The Gist (A Bucket of Blood) - THE GIST
"Let's talk about art."
These are the opening words to
A Bucket of Blood (1959), a venomous satire on the pretensions of the art world.
Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, never better) is a busboy in "The Yellow Door," a coffee bar/art gallery. The poor guy is a little slow, and as impressionable as a child. Too bad his biggest influences are these self-absorbed young adults preening with affectation: they wear bathrobes and creative facial hair, blather on about organic farming and obscure foodstuffs, constantly projecting an air of bored indifference. They rally around beatnik poet Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton), whose manifesto declares that Art is more important than anything, even the lives of other human beings. And Walter wants nothing more than to be one of them.
The joke is that he wins their accolades and respect only by taking Brock's callous screed literally - Walter kills people and turns their corpses into Art. That part is familiar - on loan from
House of Wax (1953), the film that made Vincent Price a household name just a few years earlier.
A Bucket of Blood distinguishes itself not by plot points but by context - let Vincent Price mummify his victims with nary a tongue in cheek, but Dick Miller's body of work is gloriously absurd.
Walter Paisley makes no particular effort to hide the fact that his "sculptures" are just dead things encased in clay. The art aficionados around him simply
assume these pieces are great works of art, and blithely accept Walter's barely concealed confessions as the quirks of a misunderstood artist. Walter brings in his first piece, "Dead Cat," with a knife suspiciously stabbed into its side. He is asked why he stuck a knife in it, and he guilelessly replies, "I didn't meant to."
It is merely the culture of the place that no one asks follow-up questions. Paisley drags in one poorly disguised murder victim after another, some still dripping blood, all to riotously entertaining raves from the Yellow Door's art critics.
The movie itself, in a wonderful stroke of irony, found much the same reception. Roger Corman cranked out the exploitation flick in less than a week, on a dare, to find it hailed as a sharp social satire.
Corman, you see, was a serious artist. Sure, he worked in the indie world's backwater of quickie exploitation pictures, but that never stopped him taking his work -or himself- seriously. This is a man who studied Freud and used his Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe cycle as a platform for his ideas on human psychology. He read important books, was politically active, keen to push boundaries. And he was used to taking a drubbing for making low-budget monster movies-they could be well-made, thoughtful, popular even, and never enjoy mainstream respect simply because they were what they were.
Like Paisley, Corman made what he could out of the materials at hand, turning dross into gold sometimes. Reviewer's attitudes about "what is art" were a constant frustration for a working filmmaker. Meanwhile, his backers at AIP were just as small-minded when it came to evaluating the aesthetics and merit of his creations-Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson were notorious for disrespecting the films they handled. Yet, like Paisley's benefactor Leonard DeSantis, they never let their qualms get in the way of profit-all objections fly out the window when money comes in the door.
In
A Bucket of Blood Corman takes his revenge, depicting the whole scene as something ridiculous, amoral, contemptible. "When a critic wrote that the art world [in the film] was a metaphor for the movie world," says Corman, "I didn't deny it."
This he does in a 5-day wonder that is a marvel of good filmmaking. Clever directorial flourishes abound. When Brock bloviates, "I refuse to say anything twice. Repetition is death," you can be sure that line will, in fact, be repeated. Later, when Walter accidentally kills the cat and sets the whole drama in motion, he first smacks his head into a hanging lamp: a small piece of slapstick that motivates deeply atmospheric lighting effects for the crucial sequence that immediately unfolds. Alfred Hitchcock would pull much the same stunt in the climax of
Psycho that same year.
While making his statue "Murdered Man," Walter has to hide the body from his inquisitive landlady. She barges into his apartment to find his sofa now mysteriously draped by a sheet. Suspicious about what he might have to hide under that sheet, she yanks it away-to reveal a plain, empty sofa! As we adjust to the startling surprise, the dead man's arm suddenly drops into view from the top of the frame. It is a perfectly timed and executed fake-out and reveal, the likes of which would fuel countless thrillers like
Alien (1979) in the generations to come.
The finale finds Walter hunted by both his enraged public and the ghosts of his victims. Fritz Lang would have been proud (and probably was, come to think of it) to see Corman riffing on the climax of Lang's 1922 epic
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. It is a moody and effective chase scene, proof that Corman knew when to spend time and money as well as when to save it.
Dick Miller might disagree. "If they'd had more money to put into the production," he told film historian Beverly Gray, "if we didn't have to shoot the last scene with me hanging with just some gray makeup on because they didn't have time to put the plaster on me, this could have been a very classic little film."
That it
is a "classic little film" should go without saying. Corman praised Miller as "the best actor in Hollywood," while European critics (especially the French) started to lionize Corman as an important filmmaker. And no sooner did Corman's reputation grow for his gallows humor and arch thrillers than he switched gears yet again: into glossy, bigger-budgeted adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. Walter Paisley's crime was double: not only did he kill for his art, he never saw a way not to. Corman the artist was always evolving, ever imaginative, always one step ahead of everyone else.
by David Kalat
SOURCES:
Alan Frank,
The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray,
Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood," Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist," Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
The Gist (A Bucket of Blood) - THE GIST
"Let's talk about art."
These are the opening words to A Bucket of Blood (1959), a venomous satire on the pretensions of the art world.
Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, never better) is a busboy in "The Yellow Door," a coffee bar/art gallery. The poor guy is a little slow, and as impressionable as a child. Too bad his biggest influences are these self-absorbed young adults preening with affectation: they wear bathrobes and creative facial hair, blather on about organic farming and obscure foodstuffs, constantly projecting an air of bored indifference. They rally around beatnik poet Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton), whose manifesto declares that Art is more important than anything, even the lives of other human beings. And Walter wants nothing more than to be one of them.
The joke is that he wins their accolades and respect only by taking Brock's callous screed literally - Walter kills people and turns their corpses into Art. That part is familiar - on loan from House of Wax (1953), the film that made Vincent Price a household name just a few years earlier. A Bucket of Blood distinguishes itself not by plot points but by context - let Vincent Price mummify his victims with nary a tongue in cheek, but Dick Miller's body of work is gloriously absurd.
Walter Paisley makes no particular effort to hide the fact that his "sculptures" are just dead things encased in clay. The art aficionados around him simply assume these pieces are great works of art, and blithely accept Walter's barely concealed confessions as the quirks of a misunderstood artist. Walter brings in his first piece, "Dead Cat," with a knife suspiciously stabbed into its side. He is asked why he stuck a knife in it, and he guilelessly replies, "I didn't meant to."
It is merely the culture of the place that no one asks follow-up questions. Paisley drags in one poorly disguised murder victim after another, some still dripping blood, all to riotously entertaining raves from the Yellow Door's art critics.
The movie itself, in a wonderful stroke of irony, found much the same reception. Roger Corman cranked out the exploitation flick in less than a week, on a dare, to find it hailed as a sharp social satire.
Corman, you see, was a serious artist. Sure, he worked in the indie world's backwater of quickie exploitation pictures, but that never stopped him taking his work -or himself- seriously. This is a man who studied Freud and used his Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe cycle as a platform for his ideas on human psychology. He read important books, was politically active, keen to push boundaries. And he was used to taking a drubbing for making low-budget monster movies-they could be well-made, thoughtful, popular even, and never enjoy mainstream respect simply because they were what they were.
Like Paisley, Corman made what he could out of the materials at hand, turning dross into gold sometimes. Reviewer's attitudes about "what is art" were a constant frustration for a working filmmaker. Meanwhile, his backers at AIP were just as small-minded when it came to evaluating the aesthetics and merit of his creations-Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson were notorious for disrespecting the films they handled. Yet, like Paisley's benefactor Leonard DeSantis, they never let their qualms get in the way of profit-all objections fly out the window when money comes in the door.
In A Bucket of Blood Corman takes his revenge, depicting the whole scene as something ridiculous, amoral, contemptible. "When a critic wrote that the art world [in the film] was a metaphor for the movie world," says Corman, "I didn't deny it."
This he does in a 5-day wonder that is a marvel of good filmmaking. Clever directorial flourishes abound. When Brock bloviates, "I refuse to say anything twice. Repetition is death," you can be sure that line will, in fact, be repeated. Later, when Walter accidentally kills the cat and sets the whole drama in motion, he first smacks his head into a hanging lamp: a small piece of slapstick that motivates deeply atmospheric lighting effects for the crucial sequence that immediately unfolds. Alfred Hitchcock would pull much the same stunt in the climax of Psycho that same year.
While making his statue "Murdered Man," Walter has to hide the body from his inquisitive landlady. She barges into his apartment to find his sofa now mysteriously draped by a sheet. Suspicious about what he might have to hide under that sheet, she yanks it away-to reveal a plain, empty sofa! As we adjust to the startling surprise, the dead man's arm suddenly drops into view from the top of the frame. It is a perfectly timed and executed fake-out and reveal, the likes of which would fuel countless thrillers like Alien (1979) in the generations to come.
The finale finds Walter hunted by both his enraged public and the ghosts of his victims. Fritz Lang would have been proud (and probably was, come to think of it) to see Corman riffing on the climax of Lang's 1922 epic Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. It is a moody and effective chase scene, proof that Corman knew when to spend time and money as well as when to save it.
Dick Miller might disagree. "If they'd had more money to put into the production," he told film historian Beverly Gray, "if we didn't have to shoot the last scene with me hanging with just some gray makeup on because they didn't have time to put the plaster on me, this could have been a very classic little film."
That it is a "classic little film" should go without saying. Corman praised Miller as "the best actor in Hollywood," while European critics (especially the French) started to lionize Corman as an important filmmaker. And no sooner did Corman's reputation grow for his gallows humor and arch thrillers than he switched gears yet again: into glossy, bigger-budgeted adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. Walter Paisley's crime was double: not only did he kill for his art, he never saw a way not to. Corman the artist was always evolving, ever imaginative, always one step ahead of everyone else.
by David Kalat
SOURCES:
Alan Frank, The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray, Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood," Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist," Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
Insider Info (A Bucket of Blood) - BEHIND THE SCENES
"I was out to create a different kind of film-more cynical, darker, more wickedly funny," said Roger Corman.
They say hindsight is 20/20, and for a modern-day P.T. Barnum like cult movie auteur Corman that is understating things. In other words, Corman may be overstating things. The bleakly black comedies he fashioned at the tail end of the 1950s were not quite as ground-breaking as all that-just watch James Whale's
The Old Dark House (1932) if you don't believe me. But in the sunny landscape of
Father Knows Best 1950s, Corman's bilious satires were a cold splash of water in the face, a kick in the gut, a breath of decidedly unfresh air.
Roger Corman was bushed.
Ski Troop Attack (1960) had been a grueling shoot. Recuperating from the experience, he was asked by his distributors at AIP to deliver some horror goods for $50,000 pocket change. Corman needed something quick-n-dirty after that cruel Chicago winter. So he accepted the assignment as a kind of dare: what if he could break his previous record of filming an entire movie in just 6 days?
Whatever he was going to do, then, it would have to be small in scale. As he would later explain in a 1987 interview, this meant approaching the film from a new direction: "You break the tension one way, and it's horror. You break the tension another way, they laugh." Horror and comedy were two sides of the same coin. Inspired by his experiment with black comedy in 1957's
Not of This Earth, Corman would focus on mordant wit and social satire.
It all started with an all-night coffee bender across Sunset Strip. Corman and writer Chuck Griffith trawled across endless coffee bars, hashing out story ideas. Come the wee hours of the morning and the pair found themselves at Chez Paulette as the staff were closing up. Waitress-cum-wannabe-actress Sally Kellerman took a break from her washing up duties to plunk down in a chair with the two filmmakers, offering up some notions of her own. And thus was
A Bucket of Blood born.*
This is the official story, a satisfying mythology repeated by Corman whenever the subject of
A Bucket of Blood comes up. It is not, however, the only account.
There are those-such as Corman acolyte Joe Dante-who insist Corman didn't even get the jokes and needed others to explain the humor to him. Chuck Griffith says that when he first suggested making a comedy, Corman said no: "We don't do comedy," Corman allegedly explained, "because you have to be
good. We don't have the time or money to be good, so we stick to action." When Griffith finally persuaded Corman to take the chance, he says Corman fretted nervously about how to even direct such a thing, and relied on Griffith (a vaudeville baby) for advice.
Corman and Griffith each tell the tale in a way that effaces the other and inflates their own role; the truth likely sits somewhere in between. Regardless of whether Corman set out to pioneer a new breed of horror comedy or had it thrust upon him by a canny screenwriter, the fact remains that Corman did at least win his bet.
A Bucket of Blood came in at a tidy $35,000 and took just five days-a new record, and with time and money still in hand for yet a second film!
Corman got wind that the Chaplin Studio nearby had some sets still standing from a previous production that were ready to be torn down. Corman quickly rented the sets for two days (the amount of time he still had left on
A Bucket of Blood 's ledger) and tasked Griffith with cooking up a script that could be done using just those settings. The result was
The Little Shop of Horrors, made for a measly $27,500 and beating
Blood's record handily. A third black comedy,
Creature from the Haunted Sea completed the triptych in 1960.
"Taken together," boasted Corman, "these remarkably modest black and white films-with their loose, raw energy-were a major departure in my career."
* -- Chuck Griffith tells much the same story about a coffee-bender that ended at Chez Paulette and the birth of a screenplay, but he says the film in question was
The Little Shop of Horrors.
by David Kalat
Sources:
Alan Frank,
The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray,
Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood," Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist," Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
Insider Info (A Bucket of Blood) - BEHIND THE SCENES
"I was out to create a different kind of film-more cynical, darker, more wickedly funny," said Roger Corman.
They say hindsight is 20/20, and for a modern-day P.T. Barnum like cult movie auteur Corman that is understating things. In other words, Corman may be overstating things. The bleakly black comedies he fashioned at the tail end of the 1950s were not quite as ground-breaking as all that-just watch James Whale's The Old Dark House (1932) if you don't believe me. But in the sunny landscape of Father Knows Best 1950s, Corman's bilious satires were a cold splash of water in the face, a kick in the gut, a breath of decidedly unfresh air.
Roger Corman was bushed. Ski Troop Attack (1960) had been a grueling shoot. Recuperating from the experience, he was asked by his distributors at AIP to deliver some horror goods for $50,000 pocket change. Corman needed something quick-n-dirty after that cruel Chicago winter. So he accepted the assignment as a kind of dare: what if he could break his previous record of filming an entire movie in just 6 days?
Whatever he was going to do, then, it would have to be small in scale. As he would later explain in a 1987 interview, this meant approaching the film from a new direction: "You break the tension one way, and it's horror. You break the tension another way, they laugh." Horror and comedy were two sides of the same coin. Inspired by his experiment with black comedy in 1957's Not of This Earth, Corman would focus on mordant wit and social satire.
It all started with an all-night coffee bender across Sunset Strip. Corman and writer Chuck Griffith trawled across endless coffee bars, hashing out story ideas. Come the wee hours of the morning and the pair found themselves at Chez Paulette as the staff were closing up. Waitress-cum-wannabe-actress Sally Kellerman took a break from her washing up duties to plunk down in a chair with the two filmmakers, offering up some notions of her own. And thus was A Bucket of Blood born.*
This is the official story, a satisfying mythology repeated by Corman whenever the subject of A Bucket of Blood comes up. It is not, however, the only account.
There are those-such as Corman acolyte Joe Dante-who insist Corman didn't even get the jokes and needed others to explain the humor to him. Chuck Griffith says that when he first suggested making a comedy, Corman said no: "We don't do comedy," Corman allegedly explained, "because you have to be good. We don't have the time or money to be good, so we stick to action." When Griffith finally persuaded Corman to take the chance, he says Corman fretted nervously about how to even direct such a thing, and relied on Griffith (a vaudeville baby) for advice.
Corman and Griffith each tell the tale in a way that effaces the other and inflates their own role; the truth likely sits somewhere in between. Regardless of whether Corman set out to pioneer a new breed of horror comedy or had it thrust upon him by a canny screenwriter, the fact remains that Corman did at least win his bet. A Bucket of Blood came in at a tidy $35,000 and took just five days-a new record, and with time and money still in hand for yet a second film!
Corman got wind that the Chaplin Studio nearby had some sets still standing from a previous production that were ready to be torn down. Corman quickly rented the sets for two days (the amount of time he still had left on A Bucket of Blood 's ledger) and tasked Griffith with cooking up a script that could be done using just those settings. The result was The Little Shop of Horrors, made for a measly $27,500 and beating Blood's record handily. A third black comedy, Creature from the Haunted Sea completed the triptych in 1960.
"Taken together," boasted Corman, "these remarkably modest black and white films-with their loose, raw energy-were a major departure in my career."
* -- Chuck Griffith tells much the same story about a coffee-bender that ended at Chez Paulette and the birth of a screenplay, but he says the film in question was The Little Shop of Horrors.
by David Kalat
Sources:
Alan Frank, The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray, Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood," Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist," Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
In the Know (A Bucket of Blood) - TRIVIA
"I've played Walter five times now, I think," says Dick Miller, the star of
A Bucket of Blood, "I've lost count." In fact, Miller has played characters named "Walter Paisley" in no less than 6 additional movies besides
A Bucket of Blood. As a new generation of filmmakers rose up through Corman's ranks (or felt otherwise indebted to his legend), they paid homage to his blackly comic classic by hiring Miller to play a "Paisley" in:
Hollywood Boulevard (1976),
The Howling (1981),
Heartbeeps (1981),
The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983),
Chopping Mall (1986), and
Shake, Rattle and Rock! (1994).
Roger Corman missed a trick by not bringing back Miller in at least a cameo role in the misfired 1995 remake of
A Bucket of Blood. For his Showtime series
Roger Corman Presents, Corman commissioned director Michael James McDonald to rehash the 1959 film under the less-evocative but more accurate title
The Death Artist. Ex-brat-packer Anthony Michael Hall took over the "Walter Paisley" duties, but with little of Miller's understated charm. He was joined by a promising cast that included: Justine Bateman, David Cross, Will Ferrell, and Paul Bartel - all for naught. Sadly, the remake squanders its satirical opportunities and proves that not just anyone could do what Corman did, so well, back in 1959.
Part of Corman's impetus to remake the property was to reclaim ownership, to set right a bad business decision made long before. Back in the day, Corman focused entirely on the here-and-now with little regard for the future of his creations. Says Miller, "His thinking was, 'We're going to make this movie, it's going to play in a couple of theaters for a month or two, and then it's garbage.'" It was a shortsightedness shared by Corman's distributors at AIP (American International Pictures). Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff admitted, "When you come down to it, I don't think there are any of us in the film industry making anything today that will be of more than passing historical interest fifty years from now." And with such carelessness, AIP and Corman let many of his early works slide into the public domain, where they have been ruthlessly mistreated.
Back in 1959, AIP promoted
A Bucket of Blood with its usual ballyhoo. They advised theater owners to set up a giant bucket, tipped slightly, "with the appearance of red fluid dripping" from it. To accomplish this effect, AIP's promotional advice suggested using "some art," or, failing that, to let the bucket actually drip red dye. Now
there's a good idea!
Exhibitors were also urged to trail paths of the red fluid from various strategic points in the city to the theater entrance, where they recommended having the Red Cross conduct a blood drive. "How many 'Buckets of Blood' would a human be able to fill?" AIP offered as a slogan to promote the blood drive (and, in turn, to promote the film, natch). Patrons who managed to bring their own "bucket of blood" with them would be admitted for free - a marketing notion that could never be revived in today's more callously violent age.
"You'll die laughing!"
- AIP's ad campaign for
A Bucket of Blood
by David Kalat
SOURCES:
Alan Frank,
The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray,
Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood," Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist," Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
In the Know (A Bucket of Blood) - TRIVIA
"I've played Walter five times now, I think," says Dick Miller, the star of A Bucket of Blood, "I've lost count." In fact, Miller has played characters named "Walter Paisley" in no less than 6 additional movies besides A Bucket of Blood. As a new generation of filmmakers rose up through Corman's ranks (or felt otherwise indebted to his legend), they paid homage to his blackly comic classic by hiring Miller to play a "Paisley" in: Hollywood Boulevard (1976), The Howling (1981), Heartbeeps (1981), The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983), Chopping Mall (1986), and Shake, Rattle and Rock! (1994).
Roger Corman missed a trick by not bringing back Miller in at least a cameo role in the misfired 1995 remake of A Bucket of Blood. For his Showtime series Roger Corman Presents, Corman commissioned director Michael James McDonald to rehash the 1959 film under the less-evocative but more accurate title The Death Artist. Ex-brat-packer Anthony Michael Hall took over the "Walter Paisley" duties, but with little of Miller's understated charm. He was joined by a promising cast that included: Justine Bateman, David Cross, Will Ferrell, and Paul Bartel - all for naught. Sadly, the remake squanders its satirical opportunities and proves that not just anyone could do what Corman did, so well, back in 1959.
Part of Corman's impetus to remake the property was to reclaim ownership, to set right a bad business decision made long before. Back in the day, Corman focused entirely on the here-and-now with little regard for the future of his creations. Says Miller, "His thinking was, 'We're going to make this movie, it's going to play in a couple of theaters for a month or two, and then it's garbage.'" It was a shortsightedness shared by Corman's distributors at AIP (American International Pictures). Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff admitted, "When you come down to it, I don't think there are any of us in the film industry making anything today that will be of more than passing historical interest fifty years from now." And with such carelessness, AIP and Corman let many of his early works slide into the public domain, where they have been ruthlessly mistreated.
Back in 1959, AIP promoted A Bucket of Blood with its usual ballyhoo. They advised theater owners to set up a giant bucket, tipped slightly, "with the appearance of red fluid dripping" from it. To accomplish this effect, AIP's promotional advice suggested using "some art," or, failing that, to let the bucket actually drip red dye. Now there's a good idea!
Exhibitors were also urged to trail paths of the red fluid from various strategic points in the city to the theater entrance, where they recommended having the Red Cross conduct a blood drive. "How many 'Buckets of Blood' would a human be able to fill?" AIP offered as a slogan to promote the blood drive (and, in turn, to promote the film, natch). Patrons who managed to bring their own "bucket of blood" with them would be admitted for free - a marketing notion that could never be revived in today's more callously violent age.
"You'll die laughing!"
- AIP's ad campaign for A Bucket of Blood
by David Kalat
SOURCES:
Alan Frank, The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray, Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood," Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist," Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
Yea or Nay (A Bucket of Blood) - CRITIC REVIEWS OF "A BUCKET OF BLOOD" (1959)
"A 66-minute joke compounded of beatniks and gore. It's too comic to be a typical horror film and the horror is too explicit for it to be a comedy, but for the youth market at which it's aimed, the feature looks like a winner."
-
Variety
"While only marginal as a horror film, Roger Corman's
A Bucket of Blood excels as both a black comedy and a cagey send-up of the '50s beatnik scene and gives Dick Miller his most memorable role."
-John Charles, Video Watchdog
"Dick Miller gives a performance of sustained poignancy as the half-wit hero."
-Monthly Film Bulletin
"The difficult central role of the crushed timid underdog menial is cleverly played by Dick Miller. Parts of the film, notably the earlier scenes, are a glorious satire on jargon-spouting beatniks and phoney artists, led by a mystic poet who recites to jazz."
-CEA Film Report
"A wonderful beatnik horror comedy...Dick Miller, a familiar Corman stock-company player, is perfect as Walter Paisley...An all-time classic."
-
The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
"This is a marvellous little film which takes some delightful sideswipes at beatnik pretensions (Allen Ginsberg is hilariously caricatured) and breathes rude life into a story that neither
Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) nor
House of Wax (1953) was quite able to animate. Miller...is wonderfully deadpan as the half-witted waiter..."
-
The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies
"Corman's first full-blooded horror comedy was put in a class of its own by Charles Griffith's unusually witty script...Not surprisingly, the parody of the 'beat scene'...is closer to the truth than those attempted in many mainstream movies."
-
TimeOut Film Guide
"Heavy handed spoof with a few choice if bloody moments"
-
Halliwell's Film & Video Guide
"Zestful Corman quickie spoofing the 1950s beatnik movement as well as
House of Wax-type horror films. Miller is terrific in his signature role...It runs out of steam before it reaches its climax, but is a nice precursor to Corman's even cheaper classic,
The Little Shop of Horrors..."
- James O'Neill,
Terror on Tape
"...an exercise in dark humor...Charles B. Griffith's hip, flip script is full of amusement, such as when a newsboy croaks, "Read all about the man cut in half! Police can find only part of the body!"
- John Stanley,
Creature Features
"Corman and Griffith's interpretation is as a gleeful black comedy which happily jibes at the pretence of the Beat Generation. It's amusing, although the script is told with a minimalist economy that brings a smile rather than a real laugh. Dick Miller plays with likeably nebbish lunacy."
- Richard Scheib, The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review
"Miller, who manages to sustain a sense of poignancy while committing his atrocities, gives an excellent performance in this funny film with a good comical jazz score by Fred Katz."
- TV Guide
Compiled by David Kalat & Jeff Stafford
Yea or Nay (A Bucket of Blood) - CRITIC REVIEWS OF "A BUCKET OF BLOOD" (1959)
"A 66-minute joke compounded of beatniks and gore. It's too comic to be a typical horror film and the horror is too explicit for it to be a comedy, but for the youth market at which it's aimed, the feature looks like a winner."
-Variety
"While only marginal as a horror film, Roger Corman's A Bucket of Blood excels as both a black comedy and a cagey send-up of the '50s beatnik scene and gives Dick Miller his most memorable role."
-John Charles, Video Watchdog
"Dick Miller gives a performance of sustained poignancy as the half-wit hero."
-Monthly Film Bulletin
"The difficult central role of the crushed timid underdog menial is cleverly played by Dick Miller. Parts of the film, notably the earlier scenes, are a glorious satire on jargon-spouting beatniks and phoney artists, led by a mystic poet who recites to jazz."
-CEA Film Report
"A wonderful beatnik horror comedy...Dick Miller, a familiar Corman stock-company player, is perfect as Walter Paisley...An all-time classic."
- The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film
"This is a marvellous little film which takes some delightful sideswipes at beatnik pretensions (Allen Ginsberg is hilariously caricatured) and breathes rude life into a story that neither Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933) nor House of Wax (1953) was quite able to animate. Miller...is wonderfully deadpan as the half-witted waiter..."
- The Encyclopedia of Horror Movies
"Corman's first full-blooded horror comedy was put in a class of its own by Charles Griffith's unusually witty script...Not surprisingly, the parody of the 'beat scene'...is closer to the truth than those attempted in many mainstream movies."
- TimeOut Film Guide
"Heavy handed spoof with a few choice if bloody moments"
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide
"Zestful Corman quickie spoofing the 1950s beatnik movement as well as House of Wax-type horror films. Miller is terrific in his signature role...It runs out of steam before it reaches its climax, but is a nice precursor to Corman's even cheaper classic, The Little Shop of Horrors..."
- James O'Neill, Terror on Tape
"...an exercise in dark humor...Charles B. Griffith's hip, flip script is full of amusement, such as when a newsboy croaks, "Read all about the man cut in half! Police can find only part of the body!"
- John Stanley, Creature Features
"Corman and Griffith's interpretation is as a gleeful black comedy which happily jibes at the pretence of the Beat Generation. It's amusing, although the script is told with a minimalist economy that brings a smile rather than a real laugh. Dick Miller plays with likeably nebbish lunacy."
- Richard Scheib, The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review
"Miller, who manages to sustain a sense of poignancy while committing his atrocities, gives an excellent performance in this funny film with a good comical jazz score by Fred Katz."
- TV Guide
Compiled by David Kalat & Jeff Stafford
A Bucket of Blood
"Let's talk about art."
These are the opening words to
A Bucket of Blood (1959), a venomous satire on the pretensions of the art world.
Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, never better) is a busboy in "The Yellow Door," a coffee bar/art gallery. The poor guy is a little slow, and as impressionable as a child. Too bad his biggest influences are these self-absorbed young adults preening with affectation: they wear bathrobes and creative facial hair, blather on about organic farming and obscure foodstuffs, constantly projecting an air of bored indifference. They rally around beatnik poet Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton), whose manifesto declares that Art is more important than anything, even the lives of other human beings. And Walter wants nothing more than to be one of them.
The joke is that he wins their accolades and respect only by taking Brock's callous screed literally - Walter kills people and turns their corpses into Art. That part is familiar - on loan from
House of Wax (1953), the film that made Vincent Price a household name just a few years earlier.
A Bucket of Blood distinguishes itself not by plot points but by context - let Vincent Price mummify his victims with nary a tongue in cheek, but Dick Miller's body of work is gloriously absurd.
Walter Paisley makes no particular effort to hide the fact that his "sculptures" are just dead things encased in clay. The art aficionados around him simply
assume these pieces are great works of art, and blithely accept Walter's barely concealed confessions as the quirks of a misunderstood artist. Walter brings in his first piece, "Dead Cat," with a knife suspiciously stabbed into its side. He is asked why he stuck a knife in it, and he guilelessly replies, "I didn't meant to."
It is merely the culture of the place that no one asks follow-up questions. Paisley drags in one poorly disguised murder victim after another, some still dripping blood, all to riotously entertaining raves from the Yellow Door's art critics.
The movie itself, in a wonderful stroke of irony, found much the same reception. Roger Corman cranked out the exploitation flick in less than a week, on a dare, to find it hailed as a sharp social satire.
Corman, you see, was a serious artist. Sure, he worked in the indie world's backwater of quickie exploitation pictures, but that never stopped him taking his work -or himself- seriously. This is a man who studied Freud and used his Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe cycle as a platform for his ideas on human psychology. He read important books, was politically active, keen to push boundaries. And he was used to taking a drubbing for making low-budget monster movies-they could be well-made, thoughtful, popular even, and never enjoy mainstream respect simply because they were what they were.
Like Paisley, Corman made what he could out of the materials at hand, turning dross into gold sometimes. Reviewer's attitudes about "what is art" were a constant frustration for a working filmmaker. Meanwhile, his backers at AIP were just as small-minded when it came to evaluating the aesthetics and merit of his creations-Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson were notorious for disrespecting the films they handled. Yet, like Paisley's benefactor Leonard DeSantis, they never let their qualms get in the way of profit-all objections fly out the window when money comes in the door.
In
A Bucket of Blood Corman takes his revenge, depicting the whole scene as something ridiculous, amoral, contemptible. "When a critic wrote that the art world [in the film] was a metaphor for the movie world," says Corman, "I didn't deny it."
This he does in a 5-day wonder that is a marvel of good filmmaking. Clever directorial flourishes abound. When Brock bloviates, "I refuse to say anything twice. Repetition is death," you can be sure that line will, in fact, be repeated. Later, when Walter accidentally kills the cat and sets the whole drama in motion, he first smacks his head into a hanging lamp: a small piece of slapstick that motivates deeply atmospheric lighting effects for the crucial sequence that immediately unfolds. Alfred Hitchcock would pull much the same stunt in the climax of
Psycho that same year.
While making his statue "Murdered Man," Walter has to hide the body from his inquisitive landlady. She barges into his apartment to find his sofa now mysteriously draped by a sheet. Suspicious about what he might have to hide under that sheet, she yanks it away-to reveal a plain, empty sofa! As we adjust to the startling surprise, the dead man's arm suddenly drops into view from the top of the frame. It is a perfectly timed and executed fake-out and reveal, the likes of which would fuel countless thrillers like
Alien (1979) in the generations to come.
The finale finds Walter hunted by both his enraged public and the ghosts of his victims. Fritz Lang would have been proud (and probably was, come to think of it) to see Corman riffing on the climax of Lang's 1922 epic
Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. It is a moody and effective chase scene, proof that Corman knew when to spend time and money as well as when to save it.
Dick Miller might disagree. "If they'd had more money to put into the production," he told film historian Beverly Gray, "if we didn't have to shoot the last scene with me hanging with just some gray makeup on because they didn't have time to put the plaster on me, this could have been a very classic little film."
That it
is a "classic little film" should go without saying. Corman praised Miller as "the best actor in Hollywood," while European critics (especially the French) started to lionize Corman as an important filmmaker. And no sooner did Corman's reputation grow for his gallows humor and arch thrillers than he switched gears yet again: into glossy, bigger-budgeted adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. Walter Paisley's crime was double: not only did he kill for his art, he never saw a way not to. Corman the artist was always evolving, ever imaginative, always one step ahead of everyone else.
by David Kalat
SOURCES:
Alan Frank,
The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray,
Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha,
The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood,"
Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist,"
Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman,
How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
A Bucket of Blood
"Let's talk about art."
These are the opening words to A Bucket of Blood (1959), a venomous satire on the pretensions of the art world.
Walter Paisley (Dick Miller, never better) is a busboy in "The Yellow Door," a coffee bar/art gallery. The poor guy is a little slow, and as impressionable as a child. Too bad his biggest influences are these self-absorbed young adults preening with affectation: they wear bathrobes and creative facial hair, blather on about organic farming and obscure foodstuffs, constantly projecting an air of bored indifference. They rally around beatnik poet Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton), whose manifesto declares that Art is more important than anything, even the lives of other human beings. And Walter wants nothing more than to be one of them.
The joke is that he wins their accolades and respect only by taking Brock's callous screed literally - Walter kills people and turns their corpses into Art. That part is familiar - on loan from House of Wax (1953), the film that made Vincent Price a household name just a few years earlier. A Bucket of Blood distinguishes itself not by plot points but by context - let Vincent Price mummify his victims with nary a tongue in cheek, but Dick Miller's body of work is gloriously absurd.
Walter Paisley makes no particular effort to hide the fact that his "sculptures" are just dead things encased in clay. The art aficionados around him simply assume these pieces are great works of art, and blithely accept Walter's barely concealed confessions as the quirks of a misunderstood artist. Walter brings in his first piece, "Dead Cat," with a knife suspiciously stabbed into its side. He is asked why he stuck a knife in it, and he guilelessly replies, "I didn't meant to."
It is merely the culture of the place that no one asks follow-up questions. Paisley drags in one poorly disguised murder victim after another, some still dripping blood, all to riotously entertaining raves from the Yellow Door's art critics.
The movie itself, in a wonderful stroke of irony, found much the same reception. Roger Corman cranked out the exploitation flick in less than a week, on a dare, to find it hailed as a sharp social satire.
Corman, you see, was a serious artist. Sure, he worked in the indie world's backwater of quickie exploitation pictures, but that never stopped him taking his work -or himself- seriously. This is a man who studied Freud and used his Vincent Price/Edgar Allan Poe cycle as a platform for his ideas on human psychology. He read important books, was politically active, keen to push boundaries. And he was used to taking a drubbing for making low-budget monster movies-they could be well-made, thoughtful, popular even, and never enjoy mainstream respect simply because they were what they were.
Like Paisley, Corman made what he could out of the materials at hand, turning dross into gold sometimes. Reviewer's attitudes about "what is art" were a constant frustration for a working filmmaker. Meanwhile, his backers at AIP were just as small-minded when it came to evaluating the aesthetics and merit of his creations-Samuel Z. Arkoff and James Nicholson were notorious for disrespecting the films they handled. Yet, like Paisley's benefactor Leonard DeSantis, they never let their qualms get in the way of profit-all objections fly out the window when money comes in the door.
In A Bucket of Blood Corman takes his revenge, depicting the whole scene as something ridiculous, amoral, contemptible. "When a critic wrote that the art world [in the film] was a metaphor for the movie world," says Corman, "I didn't deny it."
This he does in a 5-day wonder that is a marvel of good filmmaking. Clever directorial flourishes abound. When Brock bloviates, "I refuse to say anything twice. Repetition is death," you can be sure that line will, in fact, be repeated. Later, when Walter accidentally kills the cat and sets the whole drama in motion, he first smacks his head into a hanging lamp: a small piece of slapstick that motivates deeply atmospheric lighting effects for the crucial sequence that immediately unfolds. Alfred Hitchcock would pull much the same stunt in the climax of Psycho that same year.
While making his statue "Murdered Man," Walter has to hide the body from his inquisitive landlady. She barges into his apartment to find his sofa now mysteriously draped by a sheet. Suspicious about what he might have to hide under that sheet, she yanks it away-to reveal a plain, empty sofa! As we adjust to the startling surprise, the dead man's arm suddenly drops into view from the top of the frame. It is a perfectly timed and executed fake-out and reveal, the likes of which would fuel countless thrillers like Alien (1979) in the generations to come.
The finale finds Walter hunted by both his enraged public and the ghosts of his victims. Fritz Lang would have been proud (and probably was, come to think of it) to see Corman riffing on the climax of Lang's 1922 epic Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler. It is a moody and effective chase scene, proof that Corman knew when to spend time and money as well as when to save it.
Dick Miller might disagree. "If they'd had more money to put into the production," he told film historian Beverly Gray, "if we didn't have to shoot the last scene with me hanging with just some gray makeup on because they didn't have time to put the plaster on me, this could have been a very classic little film."
That it is a "classic little film" should go without saying. Corman praised Miller as "the best actor in Hollywood," while European critics (especially the French) started to lionize Corman as an important filmmaker. And no sooner did Corman's reputation grow for his gallows humor and arch thrillers than he switched gears yet again: into glossy, bigger-budgeted adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's stories. Walter Paisley's crime was double: not only did he kill for his art, he never saw a way not to. Corman the artist was always evolving, ever imaginative, always one step ahead of everyone else.
by David Kalat
SOURCES:
Alan Frank, The Films of Roger Corman, BT Batsford Ltd, London.
Beverly Gray, Roger Corman, Thunder's Mouth Press, New York.
Ed Naha, The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget, Arco Publishing Inc., New York.
John Charles, "A Bucket of Blood," Video Watchdog, Number 68, 2001, Cincinnati, OH.
John Charles, "The Death Artist," Video Watchdog Number 37, 1997, Cincinnati, OH.
Roger Corman, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, Dell Publishing, New York.
Quote It (A Bucket of Blood) - QUOTES FROM "A BUCKET OF BLOOD" (1959)
BROCK (Julian Burton): Walter has a clear mind. Someday something will enter it, feel lonely, and move on.
BROCK: I am proud to say that my poetry is understood by that minority which is aware.
WOMAN: Aware of what?
NAOLIA (Jhean Burton): Well, not of anything, stupid, just aware!
BROCK: Where are John, Joe, Jake, Jim, jerk? Dead, dead, dead! They were not born, before they were born, they were not born. Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive! Alive! Alive! They were born!
ALICE (Judy Bamber): I'm a model. I only charge $25 an hour. Would you like to do me?
LEONARD (Antony Carbone): You can see the direction his "realism" takes - it's unhealthy!
WALTER: I didn't mean to hurt you, Lou. But if you'd have shot me, you'd be moppin' up my blood now.
BROCK: To be uncreative, you might as well be in your grave.
Beatnik: I saw a statue once. It was called, "the third time Phyllis saw me, she exploded."
Beatnik's Friend: Man, what kind of statue was that?
Beatnik: I dunno, it was made out of driftwood and dipped in fluoric acid. Very wild.
BROCK: Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.
ALICE: You could use a little more heat around this place...!
WALTER: It's bad for the clay! You'll get used to it!
Compiled by David Kalat
Quote It (A Bucket of Blood) - QUOTES FROM "A BUCKET OF BLOOD" (1959)
BROCK (Julian Burton): Walter has a clear mind. Someday something will enter it, feel lonely, and move on.
BROCK: I am proud to say that my poetry is understood by that minority which is aware.
WOMAN: Aware of what?
NAOLIA (Jhean Burton): Well, not of anything, stupid, just aware!
BROCK: Where are John, Joe, Jake, Jim, jerk? Dead, dead, dead! They were not born, before they were born, they were not born. Where are Leonardo, Rembrandt, Ludwig? Alive! Alive! Alive! They were born!
ALICE (Judy Bamber): I'm a model. I only charge $25 an hour. Would you like to do me?
LEONARD (Antony Carbone): You can see the direction his "realism" takes - it's unhealthy!
WALTER: I didn't mean to hurt you, Lou. But if you'd have shot me, you'd be moppin' up my blood now.
BROCK: To be uncreative, you might as well be in your grave.
Beatnik: I saw a statue once. It was called, "the third time Phyllis saw me, she exploded."
Beatnik's Friend: Man, what kind of statue was that?
Beatnik: I dunno, it was made out of driftwood and dipped in fluoric acid. Very wild.
BROCK: Life is an obscure hobo, bumming a ride on the omnibus of art.
ALICE: You could use a little more heat around this place...!
WALTER: It's bad for the clay! You'll get used to it!
Compiled by David Kalat
TCM Remembers - Samuel Arkoff
SAMUEL ARKOFF 1918-2001
Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, who died September 16 at the age of 83, made a dent in film history by co-founding and running the legendary American International Pictures (AIP), a key player in the drive-in and exploitation markets during the 50s, 60s and 70s. Arkoff was born in Iowa on June 12, 1918, served as a military crypographer during World War Two and ended up as an entertainment lawyer. Life changed in 1954 when he and former theatre owner James H. Nicholson founded American Releasing Corporation, a name changed two years later to American International. Their first film was The Fast and the Furious (1954), a road race melodrama starring John Ireland as a fugitive from justice, which cost $75,000 and earned double that amount giving the company a healthy start. The film also kicked off the career of screenwriter Roger Corman who would later become a key B-movie producer and director himself, and provided the title for one of 2001's biggest hits of the summer.
AIP tapped into a previously nonexistant teenage market, the same one fed by rock 'n' roll but not well served by the large Hollywood studios. Arkoff and Nicholson split duties with the colorful, cigar-chomping Arkoff doing the business end and Nicholson handling the creative end (including those unforgettable titles). AIP films included such titles as Attack of the Crab Monsters(1957), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), Black Caesar (1973) and close to 200 others. AIP also imported European and Asian films of commercial potential such as Mario Bava's moody masterworks (Black Sunday, 1960) but also pure schlock like Jess Franco's Attack of the Robots (1966) or the giant monster Gamera series from Japan. These films were usually money makers because of their low costs and built-in market and remain entertaining to this day. AIP also gave a start to then-struggling actors and directors like Robert De Niro (Bloody Mama 1970), Peter Fonda (The Trip 1967), Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha 1972), Jack Nicholson (The Terror (1963), Brian De Palma (Sisters 1973) and Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13 1963). By the 1970s the major studios had moved into the market and AIP itself was making more expensive films like The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) and The Amityville Horror (1979). That combination put AIP in financial trouble; they were sold to Filmways in 1979. Arkoff founded his own Arkoff International Pictures but it made few films; Larry Cohen's Q (1982) was one of the few notable titles.
By Lang Thompson
PAULINE KAEL 1919-2001
Pauline Kael, who died September 3rd at the age of 82, was one of the handful of film critics who made a noticable impact on the way we view movies. Her mix of personal feelings with more abstract aesthetics inspired numerous other critics (sometimes called "Paulettes") and in a few cases even made big hits of movies like Bonnie and Clyde (1967). She claimed to never see a movie more than once or to change her mind about it later. Several collections of her work are available, most with mildly risque titles like I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Going Steady.
Kael was born June 19, 1919 in Petaluma, California but moved with her family to San Francisco during her teens. There she majored in philosophy at University of California at Berkeley though she didn't graduate (the school later gave her an honorary degree). That's when she started to develop a serious interest in movies. In addition to the usual writer's assortment of jobs (seamstress, cook, retail clerk) she started writing about film in 1953; her first review was of Charlie Chaplin's Limelight which she disliked. She wrote for several small publications and did a radio show on the groundbreaking network KPFA before finally landing a job at the high-profile McCall's only to be fired shortly after she panned The Sound of Music (1965) (which she called The Sound of Money). During this period she was also managing and programming Berkeley Cinema Guild Theatres (one of the country's earliest repertoire cinemas despite being basically small rooms above a laundry), and was briefly married to avant-garde filmmaker James Broughton.
The turning point came in 1965 when I Lost It at the Movies not only attracted major critical attention but became a strong seller in book stores. Two years later legendary editor William Shawn hired Kael as film critic for The New Yorker, completing her jump into the limelight. Kael never shied away from controversy as two other events proved. In the early Sixties she engaged in an infamous and surprisingly bitter debate with critic Andrew Sarris among others about the merits of auteurism, the French-born philosophy that believes the director is the chief creative person behind any film. Kael's anti-intellectual streak came forward but since auteurism wasn't meant to be a genuinely rigorous theory (such attempts came later in the 70s) this was a sort of Brer Rabbit vs. tar baby fight that Kael could never win. The other notorious controversy occured in 1971 with her essay "Raising Kane" which was intended to show that screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz deserved as much if not more credit for Citizen Kane (1941) than Orson Welles. While Mankiewicz's contribution had clearly been underappreciated, most of Kael's conclusions and even some of her factual basis have been disproven though she never bothered to revise the essay.
In 1979, Kael made a detour to Hollywood by the urging of Warren Beatty. She was meant to be an "executive consultant" at Paramount but actually making movies is quite a different matter than writing about them so Kael lasted only five months. She went back to The New Yorker, eventually retiring in 1991 partly as a result of Parkinson's Syndrome. She still kept up with movies though, loving such smaller films as Vanya on 42nd Street and actors like Jim Carrey (who "has practically kept movies alive the past few years" she said in 1998).
By Lang Thompson
Troy Donahue 1936-2001
Troy Donahue died September 2nd at the age of 65. He was a fixture in movies during the 1950s, playing an assortment of heartthrobs and borderline tough guys. Donahue was actually Merle Johnson Jr, born in New York City on Jan 27, 1936. He went to Columbia University and started acting in small theatrical roles which eventually
led to film appearances, the earliest ones uncredited. His first was Man Afraid (1957) but Donahue also made brief TV appearances at the time on shows like Wagon Train. He signed with Warner Brothers in 1959 and immediately jumped to stardom in films like A Summer Place and Imitation of Life (both 1959). He was busy in a variety of films during this periods - notably Parrish (1961) and Rome Adventure (1962) - but also starred in the TV series Surfside 6 (1960) and Hawaiian Eye (1962 and predating Hawaii Five-O by several years). Donahue's career declined as the Sixties became more turbulent but he still made notable appearances in The Godfather Part II (1974), playing a character with Donahue's own real name, and Monte Hellman's Cockfighter (1974). Most of Donahue's later films were direct-to-video efforts like Nudity Required and Omega Cop but trash aesthete John Waters, a huge fan, used him for Cry-Baby (1990).
By Lang Thompson
TCM REMEMBERS CARROLL O'CONNOR 1924-2001
Carroll O'Connor - who died June 21st at the age of 76 - will be best remembered for portraying Archie Bunker on TV's All in the Family but his career actually was much more extensive. Born in New York on August 2nd, 1924, O'Connor served in the merchant marine during World War II before attending the University of Montana where he worked on the school newspaper. Before graduating, he followed his brother to another college in Ireland (he would later get a Masters in speech from Montana). It was in Ireland that O'Connor started acting in several local productions. He returned to the U.S. for his Broadway debut in 1958 and shortly after started to appear on numerous TV shows like The Untouchables and Naked City. His first film was Parrish (1961) though he eventually acted in over a dozen films during the Sixties including Cleopatra (1963), Marlowe (1969), Hawaii (1966) and Point Blank (1967). O'Connor even auditioned for the part of the Skipper in the TV series, Gilligan's Island, but it was his role as Archie Bunker in a 1971 sitcom that made him a star. All in the Family was an American version of the British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part that met some initial resistance (ABC rejected the first two pilots) but quickly captivated American audiences and became the country's top-rated TV show. Archie became such an icon that his chair is now preserved in the Smithsonian. The series lasted until 1979 and brought O'Connor four Emmys, even leading to a four-year spinoff Archie Bunker's Place starring O'Connor. (It also produced one of TV's oddest spinoffs in1994's 704 Hauser about a multi-racial family living in Archie Bunker's old house. It had no cast members from the earlier series and only lasted six episodes.) In 1988, O'Connor took the role of a Southern sheriff in a TV series based on the movie In the Heat of the Night and found himself in another hit, this one lasting until 1995. He also occasionally played Helen Hunt's father on Mad About You. By all accounts, O'Connor was nothing like Archie Bunker; in fact, O'Connor was an active anti-drug crusader, partly the result of his son's drug-related suicide.
By Lang Thompson
TCM REMEMBERS JACK LEMMON 1925-2001
Whether playing a cross-dressing jazz bassist or a bickering roommate, Lemmon has kept his fans in stitches for fifty years. But beneath that comedian's facade, the actor had a very serious side, which occasionally surfaced in such films as Days of Wine and Roses (1962) or Costa-Gavras' political thriller Missing (1982). Lemmon was truly a one-of-a-kind actor and his track record for acclaimed performances is truly remarkable: 8 Oscar nominations (he won Best Supporting Actor for Mister Roberts (1955) and Best Actor for Save the Tiger (1973), a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, 8 British Academy Award nominations, 4 Emmy Award nominations, numerous Golden Globe nominations, a two-time Best Actor winner at the Cannes Film Festival, the list goes on and on.
Lemmon entered the world in a completely novel fashion; he was born prematurely in an elevator in Boston in 1925. The son of a doughnut manufacturer, Lemmon later attended Harvard University but was bitten by the acting bug and left the prestigious college for Broadway. Between theatrical gigs, he played piano accompaniment to silent films shown at the Knickerbocker Music Hall in New York. Later, Lemmon claimed that he learned more about comic technique by watching these Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd two-reelers than acting school could have ever taught him.
From Broadway and early TV appearances to Hollywood, Lemmon moved West to make his screen debut in It Should Happen to You (1954), opposite Judy Holliday in a variation of her 'dumb blonde' persona that had won her an Oscar for Born Yesterday (1952). In It Should Happen to You, Holliday plays a struggling actress who soon wins fast fame as the product of promotion. Lemmon plays her levelheaded boyfriend but finds himself on the sidelines when the suave and sophisticated Peter Lawford appears on the scene. It Should Happen to You, directed by George Cukor, was a popular success and Lemmon and Holliday were quickly teamed again in Phffft! (1954), another lightweight romantic comedy. A year later, Lemmon hit the major leagues when he supported Hollywood heavyweights Henry Fonda, James Cagney and William Powell in Mister Roberts (1955). As Ensign Pulver, a deckhand who avoids work whenever possible, Lemmon won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar¿.
Onscreen, Lemmon's characters often found that they were the wrong men for their jobs. In Cowboy (1958), Lemmon plays a city slicker venturing out on the wild frontier. His romantic visions of the West are soon changed by the hard-living, hard-drinking reality. Cowboy is based on the autobiography of Frank Harris, and, like the author, Lemmon found himself adapting to the rough and tumble lifestyle on the trail.
Lemmon brought a new comic persona to Hollywood films. He combined elements of screwball and slapstick comedy with his own self-deprecating humor to create satiric portraits of the contemporary American male. The sometimes cynical comic sense of director Billy Wilder provided Lemmon with the perfect complement. Together they made seven films, but it was their first, Some Like It Hot (1959), that captured the sheer comic genius of their collaborations together.
From sexual antics to social critique, Lemmon and Wilder sharpened their comic knives on the hypocrisies they saw in American culture. The Apartment (1960) focused on a working stiff who lends his home to his supervisors for their extramarital affairs. Problems arise when Lemmon falls for his boss's paramour - it gets even more complicated when she tries to kill herself in his pad! Though The Apartment was a comic success, with each passing year the film's serious side seems even more dark and derisive. Illicit love and the corruption of big business might not seem to be the stuff of hit comedies, but Wilder and Lemmon found humor in the most unlikeliest of places. Director and comic star went on to make five more films: Irma la Douce (1963), The Fortune Cookie (1966), Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974) and Buddy Buddy (1981).
Billy Wilder and Lemmon's lifelong comic foil Walter Matthau (nine collaborations with Lemmon in 32 years, including their most popular film, The Odd Couple, 1968) brought some of the comedian's finest funny moments to the screen. But there was a serious side too. Lemmon waived his salary to act in Save the Tiger (1973), the 'great American tragedy' of a businessman at the end of his rope. Lemmon won his second Academy Award for the film. In Missing (1982), directed by the uncompromising Costa-Gavras, Lemmon played a patriotic father searching for his kidnapped son in Latin America. The closer he gets to his goal, the clearer it becomes that a government conspiracy is behind his son's disappearance. Missing was inspired by a true story - the production was condemned by the Reagan administration and awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes film festival.
Very few actors today can match Lemmon's range on the screen. He has acted in everything from lightweight sex farces (How to Murder Your Wife, 1965) to musicals (My Sister Eileen, 1955) to social dramas (Days of Wine and Roses, 1962) to political thrillers (The China Syndrome, 1979). Turner Classic Movies cherishes the memory of this remarkable talent.
By Cino Niles & Jeff Stafford
TCM Remembers - Samuel Arkoff
SAMUEL ARKOFF 1918-2001
Producer Samuel Z. Arkoff, who died September 16 at the age of 83, made a dent in film history by co-founding and running the legendary American International Pictures (AIP), a key player in the drive-in and exploitation markets during the 50s, 60s and 70s. Arkoff was born in Iowa on June 12, 1918, served as a military crypographer during World War Two and ended up as an entertainment lawyer. Life changed in 1954 when he and former theatre owner James H. Nicholson founded American Releasing Corporation, a name changed two years later to American International. Their first film was The Fast and the Furious (1954), a road race melodrama starring John Ireland as a fugitive from justice, which cost $75,000 and earned double that amount giving the company a healthy start. The film also kicked off the career of screenwriter Roger Corman who would later become a key B-movie producer and director himself, and provided the title for one of 2001's biggest hits of the summer.
AIP tapped into a previously nonexistant teenage market, the same one fed by rock 'n' roll but not well served by the large Hollywood studios. Arkoff and Nicholson split duties with the colorful, cigar-chomping Arkoff doing the business end and Nicholson handling the creative end (including those unforgettable titles). AIP films included such titles as Attack of the Crab Monsters(1957), I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), Black Caesar (1973) and close to 200 others. AIP also imported European and Asian films of commercial potential such as Mario Bava's moody masterworks (Black Sunday, 1960) but also pure schlock like Jess Franco's Attack of the Robots (1966) or the giant monster Gamera series from Japan. These films were usually money makers because of their low costs and built-in market and remain entertaining to this day. AIP also gave a start to then-struggling actors and directors like Robert De Niro (Bloody Mama 1970), Peter Fonda (The Trip 1967), Martin Scorsese (Boxcar Bertha 1972), Jack Nicholson (The Terror (1963), Brian De Palma (Sisters 1973) and Francis Ford Coppola (Dementia 13 1963). By the 1970s the major studios had moved into the market and AIP itself was making more expensive films like The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977) and The Amityville Horror (1979). That combination put AIP in financial trouble; they were sold to Filmways in 1979. Arkoff founded his own Arkoff International Pictures but it made few films; Larry Cohen's Q (1982) was one of the few notable titles.
By Lang Thompson
PAULINE KAEL 1919-2001
Pauline Kael, who died September 3rd at the age of 82, was one of the handful of film critics who made a noticable impact on the way we view movies. Her mix of personal feelings with more abstract aesthetics inspired numerous other critics (sometimes called "Paulettes") and in a few cases even made big hits of movies like Bonnie and Clyde (1967). She claimed to never see a movie more than once or to change her mind about it later. Several collections of her work are available, most with mildly risque titles like I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Going Steady.
Kael was born June 19, 1919 in Petaluma, California but moved with her family to San Francisco during her teens. There she majored in philosophy at University of California at Berkeley though she didn't graduate (the school later gave her an honorary degree). That's when she started to develop a serious interest in movies. In addition to the usual writer's assortment of jobs (seamstress, cook, retail clerk) she started writing about film in 1953; her first review was of Charlie Chaplin's Limelight which she disliked. She wrote for several small publications and did a radio show on the groundbreaking network KPFA before finally landing a job at the high-profile McCall's only to be fired shortly after she panned The Sound of Music (1965) (which she called The Sound of Money). During this period she was also managing and programming Berkeley Cinema Guild Theatres (one of the country's earliest repertoire cinemas despite being basically small rooms above a laundry), and was briefly married to avant-garde filmmaker James Broughton.
The turning point came in 1965 when I Lost It at the Movies not only attracted major critical attention but became a strong seller in book stores. Two years later legendary editor William Shawn hired Kael as film critic for The New Yorker, completing her jump into the limelight. Kael never shied away from controversy as two other events proved. In the early Sixties she engaged in an infamous and surprisingly bitter debate with critic Andrew Sarris among others about the merits of auteurism, the French-born philosophy that believes the director is the chief creative person behind any film. Kael's anti-intellectual streak came forward but since auteurism wasn't meant to be a genuinely rigorous theory (such attempts came later in the 70s) this was a sort of Brer Rabbit vs. tar baby fight that Kael could never win. The other notorious controversy occured in 1971 with her essay "Raising Kane" which was intended to show that screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz deserved as much if not more credit for Citizen Kane (1941) than Orson Welles. While Mankiewicz's contribution had clearly been underappreciated, most of Kael's conclusions and even some of her factual basis have been disproven though she never bothered to revise the essay.
In 1979, Kael made a detour to Hollywood by the urging of Warren Beatty. She was meant to be an "executive consultant" at Paramount but actually making movies is quite a different matter than writing about them so Kael lasted only five months. She went back to The New Yorker, eventually retiring in 1991 partly as a result of Parkinson's Syndrome. She still kept up with movies though, loving such smaller films as Vanya on 42nd Street and actors like Jim Carrey (who "has practically kept movies alive the past few years" she said in 1998).
By Lang Thompson
Troy Donahue 1936-2001
Troy Donahue died September 2nd at the age of 65. He was a fixture in movies during the 1950s, playing an assortment of heartthrobs and borderline tough guys. Donahue was actually Merle Johnson Jr, born in New York City on Jan 27, 1936. He went to Columbia University and started acting in small theatrical roles which eventually
led to film appearances, the earliest ones uncredited. His first was Man Afraid (1957) but Donahue also made brief TV appearances at the time on shows like Wagon Train. He signed with Warner Brothers in 1959 and immediately jumped to stardom in films like A Summer Place and Imitation of Life (both 1959). He was busy in a variety of films during this periods - notably Parrish (1961) and Rome Adventure (1962) - but also starred in the TV series Surfside 6 (1960) and Hawaiian Eye (1962 and predating Hawaii Five-O by several years). Donahue's career declined as the Sixties became more turbulent but he still made notable appearances in The Godfather Part II (1974), playing a character with Donahue's own real name, and Monte Hellman's Cockfighter (1974). Most of Donahue's later films were direct-to-video efforts like Nudity Required and Omega Cop but trash aesthete John Waters, a huge fan, used him for Cry-Baby (1990).
By Lang Thompson
TCM REMEMBERS CARROLL O'CONNOR 1924-2001
Carroll O'Connor - who died June 21st at the age of 76 - will be best remembered for portraying Archie Bunker on TV's All in the Family but his career actually was much more extensive. Born in New York on August 2nd, 1924, O'Connor served in the merchant marine during World War II before attending the University of Montana where he worked on the school newspaper. Before graduating, he followed his brother to another college in Ireland (he would later get a Masters in speech from Montana). It was in Ireland that O'Connor started acting in several local productions. He returned to the U.S. for his Broadway debut in 1958 and shortly after started to appear on numerous TV shows like The Untouchables and Naked City. His first film was Parrish (1961) though he eventually acted in over a dozen films during the Sixties including Cleopatra (1963), Marlowe (1969), Hawaii (1966) and Point Blank (1967). O'Connor even auditioned for the part of the Skipper in the TV series, Gilligan's Island, but it was his role as Archie Bunker in a 1971 sitcom that made him a star. All in the Family was an American version of the British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part that met some initial resistance (ABC rejected the first two pilots) but quickly captivated American audiences and became the country's top-rated TV show. Archie became such an icon that his chair is now preserved in the Smithsonian. The series lasted until 1979 and brought O'Connor four Emmys, even leading to a four-year spinoff Archie Bunker's Place starring O'Connor. (It also produced one of TV's oddest spinoffs in1994's 704 Hauser about a multi-racial family living in Archie Bunker's old house. It had no cast members from the earlier series and only lasted six episodes.) In 1988, O'Connor took the role of a Southern sheriff in a TV series based on the movie In the Heat of the Night and found himself in another hit, this one lasting until 1995. He also occasionally played Helen Hunt's father on Mad About You. By all accounts, O'Connor was nothing like Archie Bunker; in fact, O'Connor was an active anti-drug crusader, partly the result of his son's drug-related suicide.
By Lang Thompson
TCM REMEMBERS JACK LEMMON 1925-2001
Whether playing a cross-dressing jazz bassist or a bickering roommate, Lemmon has kept his fans in stitches for fifty years. But beneath that comedian's facade, the actor had a very serious side, which occasionally surfaced in such films as Days of Wine and Roses (1962) or Costa-Gavras' political thriller Missing (1982). Lemmon was truly a one-of-a-kind actor and his track record for acclaimed performances is truly remarkable: 8 Oscar nominations (he won Best Supporting Actor for Mister Roberts (1955) and Best Actor for Save the Tiger (1973), a Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute, 8 British Academy Award nominations, 4 Emmy Award nominations, numerous Golden Globe nominations, a two-time Best Actor winner at the Cannes Film Festival, the list goes on and on.
Lemmon entered the world in a completely novel fashion; he was born prematurely in an elevator in Boston in 1925. The son of a doughnut manufacturer, Lemmon later attended Harvard University but was bitten by the acting bug and left the prestigious college for Broadway. Between theatrical gigs, he played piano accompaniment to silent films shown at the Knickerbocker Music Hall in New York. Later, Lemmon claimed that he learned more about comic technique by watching these Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd two-reelers than acting school could have ever taught him.
From Broadway and early TV appearances to Hollywood, Lemmon moved West to make his screen debut in It Should Happen to You (1954), opposite Judy Holliday in a variation of her 'dumb blonde' persona that had won her an Oscar for Born Yesterday (1952). In It Should Happen to You, Holliday plays a struggling actress who soon wins fast fame as the product of promotion. Lemmon plays her levelheaded boyfriend but finds himself on the sidelines when the suave and sophisticated Peter Lawford appears on the scene. It Should Happen to You, directed by George Cukor, was a popular success and Lemmon and Holliday were quickly teamed again in Phffft! (1954), another lightweight romantic comedy. A year later, Lemmon hit the major leagues when he supported Hollywood heavyweights Henry Fonda, James Cagney and William Powell in Mister Roberts (1955). As Ensign Pulver, a deckhand who avoids work whenever possible, Lemmon won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar¿.
Onscreen, Lemmon's characters often found that they were the wrong men for their jobs. In Cowboy (1958), Lemmon plays a city slicker venturing out on the wild frontier. His romantic visions of the West are soon changed by the hard-living, hard-drinking reality. Cowboy is based on the autobiography of Frank Harris, and, like the author, Lemmon found himself adapting to the rough and tumble lifestyle on the trail.
Lemmon brought a new comic persona to Hollywood films. He combined elements of screwball and slapstick comedy with his own self-deprecating humor to create satiric portraits of the contemporary American male. The sometimes cynical comic sense of director Billy Wilder provided Lemmon with the perfect complement. Together they made seven films, but it was their first, Some Like It Hot (1959), that captured the sheer comic genius of their collaborations together.
From sexual antics to social critique, Lemmon and Wilder sharpened their comic knives on the hypocrisies they saw in American culture. The Apartment (1960) focused on a working stiff who lends his home to his supervisors for their extramarital affairs. Problems arise when Lemmon falls for his boss's paramour - it gets even more complicated when she tries to kill herself in his pad! Though The Apartment was a comic success, with each passing year the film's serious side seems even more dark and derisive. Illicit love and the corruption of big business might not seem to be the stuff of hit comedies, but Wilder and Lemmon found humor in the most unlikeliest of places. Director and comic star went on to make five more films: Irma la Douce (1963), The Fortune Cookie (1966), Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974) and Buddy Buddy (1981).
Billy Wilder and Lemmon's lifelong comic foil Walter Matthau (nine collaborations with Lemmon in 32 years, including their most popular film, The Odd Couple, 1968) brought some of the comedian's finest funny moments to the screen. But there was a serious side too. Lemmon waived his salary to act in Save the Tiger (1973), the 'great American tragedy' of a businessman at the end of his rope. Lemmon won his second Academy Award for the film. In Missing (1982), directed by the uncompromising Costa-Gavras, Lemmon played a patriotic father searching for his kidnapped son in Latin America. The closer he gets to his goal, the clearer it becomes that a government conspiracy is behind his son's disappearance. Missing was inspired by a true story - the production was condemned by the Reagan administration and awarded the Golden Palm at the Cannes film festival.
Very few actors today can match Lemmon's range on the screen. He has acted in everything from lightweight sex farces (How to Murder Your Wife, 1965) to musicals (My Sister Eileen, 1955) to social dramas (Days of Wine and Roses, 1962) to political thrillers (The China Syndrome, 1979). Turner Classic Movies cherishes the memory of this remarkable talent.
By Cino Niles & Jeff Stafford
