I love movies that are off-the-wall, but every once in a while, I run across a movie that comes to that wall, rams it head first, and completely obliterates it. That’s Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood (1959). It is an oddball, razor-sharp black comedy that had me one second laughing out loud and the next harboring pity for social outcasts.
The movie focuses on the artistic counterculture, and the beatnik parodies in the film are beyond perfection. The opening sequence features the character of Maxwell (for me, the show-stealer of the movie) reciting his own poetic take on society a la Ginsberg’s Howl. He’s a pompous windbag and the Grand Poobah of this self-satisfied band of hipster hangers-on. In fact, these characters are so believable and relevant that upon opening your door, you may find them boycotting the Starbuck’s down the street because it’s corporate and infesting any local, little-known coffee shop or cafe with their arrogance and disdain. As their sanctified and sanctimonious skipper, Maxwell parcels out his florid knowledge, and his disciples lap it like hungry alley cats. For instance, he proclaims with conviction that “Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.” And “I refuse to say anything twice. Repetition is death. When you repeat something, you are reliving a moment, wasting it, severing it from the other end of your life. I believe only in new impressions, new stimuli, new life!” The beatniks refer to themselves as “aware” as if the adjective is a badge of honor endowed on so few. When one of them is questioned as to what it is exactly that she’s aware of, she responds with “Not anything, stupid. Just aware.” The audience and the movie makers know that everything spewing from Maxwell, and in turn his followers, is pure shit, but the characters have no idea they’re playing in the sewers. The credibility of Maxwell (and art in general) rests only on the tenuous agreement by the followers that merit is to be found in the words he strings together--an idea the movie brings into sharp, critical, hilarious focus.
And then comes the truly tragic figure of Walter--a boy as much victim as he is villain. Walter works as a bus boy in the coffee shop where these hipsters meet to fester in their own self-importance, and he desperately wants the acceptance and acclaim that Maxwell and some of the others have achieved. But the obstacle is that Walter lacks the creativity, intelligence, and artistic inclination to make any sort of name for himself. This unwillingly makes Walter the whipping post of his intellectually superior peers, and he only half understands how truly suck-tastic his position amongst them is. In speaking of Walter, Maxwell says, “Walter has a clear mind. One day something will enter it, feel lonely, and leave again.” This is the shared sentiment of Walter’s usefulness and ability within the beatnik community.
But the tides turn when Walter accidentally stabs the boardinghouse cat, Frankie, with a steak knife through a plaster wall, covers the corpse and weapon in molding clay, and calls it art. Bam. Instant success. His greatest fan and supporter? Maxwell--who has no idea that the sculpture is anything other than a molded figment of Walter’s imagination. Walter enters what I’ll call a very active and fertile creative period, turning out more sculptures of greater, er, stature and increasingly gruesome detail. And rather than indict him, I root for Walter, the poor bus boy turned artist with slow-firing synapses and a desperate need for love and acceptance.
In the end, the truth is discovered, and rather than eat their words (they’d rather have wheat-germ bagels), the beatniks embrace the social groupthink to which they are so opposed and hunt down Walter. The cycle has come full circle, and Walter is once again their whipping boy, an easy target for damnation to handily erase their misguided hero worship and praise for the “artistry” of brutal murder.
But the real “artistry” is in twisting a tale to make the killer the victim and the smarmy pseudo-intellectuals the savage perps of social injustice. The mixed metaphors and spoken-word mumbo jumbo that these counterculture culprits go tossing about are as deadly as Walter’s hands. Their exclusivity and cruelty breeds a desperation that most people can relate to on some level. What wouldn’t we do to belong? Hand over our lunch money? Play a cruel prank on someone even further on the outside than us? Do the bidding of someone higher on the social food chain? Completely sign over our self-worth and dignity? Corman’s vision is a gathering of geeks with the adopted mentality of bully jocks, and in all its cult-film coverings, it’s as real and relevant today as it was over 50 years ago. A dynamic social critique with some of the most quote-worthy, hilarious lines of all time make this well-worth viewing.
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