A Bucket of Blood

 Roger Corman's 1959 A Bucket of Blood is a delicious entertainment, sharply scripted and thought-provoking -- indeed, far better than it has any right to be.  Conspicuously low budget, the picture demonstrates Corman's characteristic opportunism and insouciance -- the picture is rip-off of House of Wax (corpses of murder victims encased in wax) filtered through jazzy exploitation of the beatnik milieu.  Bucket of Blood's beauty is that Corman never winks at the audience; the exploitation isn't colored by irony -- the freak show aspects of the beatnik scene are played straight.  A good example is an earnest, clean-cut folk singer (he looks like Tommy Smothers or one of the Kingston Trio); the handsome young man with a crew-cut strums a guitar and sings a murder ballad that comments on the film's macabre action; he stares straight at the audience (and camera) and there is nothing campy or parodistic about the song or its repeated refrain:  "Go down, you murderer, go down!"  Corman seems to be reporting on a phenomenon that he thinks will intrigue the rural, down-market audiences at drive-ins where his pictures were shown and he has a sort of crazy integrity in presenting this colorful stuff to them.  His aesthetic is to show the audience what it wants to see, but without seeming to patronize people who have bought tickets to his movies.  

In an offbeat and grotesque manner A Bucket of Blood stages a thesis about modern art and the communities that consume this product.  In a beatnik coffee house called The Yellow Door, a crowd of "angel-headed hipsters" have gathered to listen to a hirsute bard recite a poem to the accompaniment of a mournful solo saxophone.  The bard (his name is Maxwell) announces that the artist and creator is the engine for all that is good and meaningful in society:  "What is not creation," he declaims, "is graham crackers doomed to crumble into oblivion... If you're not an artist, you are nothing!"  These words are part of a rhapsodic effusion involving hobos and bums and all sorts of picturesque imagery -- something that sounds more than a little like a slightly gentrified version of Ginsberg's Howl.

A schlemiel named Walter is working as a bus-boy at the coffee house.  He is universally derided by the customers and bullied by the boss, Mr. De Santis and the rest of the cool cats in attendance.  Walter Paisly looks like James Dean but with a terrible posture signifying that he is, more or less, literally downtrodden.  He has a handsome profile, but his features are a parody of fifties' stars like Tab Hunter, a poor man's caricature of a movie star.  Poor Walter takes the poet's dithyrambs seriously and retreating to his filthy apartment unwraps a big block of modeling clay and tries to make a figure.  He doesn't succeed, muttering "Be a nose!  Be a nose!" at the intransigent clay.  The landlady's cat has somehow become trapped in a wall (Corman, a great adaptor of Edgar Alan Poe in later movies, here borrows from "The Black Cat").  When he tries to extract the cat from between the wallboards, he drives a knife into the beast, killing it.  To conceal his misdeed, Walter coats the dead cat with clay and brings it to the coffee house the next day, the fatal knife still embedded in the grey figurine.  The beatniks and avant garde artists are enthralled by the so-called sculpture.  Walter, who seems completely naive, doesn't really hide the fact that the sculpture involves a real dead cat.  Indeed, he has taken to heart the poet's declaration that art is paramount over all other values and, therefore, has logically concluded that if a sculpture requires killing or, even, murder this is permissible.  Of course, one thing leads to another.  When a girl named Naolia slips some heroin into his pocket, Walter is confronted by a Narc.  When the cop pulls a gun, Walter panics and accidentally kills the man by splitting his skull open with a frying pan and, then, as the corpse's blood drips into the titular bucket, covers the cadaver with clay.  This new "art work" is greeted with even greater acclaim and Walter is proclaimed the king of the hipsters at the Yellow Door.  His work is proclaimed as return to figurative realism -- Walter doesn't really bother to hide his modus operandi but no one is willing to accept the reality about these sculptures. He commits a few more murders and, then, has a show at the Yellow Door -- the sleazy boss, Mr. De Santis, has been marketing Walter's creations, throwing a few bucks to him from the big commissions paid by equally corrupt dealers.  The poet recites an ode to him, stentoriously chanting that "Walter Paisley is born" as a a new artistic talent.  Walter decides to immortalize a young woman that he desires by transforming her into art.  He chases her in a desultory way through what looks like the back alleys of Venice Beach in LA.  The girl gets away and Walter commits suicide -- the film's ending is abrupt and unsatisfying; it's as if Corman and his screenwriter just ran out of money (or good ideas) and film's climax is perfunctory.  

The picture is very well-made with plausibly loathsome and pretentious bohemians cluttering up The Yellow Door and lots of au courant jargon involving smack and jazz and the like -- when Walter is proclaimed King of the hipsters and enthroned, he has a scepter that he calls his "Zen stick."  The film traffics in a number of interesting ideas.  First, there is the logic of fame -- with each "creation," Walter has to up the ante, the stakes keep increasing and his works have to become more and more grotesque and disturbing, "otherwise," the protagonist says, "I'll just be a bus boy again."  In Martin Scorsese's great picture, After Hours, two thieves are debating what art works they should steal from someone's apartment -- "how do you know it's good," one of the crooks (it's either Cheech or Chong) asks.  His companion replies, "the uglier it is, the better."  After Hours, which alludes to Bucket of Blood, is notable for a scene in which the film's hero is encased in plaster-of-Paris, entrapped in a sort of George Segal statue of himself.  Bucket of Blood anticipates the entire morbid esthetic of artists like Damien Hirst,, that is, embalmed sharks in plastic vitrines, bisected sheep and the like. One of the film's pretentious hipsters raves that the life-size figure of the cop with his head cleft in half exemplifies "the anguish of modern life."  A beatnik chick proclaims that "I went to Big Sur to look for Henry Miller" (who happened to be in Europe at the time.)  Walter's apartment looks like a Kienholz installation; it's dingy beyond belief, the color of baby shit and mold, and has a mirror all fogged with the dust from time immemorial.  On the wall of The Yellow Door, there are big pictures that look like engravings by Ben Shahn and jolts of abstract expressionism.  The decor is splendid, the dialogue witty, and the action gripping until the movie just runs out of steam at the one hour mark. But up to that point, it is, to use the lingo in the movie, "a gas."