I reviewed Roger Corman’s A Bucket of Blood just a year ago, when Olive released a remastered DVD. Perhaps the company already had a Signature special edition in mind, and wished to spare collectors from the quicksand of double-dip economics. If so, the wait was worth it, for the extras on this big release will delight fans of Corman’s Little Horror Comedy that Could.
The prolific producer-director once said that he wasn’t satisfied with any of his early science fiction pictures. He did say that his directing reputation took its first upswing with a gangster movie, 1958’s Machine Gun Kelly. Corman then began to transition away from simply doing films for hire, in search of the big money that was making multi-millionaires of mini-moguls like Samuel Arkoff. That full ambition would wait ten years while Corman consolidated his stature as a smart director of commercial hits.
Corman’s struggle in the exploitation trenches yielded westerns, monster movies, juvenile delinquent dramas and gangster pictures. He’d later initiate the lucrative Biker Film and Drug Epic fads. The first subgenre Corman can lay claim to molding may be the modern Horror Black Comedy. The target title A Bucket of Blood was made for A.I.P.. Numerous pundits have pointed out comedy’s relationship to horror, how both scares and laughs originate from the same involuntary impulses. Corman and Griffith’s beatnik-era Black Comedy Horror puts the theory to the test.
‘Sick’ humor was already a ‘thing’ in the New Yorker magazine cartoons of the great Charles Addams. James Whale pioneered the film form in his offbeat, sometimes campy The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein. Corman and his ingenious writer-collaborator Charles B. Griffith combined Mystery of the Wax Museum horror and Mad Magazine irreverence for a fusion of something new. Filmed in five days for $50,000, Bucket brought a bit of Grand Guignol humor to American screens. It has remained near the top of Corman’s hipster films list thanks to a starring performance by the inimitable Dick Miller and the presence of Barboura Morris, one of the director’s most appealing actresses. Griffith’s parody of the beatnik lifestyle is actually not far off the mark.
At Venice Beach’s beat coffee house The Yellow Door, faux-hipster impresario Leonard (Antony Carbone of The Last Woman on Earth) extracts a steady income from the beatnik art fad by encouraging the improvised poetry readings of a Ginsberg-like hipster, Maxwell Brock (Julian Burton). Leonard takes a cut of the art purchased by ‘beatnik tourists,’ including drawings by the beautiful and considerate Carla (Barboura Morris). As both users and sellers of drugs habituate The Yellow Door, a couple of narcs have infiltrated the joint as well. The impressionable, self esteem- challenged busboy Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) idolizes Maxwell, adores Carla and wants desperately to become an Artist with a capital ‘A.’
Walter has memorized Maxwell’s poems that preache that only artists are legitimate breathing humans. He wrestles with sculptor’s clay in his cheap room, upset that the mashed lump in his hands refuses to ‘be a nose.’ But fate takes a strange turn when Walter accidentally kills a cat. He covers it in clay, calls it ‘Dead Cat’ and reaps praise when Leonard puts it on display at the coffee house. Too excited about his new status — women now talk to him, people offer him drugs — Walter has barely thought about what to do next when another trick of fate sees him covering a human corpse with clay. Given a Yellow Door ‘coronation party’ as a made artist, Walter soon goes off the deep end. When Carla gently rebuffs his advances, he solicits another hip chick to be his next model, with predictably grim results. How long will Walter Paisley’s reign of artistic terror continue, before his guilty secret gets out?
The Yellow Door’s cardboard sign tells us this is a Roger Corman movie, but the cumulative experience of 22 movies in four years (gulp) has given the director confidence behind the camera. Stylish moving mastershots in the coffee house and Walter’s seedy room roll on for as much as two minutes without a cut. The action of principals and extras is well blocked and the atmosphere has enough finesse to make us forget we’re watching a show limited mostly to two sets. The well-rehearsed actors display considerable presence; all seem in on the joke of Charles Griffith’s faux-morality play, in which an overreaching schlemiel reaps an unjust fate for trying ‘to be somebody.’ Dick Miller invests everything he’s got in his bumbling comic character. Walter Paisley is played broadly, but he’s not so stupid or infantile so as to forfeit our sympathy.
The beatnik scene on view isn’t the expected hyper-critical lampoon of bigger studio efforts, that simply typed beats as fakes and hypocrites. Julian Burton’s funny beat poetry is not that far removed from the real thing. The habitués in Leonard’s club either like the coffee, are themselves aspiring artists, or are sympathetic lost souls, like the woman that gives Walter some heroin. The sometimes-distorted values of the Art World are writ large. Pride comes before a fall, and the nude model that Walter next ‘sculpts’ doesn’t realize how he plans to grant her an unwelcome artistic immortality.
(It’s funny how reality mimics art: at the Long Beach Pike in 1976, it was discovered that a sideshow spook-ride mannequin was actually a mummified corpse! The theory was that the 65- year-old cadaver was that of an outlaw. It had originally been exhibited as a ‘moral lesson,’ and then forgotten about and re-purposed. That’s the way I remember the story, and I found a link. The rationale was different, but the concept is similar!)
Writer Griffith’s sources are nothing if not eclectic. Edgar Allan Poe is a big inspiration, what with the cat in the wall and a nagging conscience direct from The Tell-Tale Heart. The celebration for Walter resembles a party scene in Tod Browning’s Freaks, and the ‘King of the Fools’ parade in the Laughton The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The comic scene of Maxwell Brock wearing a tuxedo with sandals was one of many improvisations added to the mix — Julian Burton had swollen feet. Barboura Morris’s Carla is not an exaggerated Earth Mother or crazy hip chick, but instead anchors the viewer’s need for a likable character. In his next Filmgroup picture Little Shop of Horrors Corman would go full-parody on the Black Horror comedy. Another schlemiel gets himself into a carbon-copy multiple murder problem, with inspired riffs on ethnic shopkeepers, fruity eccentrics and cops that talk like Jack Webb robots. A Bucket of Blood may not be quite as funny, but it has a bit more heart.
In the 1990s Corman told interviewers Alain Silver and Jim Ursini that he and Charles Griffith indeed cooked up their story on an evening’s visit to a Sunset Blvd. hipster establishment not unlike The Yellow Door. But they also added that the evening finished with a visit to another member of Corman’s circle of semi-employed marginal movie folk. Aspiring actress Sally Kellerman frequented the same acting coach as Corman, Robert Towne and others, and to make ends meet waited tables. Roger said that he and Griffith dropped in at her cafe near closing time to tell her the story they had so far, and that Sally enthusiastically helped them work out some of the final details.
Noticed at this screening, for the first time: a brief montage of police cars prowling the night has been lifted directly from Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers — as an edited unit, dissolves intact!
