FANTASIA OBSCURA: …Or, ‘What Happens When You Give a Wannabe Beatnik a Block of Clay’
There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, art can be found in the most unusual places…
A Bucket of Blood (1959)
(Dist.: American International Pictures; Dir.: Roger Corman)
Artists. They engender preconceptions and have reputations. They’ve been called everything, including a superstitious and cowardly lot —
Oh wait, wrong group. Sorry.
Or maybe not. While cinema during the mid-century is filled with plenty of portrayals of creative artists going through their processes, from Lust for Life to The Agony and the Ecstasy, there’s rarely been anywhere we get to see the dark side of pursuing a muse other than that one episode of Batman.
And what better environment to explore the madness of art in than the crazy scene of the beats.
“Everything is going to the beat — It’s the beat generation, it be-at, it’s the beat to keep, it’s the beat of the heart, it’s being beat and down in the world…”
–Jack Kerouac, Desolation Angels
The beatniks. They preceded the hipsters, grunge, emo, goth, punk, glam, the hippies; all of them carried their forbearers’ DNA forward as they continued with their efforts at rejecting mainstream culture while trying to claim their own separate space within a mass-consumption society.
For Roger Corman, the beats were the perfect setting to allow him to offer an interesting portrait of an unstable man who couldn’t dance the tune his muse called. When we first meet Walter Paisley (Dick Miller), he’s the abused busboy at the beat hangout the Golden Door, a man with small ambitions and even less competence, trying to get with the scene, even if the scene doesn’t want him to get with it.
Paisley coasts through his limited job, suffering the derision of his boss Leonard de Santis (Antony Carbone) while infatuated by the artist Carla (Barboura Morris) and having his head filled with notions by the poet Art Lacroix (Ed Nelson). Anxious to be part of the scene, he invests in a large block of clay, with which he can create nothing until he accidentally kills the cat of his landlady Mrs. Swickert (Myrtle [Damerel] Vail); in a delusional panic, he covers the cat in clay and tries to pass it off as a sculpture, which the coffee house crowd loves, encouraging him to make more such works.
In this film, it appears that the best minds of his generation were already destroyed by madness, as no one figures out until it’s too late how Walter came to have such gifts or could sculpt such detailed figures so quickly in his follow-up pieces. The fact that everyone at least sorta remembers the hanger on who was a narc (Bert Convy) and the annoying figure model (Judy Bamber) but doesn’t recognize them under a thin patina of clay doesn’t say much for their empathy or deductive skills; that someone as low wattage as Paisley could fool them all for so long seems especially incredible.
(For that matter, where does Paisley get all his clay? The block we see him work with would be mostly gone by the time he covered up the cat, let alone two full-size human figures.)
If we disregard the plot holes too big for a 20-pound bag of clay to fill, however, we have left an interesting portrait of an outsider who wants to belong, trying to find a way to be accepted and not taking no for an answer. Walter Paisley is anxious and ambitious despite his lack of qualifications, which makes him particularly dangerous, especially among a community that can’t or won’t recognize the danger. (This especially applies to his boss Leonard, whose greed for a commission of Walter’s work forces him to keep the truth to himself when he discovers it early on.)
And while the film is played for laughs, Corman’s first comedy and first collaboration with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, he shows considerable respect for the beats among whom he sets the story. They get treated far better here than they do elsewhere, as opposed to being reduced to some random color for the plot in Funny Face or quick titillation woven into the exploitation pic The Beat Generation. Even in broad strokes, we never really lose sympathy with anyone, including Walter, though only up to the point he goes a little too far.
In terms of Walter going above and beyond his place in life, Dick Miller gets to play a character named “Walter Paisley” again in The Howling, Twilight Zone: The Movie, and Chopping Mall. And while the script did not give his character’s name in his brief but memorable appearance in The Terminator, there’s nothing to say that his character wasn’t also named Walter Paisley…
As for the first Walter Paisley’s journey, it was enough of a work of art in itself that Corman and Griffith revisit the story soon afterwards. They came back to the basics of the plot: a nebbish with desires to rise more rapidly in the world and win the attention of a woman he desires who finds a way to do so that ultimately destroys him and those around him and crafted a new film based on those themes called The Little Shop of Horrors.
Because like Roy Lichtenstein and cartoon panels or Jeff Koons and balloon animals, some things show up again and again in your work from time to time.
Not that Corman’s the only director to reuse elements of older films later on, mind you…
NEXT TIME: We revisit one of a famous director’s more difficult-to-watch pictures. One that did not have Jar Jar Binks in it…
