If you’re looking for one cuh-ray-zee scene (and I’m talking wild, man) then shuffle down to the East Village for Roger Corman’s hipster horror-comedy A Bucket of Blood, now playing at Anthology Film Archives as part of their Corman retrospective.
Shot in five days for less than fifty thousand dollars, this down and dirty production skids along Los Angeles’ Sunset Strip, that unholy mecca of the West Coast beatnik scene. Drifting between coffee-and-cigarettes conversations at the Yellow Door café-all jazz-infused poetry readings and exposed brick interiors—director Corman and screenwriter Charles Griffith sketch out a cross section of counterculture stereotypes as cartoonishly colorful as the animated TV icon Cool Cat. A Ginsberg-esque prophet is trailed by a clique of sycophantic hangers-on; jive talking smack dealers play cat and mouse with undercover narcs; hustlers on the make scam some quick cash from a well heeled couple gone slumming. (For just a few bucks they’ll escort you to the most happening spot and introduce you to a genuine arteest who just happens to be a personal friend…) And buzzing from table to table, like a pesky housefly endlessly brushed away, is our ill-fated protagonist: busboy Walter Paisley (Dick Miller).
A nebbish nobody who desperately wants to be a charismatic somebody, Walter’s got a whole lot of nothing going for him—no looks, no talent, no success. He grovelingly parrots the misanthropic ramblings of the café’s house poets, just to let them know how much he gets it. Reactions range from indifference to open hostility—Walter is the kind of sad sack that everyone either ignores or despises. Everyone, that is, except for Carla (Barboura Morris) who offers Walter a modicum of kindness and is promptly rewarded with undying devotion. Desperate for still more of her attention and affirmation, Walter one night buys a block of clay and sets out to become a sculptor. After thirty seconds of work on a bust—”Be a nose, goddamnit!”—he is more dejected than ever.
His fate seems sealed when suddenly a black cat crosses his path (sort of), getting trapped in the crawlspace between the apartment walls. As Walter carves an escape hole in the drywall he slips and stabs the animal, killing his landlady’s beloved pet. In an attempt to cover up the accidental death, he then plaster-casts the kitty (knife and all!) and pawns it off at the Yellow Door as his very first sculpture.
The jazz music squeals to a halt as everyone stares in awe at his supreme artistic achievement. They praise its “realism.” (Wink wink) They eulogize it as a supreme expression of the modern condition. But what is it called?
“Dead Cat,” Walter tells them. They ooh and aah, mistaking his laughable literal-mindedness for esoteric profundity.
“But you’ll have to do more,” they insist.
Yes. More. Perhaps even some figure studies with a (ahem) live model?
A Bucket of Blood is something of a rarity amidst Corman’s horror films, a broadly comic entry in the Grand Guignol tradition rather than a straight exercise in Gothic atmospherics, as is true of his famous cycle of Poe adaptations. Credit for the comedy is typically given to Charles Griffith’s screenplay (based on a scenario the two hashed out together in a single evening), an assertion backed up by the pair’s subsequent work on A Little Shop of Horrors, which strikes a very similar tone. (An oft-repeated anecdote has it that on the first day of shooting Corman asked Griffith, “How do you direct comedy?”) But what’s most surprising about A Bucket of Blood is the way the story somehow transcends its schlock premise and cardboard caricatures to achieve a very moving sense of pathos.
While far from a modernist masterpiece—and even playfully satirizing the cult of High Art—Walter’s dilemma has a certain affinity with E.M. Forster’s Leonard Bast and T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock (”I have measured out my life with coffee spoons”), two authors Corman claimed to have studied in depth during a semester at Oxford’s Balliol College. Call it the tragedy of modern man, if you can say it without smirking: the eternal dilemmas of sexual frustration and personal unfulfillment compounded by the social atomization of contemporary urban life and the existential awareness of one’s ultimate insignificance in the material universe. Just as Prufrock lamented that he would never be the Prince Hamlet of his own life—”but an attendant lord, one that will do / To swell a progress, start a scene or two [...] At times, indeed, almost ridiculous. / Almost, at times, the Fool.”—so Walter’s greatest triumph comes when the beatniks who once ridiculed him now crown him as their creative King. Sporting a gold star on his lapel and wielding a toilet-plunger scepter and an ersatz chalice, Walter gets tipsy on champagne while the others sing his praises: “He blossoms as the one hope of our nearly sterile century.” Though his artistic achievements will soon (quite literally) come crashing down, there’s a real tenderness evoked by Walter’s punch-drunk speech to the crowd. “I would never, ever ignore you guys. I know what it is to be ignored.”
Could Walter be a surrogate for Corman, as Prufrock was for Eliot? Though he would go on to develop a cult following, Corman had only enjoyed limited critical success at the time he made Bucket. Working out of the mainstream studio system, he was denied the cultural prestige of Hollywood’s major productions, almost exclusively producing exploitation pictures aimed at the youth market: fast, cheap and (in Corman’s own view) totally dispensable. Though he was a notorious penny pincher, he never bothered to copyright any of his early works, feeling that the expenditure of shipping a certification print to the Library of Congress would cost more than anything he would ever gain in royalties. (He would even recycle original camera negatives to cut costs.) Not knowing that he would someday be christened with the moniker “King of the Bs,” Corman may very well have seen himself in Walter Paisley. Early press releases written by Corman erroneously claimed that he was, of all things, a Rhodes scholar-like Walter, he tried to bluff his way to a higher social status.
Its this underlying identification with Walter (however complex) that gives this film its unexpected resonance. If it’s not exactly Howards End, Walter’s End has a tragic sweep and creative power all its own.
A Bucket of Blood is screening as part of Anthology Film Archives’ Roger Corman Retrospective on Nov. 2 at 9:00 (following a 7:00 screening of Wild Angels), Nov. 6 at 7:30 (followed by a 9:00 screening of X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes), and Nov. 8 at 5:30 (following a 3:30 screening of Wild Angels, and followed by a 7:00 screening of Little Shop of Horrors and an 8:45 screening of Bloody Mama). Please note that each film requires separate admission.
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Paul Brunick is a young film fanatic residing in New York and a regular contributor to Film Comment magazine. He is currently completing an M.A. in Cinema Studies at NYU.
