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.

 

The Tingler

It isn't Hallowe'en month unless we put in a mention of a William Castle production—and we'll actually have a couple of them this month. The producer of low-budget—high concept "stunt" movies (aided by little tricks he'd add at theater showings) were nobody's conception of "art", but there was something altogether entertaining about the lengths (and depths) he'd go to put patrons into seats—and attempt to scare them OUT of them.

Today's movie may be a high-water mark for the tricks he'd play on the audience...and the movie he built around it may be the campiest, goofiest film he ever made. Of course, it has to be presented on "Take Out the Trash" Day.

The Tingler (William Castle, 1959)

 

I am William Castle, the director of the motion picture you are about to see. 

 

I feel obligated to warn you that some of the sensations—some of the physical reactions which the actors on the screen will feel—will also be experienced, for the first time in motion picture history, by certain members of this audience. 

 

I say 'certain members' because some people are more sensitive to these mysterious electronic impulses than others. These unfortunate, sensitive people will at times feel a strange, tingling sensation; other people will feel it less strongly.

But don't be alarmed—you can protect yourself. At any time you are conscious of a tingling sensation, you may obtain immediate relief by screaming. Don't be embarrassed about opening your mouth and letting rip with all you've got, because the person in the seat right next to you will probably be screaming too. 

 

And remember this—a scream at the right time may save your life.

What might have caused that mentioned "strange, tingling sensation" was not the titular "Tingler"—the microbial life-form that the movie makes pains to inform us lives in all of us, only to grow into a large pinching life-form that can crush your spine in moments of terror—so much as the WWII surplus airplane de-icing motors that Castle had strategically wired under certain seats in the major theaters where he was showing The Tingler. Basically, he spent $250,000 of the film's budget to plant industrial "joy-buzzers" under the keisters of his audience—a process (along the lines of past years' 3-D craze) that he dubbed "Percepto!"

Sure, it was cheesy, but Castle was a cheesy film-maker with the heart of an eccentric carny-barker. A cut-rate Hitchcock* who wasn't satisfied with keeping his thrills on the screen, he delighted in breaking the fourth wall separating film and audience and violating his paying customers' safe-space. Nothing may have delighted him more than seeing explosions of popcorn.

And The Tingler may have been his presentational masterpiece. The movie follows a prison pathologist, Warren Chapin (Vincent Price, delightfully straight), who, when performing autopsies on executed convicts, notices a spine-encrusting form on their X-rays that he reasons is a microbial life-form mutated by the fear of its hosts. He makes this disturbing assumption while performing an autopsy on a former prisoner in front of the guy's brother-in-law, "Ollie" Higgins (Philip Coolidge), who had just been hanging around after witnessing the guy's execution. Chapin speculates to this guy he just met that, evidently, screaming will negate the effects of what he dubs "The Tingler."

Chapin offers Higgins a ride from the prison to the revival-house movie theater run by him and his deaf-mute wife Martha (Judith Evelyn)—they only show silent pictures (naturally) and live in the flat above the auditorium. Martha is an over-excitable type and when Chapin cuts himself on an offered cup of coffee—the guy's an expert surgeon, after all—she has a reaction that causes her to faint dead-away. Chapin treats her for her nervous condition ("barbituates"), but she wakes up to nightmarish hallucinations: opening windows, zombie creatures coming alive, thrown axes, even red blood coming out of the tap...in a black-and-white movie!

Poor woman dies of fright. Ollie calls Chapin for help and rather than call the police, they take Martha to Chapin's home-autopsy room (he takes his work home evidently), where—in the cleanest medical procedure in the movies—he removes the fully-grown "tingler" from her spine—because she couldn't scream, the thing stayed full-size...and alive!

"It's IN the theater?"

There's an awful lot of unnecessary travel going on merely so that director Castle can make sure that the "tingler" ends up back in the movie theater, where it will escape and he can pull a meta-switcheroo, showing us the silent movie the audience is watching, so that the "tingler" can interrupt the movie-movie, plunge the real theater into darkness, and set up a panic in both fictional and real movie theaters. 

Castle did this with those "joy-buzzers" under the seats, and "planted" patrons who would scream on-cue in the dark, only to have them on stretchers (with EMT's) when the black-screen stopped and the movie once again began...in the movie and in real-life.

Sound confusing? Sure, but, Castle does it so fast, with the deliberate technical issues of a broken film and a purposely black-screen that audiences are "primed" for an unexpected jolt—which will be coming from a place they least expect it. And this was "back-in-the-day" where theaters weren't required to have aisle-lights for safety—you'd have a theater plunged into absolute blackness with only a glowing "EXIT" sign for comfort. Considering the number of "feints" and tricks that Castle had already pulled off in the film, the transposition of movie-audience with movie audience was just a third-act topper.

Castle fills the film with goofy conjecture, duplicitous wives, duplicitous husbands, even an early experiment with LSD—"the walls, the walls!" yells Chapin, tripping under the effects only to be weirded out by a skeleton in his lab. Then, during the freak-out sequence with Higgins' wife, Castle suddenly changes expectations with the black-and-white film itself, by incorporating color into the sequence—a combination of using color film into a scene where the bathroom scene is painted in shades of gray, even the actress was made up with gray make-up. By the time, the rubber "tingler" creature is brought into the film, you're not sure what to expect. Frankly, given the nature of what is ultimately presented on screen, the most effective way to show it is to turn the lights out and not show it at all.

All movies manipulate. We're shown only what the director wants us to see, cut in a way to jolt our expectations and sell the illusion. Castle, however, wasn't satisfied with that, given his limited budgets and his unlimited imagination. Mise en scène and montage weren't enough for him. Not when he could move the manipulation out into the audience and play more tricks with an audience's complacency. And he did it with a con-man's cunning and a prankster's glee. How do you get a horror-movie crowd into a theater? You tell them not even the theater is safe. That's something you can't get at home from television.

"The walls! The walls!"

* I'm reading Laurence Leamer's rather tawdry collection of mini-biographies, "Hitchcock's Blondes" right now and there's a pull-quote of a conversation Hitchcock has with writer Ernest Lehman after they'd worked together on North By Northwest that sounds a lot like Castle: 

"After a number of martinis sufficient to limber up his vocal chords and open up his emotions, he put his hand on Lehman's. 'Ernie, do you realize what we're doing in this picture?' he said in a whisper, announcing that what he was about to say was only for the screenwriter's ears. 'The audience is like a giant organ that you and I are playing. At one moment, we play this note on them and get this reaction, and then we play that chord, and they react that way. And someday, we won't even have to make a movie—there'll be electrodes implanted in their brains, and we'll just press different buttons, and they'll go 'ooooh' and 'aaaah' and we'll frighten them, and make them laugh. Won't that be wonderful?'"

Leamer, Laurence. Hitchcock's Blondes. Penguin Random House, 2023

 

Don't Make a Scene: Some Like It Hot

The Story: There's sexist...and then there's sexist. 

And these polarizing days, Some Like It Hot lands right in the middle—or you could say, the fuzzy end of the lollipop. 

"The left" curls its pursed lip at the portrayal of women and the generally juvenile attitude of the two-musicians-on-the-run and their leering—if not stalking—attitude towards the women who comprise Sweet Sue and her Society Syncopaters, especially singer Sugar Cane. And "the right"? Well, with their pearl-clutching (and despite aversions to a "nanny state") they have their hair on fire about shared bathrooms and...drag.

Which, with Some Like It Hot is a real problem.

Right now—as I write this—two states (Tennessee and Montana) ban drag shows in public—Texas signed such a law, as well, but a Federal judge struck it down. 

And when I heard the news, my first thought was "Well, there goes any outdoor showings of 'Tootsie'!" Or Some Like it Hot. Or any Monty Python...anything...or certain Bugs Bunny cartoons...or I Was a Male War Bride. All sorts of movies. Tons of them. The TV series "M*A*S*H". Keep it inside, kids. Because they all feature performances in drag. It's enough to make Milton Berle turn in his grave.

Now, there is nuance here—hard to believe any of these bills could have "nuance". Those states want to ban public drag shows outright. There is a long, dour line of states that want to ban children from drag shows: Arizona, Arkansas, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and West Virginia (or, as I, movie-lover that I am, like to call them "The Usual Suspects").

You couldn't show Some Like It Hot at, say, a drive-in theater. You certainly couldn't take kids to see it. Whether those arrested for violating the law would be parents or the folks presenting it, you can probably guess who it would be. I'm way past thinking about it. The legislators who voted for these cockamamie things certainly were. Past thinking, I mean.

What I do know is that I wouldn't live in a state that would ban Some Like it Hot or any of the ones I mentioned from being shown at a drive-in. I don't like living in a "nanny state." Even if the nanny is in drag.

It should be noted that Some Like It Hot was one of the very first movies inducted into the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"—something legislators rarely are.

 

"Well...nobody's perfect."

 

The Set-up: Musicians Jerry (Jack Lemmon) and Joe (Tony Curtis) are on the lam, after being witnesses to a St. Valentine's Day Massacre-style machine-gunning by their current employer "Spats" Columbo (George Raft). And the man hadn't even paid them yet! They need to get out of town and probably the state, but they have no money and they need to work! What's a sax and upright-bass player gonna do?

Play for "the other side", I guess.

They sign on with a traveling girls band, boarding the train in disguise, where they meet one of their band-mates, Sugar (Marilyn Monroe).

 

Action!

 

There is a general horse-laugh from the girls. 

Joe and Jerry have now reached their seats, and are taking off their coats. 

JERRY (in a delighted whisper) How about that talent? 

JERRY This is like falling into a tub of butter. 

JOE Watch it, Daphne! 

JERRY When I was a kid, I used to have a dream -- I was locked up in this pastry shop overnight -- 

JERRY with all kinds of goodies around -- jelly rolls and mocha eclairs and sponge cake and Boston cream pie and cherry tarts -- 

JOE Listen, stupe -- no butter and no pastry. We're on a diet! 

JERRY Oh, sure, sure...

Jerry starts to hang his coat across a cord running above the window. 

JOE (grabbing him) Not there -- 

JOE that's the emergency brake. 

JERRY (clutching bosom) Now you've done it! NOW YOU HAVE DONE IT!

JOE Done what? 

JERRY Tore off one of my chests. 

JOE You'd better go fix it. 

JERRY You better come help me. 

Jerry leads the way toward the rest rooms,

which are just beyond their seat.

Instinctively he heads for the one marked MEN. 

Joe grabs him, steers him back toward the one marked WOMEN. 

JOE This way, Daphne. 

JERRY (clasping his chest desperately) Now you tore the other one. 

Joe opens the curtain, propels him inside. 

INT. WOMEN'S LOUNGE

There is another customer there -- 

Sugar. She has one leg up on the leather settee, her skirt is slightly raised, and she is about to remove a small silver flask tucked under her garter. 

As Jerry and Joe come in, she guiltily pulls her skirt down. 

SUGAR OH! 

JERRY (arms folded across chest) Terribly sorry. 

SUGAR (relieved) That's all right. I was afraid it was Sweet Sue. 

SUGAR You won't tell anybody, will you? 

JOE Tell what? 

SUGAR (taking the flask out and unscrewing the cap) If they catch me once more, they'll boot me out of the band. 

(pours a drink into a paper cup) 

SUGAR You the replacement for the bass and the sax? 

JERRY That's us. I'm Daphne -- 

JERRY and this is Josephine. 

SUGAR I'm Sugar Cane. 

JERRY Hi!

JOE Sugar Cane?

SUGAR I changed it. It used to be Sugar Kowalczyk. 

JERRY Polish? 

SUGAR Yes. I come from a very musical family. My mother is a piano teacher and my father was a conductor. 

JOE Where did he conduct? 

SUGAR On the Baltimore and Ohio. 

JOE Oh. 

SUGAR I play the ukulele. And I sing too. 

JERRY (to Joe) She sings, too. 

SUGAR I don't really have much of a voice -- 

SUGAR but then it's not much of a band, either. I'm only with 'em because I'm running away. 

JOE Running away? From what? 

SUGAR Don't get me started on that. 

SUGAR (extending flask) Want a drink? It's bourbon. 

As Jerry reaches for it, his bosom starts to slip again,

and he quickly refolds his arms. 

JERRY We'll take a rain check. 

SUGAR (downs cupful of bourbon) I don't want you to think that I'm a drinker. I can stop any time I want to -- 

SUGAR only I don't want to. Especially when I'm blue. 

JOE We understand. 

SUGAR All the girls drink -- but I'm the one that gets caught. 

SUGAR That's the story of my life. 

SUGAR I always get the fuzzy end of the lollipop. 

She has screwed the cap back on the flask,

and now slips it under her garter. 

SUGAR Are my seams straight? 

JERRY (examining her legs) I'll say. 

SUGAR See you around, girls. 

She waves and exits into the Pullman car. 

JERRY Bye, Sugar. 

JERRY (to Joe) We been playing with the wrong bands. 

JOE Down, Daphne! 

JERRY How about the shape of that liquor cabinet? 

Joe spins him around, and unbuttoning the back of his dress, starts to fix the slipped brassiere. 

JOE Forget it. One false move, and they'll toss us off the train --

JOE there'll be the police, and the papers, and the mob in Chicago... 

JERRY (not listening) Boy, would I like to borrow a cup of that Sugar. 

JOE (whirling him around, grabbing the front of his dress) Look -- no butter, no pastry, and no Sugar! 

JERRY (looking down at his chest, pathetically) You tore it again!

Some Like it Hot

 

Words by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond

 

Pictures by Charles Lang and Billy Wilder

 

Some Like it Hot is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from M-G-M Home Entertainment and the Criterion Collection.