A Bucket of Blood

A Bucket of Blood (Roger Corman, 1959)

 

"I will talk to you of Art, for there is nothing else to talk about, for there is nothing else. Life is an obscure hobo bumming a ride on the omnibus of Art. Burn gas buggies, and whip your sour cream of circumstance and hope, and go ahead and sleep your bloody heads off. Creation is, all else is not. What is not creation, is graham crackers; let it all crumble to feed the creator. The Artist is, all others are not. A canvas is a canvas or a painting. A rock is a rock or a statue. A sound is a sound or is music. A preacher is a preacher, or an Artist. 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! Bring on the multitude, the multitude of fishes: feed them with the fishes for liver oil to nourish the Artist, stretch their skin upon an easel to give him canvas, crush their bones into a paste that he might mold them. Let them die, and by their miserable deaths become the clay within his hands that he might form an ashtray or an ark. For all that is comes through the eye of the Artist. The rest are blind fish, swimming in the cave of aloneness. Swim on you maudlin, muddling, maddened fools, and dream that one bright and sunny night, some Artist will bait a hook and let you bite upon it! Bite hard - and die! In his stomach you are very close to immortality."

Maxwell H. Brock

 

Feel free to snap your fingers at the crazy, words, man, and order another espresso. But, don't expect it anytime soon because the guy waiting tables, Walter, is a little bit distracted. Because he's surrounded by Art, baby, and internally roiling by his lack of it inside him. He aspires to be an artist...and to get a girlfriend...so don't harsh your mellow if the java's a little cold. You're in the Yellow Door cafe in Venice, California and the hipsters and beatniks are milling and mulling. Looking for the next "thing" to give life meaning and distract them. Because in this milieu if you aren't an artist, you're not anything. Dig?

Walter Paisley (Dick Miller) isn't an artist; he's a busboy. But, the words of all the hep cats extolling art makes him want to be an artist, too. Except he's not good at anything. Not even waiting tables. As the Yellow Door's resident genius (Julian Burton) states (and he doesn't doing anything less than "stating"):"Walter has a clear mind. Some day a thought will enter it, get lonely and leave again."

He gets a block of modeling clay, but although he has a picture of the prettiest girl at the Yellow Door (Barboura Morris), he can't make that clay into the form of what he loves. "Make a nose! Make a nose!" he pleads to the gunk in his hands, but it remains mere clay; something is needed to make the transition from raw material to completed artwork. Fortunately, Walter manages to find it when he accidentally kills the landlady's cat stuck in his stucco wall (unfortunately for the cat). The next day he presents a clay sculpture of a cat with a knife sticking through it (he's basically covered it in clay) and—what do ya know?—the hipsters think it's really good! They dig it (without having to dig anything)!

Oh, the owner of the club (Antony Carbone) gets wind of it—the "sculpture" breaks when it's knocked to the floor after-hours...and the cat's hair pokes through the crack. But, when a potential buyer looking to make an investment in "very important art" makes an offer for the sculpture far exceeding expectations, he's willing to look the other way. But, he sweats Walter's rise in stature...and statuary ("Keep up the good work...but don't RUSH things!"). Especially when Walter starts to bring in life-size...or past-life-size...figurines.

See, one of Walter's admirers, in appreciation, gave Walter a little vial. And when one of the undercover vice-cops (Ed Nelson and...Bert Convy..!!) casing the Yellow Door comes over to Walter's flea-bag apartment and tells him the vial contains "H! Horse! Heroin!" and tells the clueless Walter that he's going to drag him down to the pokey, Walter resists arrest by cracking him over the head with a skillet. But, how is he going to get rid of the body? 

 

He has to get creative.

Shot over five days and with a budget of a mere $50,000, A Bucket of Blood was a cheap horror film made by Corman on demand from the bosses at American International Pictures. The budget was a curse and a strength: with so little money, Corman and his writer Charles B. Griffith could not depend on monsters, effects, or even atmospherics; but with such a small budget, the film couldn't help but make money. So, they based their story on where they were holding their writer meetings—coffee-houses—and twisted the "Mystery of the Wax Museum"-based plot into a black comedy about the morose Beat culture, art pretensions and the skin-thin veneer of both, as well as the craving of status at any cost. That they all merge in as unironic a way as possible is a nice little "dig" at the values of hipsters, whichever coast they may find themselves on.

To maintain his admittedly minor status as an artist, Walter moves from obtaining raw material by accidental death to becoming a serial killer of whoever so much as gives him a stink-eye, and pretty soon, it becomes obvious where the schlubby sculptor gets his talent, and the film devolves into a noir-chase through the back-alleys of L.A. before the final shot of life imitating death.

It doesn't deserve to be as good as it is, but Griffith's script is clever with a lot of call-backs and ironic choices of words and some of the performances are actually better than they deserve to be. I've long been an admirer of Dick Miller, who stars as Walter Paisley* and there are times when his portrayal here has a whiff of Jerry Lewis to it—he'd be a lot more disciplined and funnier, underplaying as a flower-eating customer of Mushnik's Flowers in The Little Shop of Horrors the next year—but his physical acting at times is extraordinary, almost rodent-like initially, and then, when fame comes, flailing in ways both subtle and wild.

Everybody else is good, too, but they have the advantage of playing pretentious "types", so that florid over-acting is par for the personality and under-acting means that that character is merely holding their cards to their vest, dramatically. Also, much of the darker shading of the film is inherent in the beat milieu—the morbidity of folk-music with their subjects of murders down-by-the-river and death-row histrionics is not so out of place in a horror movie and the cynical poetry (which foreshadows events in the film) make the moral ambiguity a bit more reachable. But, a lot of what makes A Bucket of Blood so great happened by accident—there wasn't time for prep!—so, if one of the actors affected a limp or decided to wear sandals with their tuxedo it was just more detail in a project that didn't have the budget to be overstuffed with it.

And Corman makes the budget stretch as credibly as the incredulity allows. Miller groused about how the film would have been better with more budget so that they didn't have to depend on mannequins for the statues and such. True enough (although a bigger-budgeted remake isn't as good...or clever). But, budget can't replace the innovation needed to overcome its lack and it put Corman in the mind-set to make more of making-do, which would stand him in good stead for the rest of his career at AIP, and the many mentors to whom he passed on that ethic.

* He...or his collaborators...would use that name for quite a few Dick Miller characters throughout his career.

...where the title comes from.