to cut you off a slice?”

Here in probably his most famous role, Miller plays against what would be the type for most of his career. Walter is an uncertain nebbish, possibly slow and definitely out of step with the Beats who run and inhabit the club, though he wants to be a part of the sea he swims in, especially to gain the affections of Carla (Barboura Morris), who works at The Yellow Door and is kind to him. He remembers all the words of Brock’s poems (something which Brock himself doesn’t do, as he prefers to “live in the moment”), but comprehends nothing except that desperately wants to belong and can’t. As one notably obnoxious Yellow Door denizen tells him later, “You’re just a simple little farmboy and the rest of us are all sophisticated beatniks.”

Because Art is the doorway to the in-crowd, Walter retires to his crummy studio apartment with a big square of clay and tries — and fails — to be creative. It just so happens that his landlady’s cat chooses that moment to get stuck in the walls, and when Walter takes a steak knife to try to cut him out, he stabs the wall a little too aggressively. Panicked, he breaks open the wall and pulls out a dead cat (improbably stiff), the steak knife still stuck in its side.

He puts it aside to present to his landlady the morning, but that night words and phrases from Brock’s poem about “death and art” and “clay in the master’s hands” collide… So in the morning, he goes to The Yellow Door to show off to Carla and Leonard (Antony Carbone), the beret-wearing owner, his first sculpture: the shape of a cat, with a knife sticking out of it. He calls it “Dead Cat.”

“How do ya like them pancakes? Huh?”

And it’s a sensation with all the right people. Brock proclaims it a Work of Art and Genius, and suddenly half of the clientele think him an artist in the rough. One of the young ladies at the club becomes his insta-groupie and presses some pills on him, which catches the attention of an undercover cop (Burt Convy). The cop trails Walter back to his apartment and confronts him on the pills (which Walter naively assumed were headache tablets), and when the cop pulls a gun and threatens to arrest him, Walter reacts with the pan in his hand…

Meanwhile, Leonard at the club accidentally knocks “Dead Cat” off its shelf after-hours and notices with shock some fur sticking from the small crack. So when Walter calls him and Carla to Walter’s apartment to see his latest sculpture, a full male figure with a cloven skull he calls “Murdered Man,” Leonard almost loses his cookies, but keeps mum.

For those who don’t know about the soft center under the crunchy exterior of Walter’s sculptures, though, Walter is hailed as a true artiste. Or rather, Brock proclaims him the greatest thing to happen to Art in ages, and everyone else nods their heads and follows along. From the proceeds from the sale of “Dead Cat,” Walter gets himself the necessary accoutrements of a hep move and shaker: a beret, a cravat, a cigarette holder, a walking stick. He’s finally made it, and his conscience is easily silenced with the acclaim he garners from those who used to look down on him. The deaths which fueled his sculptures has been entirely accidental up until now, but the rush of acceptance is powerful enough that it’s easy to move from accidental to intentional for his next work, especially with a model who is the lone holdout in The Yellow Door at acknowledging his new status.

And for your toughest headaches, Excedrin Extra-Strength.

In structure, then, A Bucket of Blood is a tragedy in the strict sense: A story of a good person whose flaws — in this case, his desire for acceptance — leads to his moral and physical downfall. Even in his later sculptures, Walter’s motivation is only partially that of revenge; he is still largely the innocent, an adolescent retentive, even more desperate to retain his newfound acceptance as he originally was to gain it. Walter’s actions become more heinous and less defensible, but he still manages to be a sympathetic character.

And what better scene for an adolescent retentive to try to make than the Beat Scene? The majority of the wit in this movie comes from its portrayal of the beatniks and hipsters who populate The Yellow Door. It’s obviously not a pro-Beat movie, but neither is it a stern and impassioned “social menace” exploitation flick that warns those of the former generation about the behavior of the young hooligans that is scaring the horses. Largely, it shows an only slightly exaggerated picture of the Beat Generation — if it’s any exaggeration at all, represented by Brock with his Castro beard and his stentorian poetry — and lets the audience realize that what may seem profound through a haze of illicit substances is pretty thin when seen by sober eyes.

The most cutting part of Charles Griffith’s script is its portrayal of the beatnik culture and its bulwarks (not surprising, from the frequent Corman collaborator who gave us the scripts to such films as the original Little Shop of Horrors (1960) and Death Race 2000 (1975). As evoked here, the Beat Generation was like most rebellious social movements that sought to throw off what they saw as constricting social norms: almost immediately, the subculture set up strictures and tried to enforce conformity to an orthodoxy at least as inflexible as the one propounded by “The Man” that they were kicking against. Brock here is the voice of the movement as a monolithic entity, and his assessment of Walter’s work as worthy or not of praise, his gatekeeper role as to whether wanna-beatniks are “in” or not, is what allows the essentially adolescent search for peer group acceptance to be transposed to a culture of adults. Meet the new Man, same as the old Man.

Some days you’re the throne, some days you’re the plunger.

All of which, surprisingly, doesn’t drag the picture down with the weight of social commentary. Despite the grounding in social criticism, the story is light and fast, clocking in at a breezy hour and four minutes. It’s very cavalier treatment of its subject matter allows it to retain and due justice to its subtext without collapsing under the ponderous pomposity that afflicted the subculture it depicts.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4, plus 1 cat
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 2, sorta
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 1
  • Dick Miller (Walter) played “Vendor” in the TNG episode “The Big Goodbye,” and “Vin” in the DS9 two-parter “Past Tense”