Parents barely exist here and the only adulthood that truly engages with these kids are cops, and that engagement’s limited to threatening ’em with severe beatings and death by poisoning. Amy’s parents are really calm and liberal though, not even batting an eyelid when their little darling tells them she brought home Jackie, aka Dick Bakalyan, who has a face so unlovable that he’s spent the rest of his life playing loser thugs on TV and in B pictures. So the real message is there somewhere . . . if parents just scrubbed up nicely and then let teens do pretty much what they liked, they wouldn’t get into drugs, fighting and Brylcreem. Shagging funny-looking boys is just a phase we all go through. So I hear.
The heathen working classes seem to be the problem here in Crazyville. When Jackie visits Amy, he’s blown away by how clean her house is. He tells colourful lies to make his failures and unemployed Dad seem more interesting. He assumes that this nice girl’s parents will despise him on sight, so makes a bolt for it when he hears them coming. He’s ashamed about being a boy from the wrong side of the tracks . . . if Crazyville has tracks. Or trains. It’s difficult to tell. The next day he’s going to church with the prospective in-laws and wearing tank tops. Suggestible boy.
But then, so is Bennie, in a different sort of way. Bennie’s real problems are not class crisis nor his moral choices about making money. First, his Dad is a broke, bone-idle drunk who can barely stand up, and definitely not to his own son. ‘I’m a product of a complex society,’ a smirking Bennie says to teacher early doors, signalling how quickly teens had become self-conscious about their perceived neuroses after all those headlines and government reports about juvenile delinquency, not to mention the birth of therapy culture.
But Bennie’s big mistake is that he’s getting high on his own supply . . . always a disaster for drug dealers in Movie World. The boy’s so spaced that he thinks a car’s headlights are two motorcycle cops, and tries to drive right in between ’em. That might be the big clue to his downfall right there, I reckon. Every time he says he knows the score the audience are increasingly aware that he doesn’t, and that his inevitable punishment for hubris and stonerdom is going to be as out of proportion as the gang’s reaction to a quick toke.
It would be fascinating, though, to know how many kids who went to see The Cool And The Crazy at the time actually knew anything about dope, and knew that they were being lied to. How many took the film’s apocalyptic warnings seriously and how many knew enough to react to the gang’s instant bad trip traumas as the comedy we all see it as today? Perhaps the oddest scene in the movie comes when the thuggish Stu and his hapless school gang ask Bennie to do ‘something big’ to serve as a sort of gang initiation. What Bennie chooses to do is drive to the nearest police station and sort of . . . flounce around. That really is the only way to describe it. He does that round-shouldered stagger-slouch thing that young post-Dean actors did, switches genders on his back-story for no good reason (Dad’s dead, Mom’s an alcoholic), vaguely tempts the cops to arrest him . . . and then leaves. It’s obviously a shoddy tribute to the cop shop scenes in Rebel Without A Cause (see here), but with so little point or aim that it actually does look like the most surreal thing that cool, crazy Bennie could’ve done to impress a bunch of tools. ‘Hey Lieutenant! Another delinquent,’ the desk sergeant calls, jadedly. They’re all too used to being flounced at by pretty boys in . . . erm . . . wherever the fuck this place is.
One thing I am curious about is why, if AIP wanted to aggressively exploit teens, their ’50s movies resolutely refused to acknowledge the existence of the Hot New Thing that teens were most obsessed with en masse. Even the band in The Cool And The Crazy’s obligatory dance hall scene is a proper jazz group . . . black guys in black suits, playing horns. Three theories. One – AIP’s teen movies needed to get the right ratings with a minimum of fuss, and rock ’n’ roll was still too controversial, especially in the wake of the seat-slashing riots that had apparently been inspired by Bill Haley songs in Blackboard Jungle (see here) and Rock Around The Clock. Or, two – many of AIP’s juvenile leads favoured clothes and language that derived from beatniks rather than rockers, so a jazz soundtrack was their movies’ one stab at authenticity. Or – and I think three is most likely – Arkoff, Nicholson and co. just hated rock ’n’ roll and, like most adults of the 1950s, saw it as a white trash fad that would eventually be crushed by proper cutting-edge music . . . that is, jazz, which the collegiate middle classes had a big old wigger Jones for. Whichever way, the theme song played for the jiving kids at the disco has just enough rhythm ’n’ blues in it to qualify as jump-jive, which is almost, kind of, rock ’n’ roll.
Once reefer madness sets in at the disco, it’s Stu, played by Dickie Jones, who gets all the fun stuff to do . . . chain-smoking, sweats, stealing a bus-stop and thinking it’s a girl, falling acrobatically down stairs, ranting like a looney fella and stoving his friend’s head in with said bus-stop. This is some Grade A shit, Homes.
As I mentioned in the entry for I Was A Teenage Werewolf (see here), Arkoff and Nicholson discovered superstars, including Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda and Roger Corman. But most of their directors were probably like William Witney; no great auteur’s vision, perhaps, but a really stylish shot-maker. You recall the opening shot of the teen tying her shoes? Girls’ legs are obviously Witney’s pet metaphor. At one point we cut to nasty Mr Big’s hotel room – the real villain in an AIP teen movie is always an adult – and again, we’re at a dramatically low angle, staring, from the floor, up at a woman’s perfect legs, dangling from a bed, skirt pulled up to the thigh. The angles are almost identical, and we immediately contrast the innocence of the opening leg shot with the seaminess of the gangster’s girl’s legs, when taken in tandem with the right on-cue hoochie music. The girl has no face, just one of those gangster’s moll voices, dismissing Mr Big’s concerns about kids getting ‘into the needle’. Innocence and experience expertly contrasted, and, with mean old Mr Big hovering behind the woman’s legs, experience manages to be both sexier and uglier at one and the same time. As coded messages to kids go, it’s one of the truer ones.
The key scene comes towards the end, when Bennie stands up in class, and with great linguistic élan, defines the ‘subjunctive mood’ our freaked-out teacher seems obsessed with . . . an obsession shared, oddly, by the teacher in the far weightier The 400 Blows (see here) a year later. Bennie, you see, is possibly a genius. But no one at home has focused that intelligence into anything worthwhile, so . . . all is gangsters, ‘M’ and a literal trip to the fires of hell.
Crazyville may not be a recognisable American town, but it does have a real feel . . . one of confusion and chaos and a great deal of beauty, particularly in its period cars and bleached monochrome look. The Cool And The Crazy cost less to make than an Iggy Pop insurance ad and is one of the best, funniest and strangest examples of no-budget film-making you’ll ever see. Just don’t smoke while you watch it. You’ll burn the sofa.
THE BLOB
1958
Starring: Steven McQueen, Aneta Corseaut, Earl Rowe
Dir.: Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr
Plot: Teens save the world from amorphous mass hysteria.
Key line: ‘It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life!’
This may be the only movie in this book where the best thing is the theme song.
So, imagine a less raucous version of ‘Tequila’ by The Champs. Acoustic guitar, cheesy sax, MOR male harmonies, over a discreet Latin rhythm with a built-in cha-cha-cha. As the opening credits roll – decorated by nothing more than a pulsating confusion of vaguely circular red lines – the wordless harmonies finally coalesce into a song. It goes:
Beware of The Blob it creeps
And leaps
And glides
And slides across the floor
Right through
The door
And all across the floor
A splotch
A blotch
Be careful of The Blob
. . . .
BEWARE OF THE BLOB!
This masterpiece of kitsch was written by Mack David and none other than Burt Bacharach. I doubt if it rates as a proud moment for the foremost easy-pop composer of his day. But I’ll take it over ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head’ or that tragically pretentious album he made with Elvis Costello because it makes me happy. And it sets the perfect tone for the teen sci-fi B-movie that proves that cheapo ’50s exploitation gems were knowingly funny, rather than unwittingly so.
And yes, Steven McQueen is Steve McQueen. His first leading man role ran simultaneously to hit US TV show Wanted: Dead Or Alive, a bounty hunter western series which allegedly had more impact upon his journey to becoming America’s favourite leading man than this lurid mass of wobbly horror. I dunno. I’m thinking that any Hollywood producer who watched McQueen navigate this hokum with dignity and some degree of method naturalism intact would figure that the guy’s a star. McQueen rejected a percentage deal and went for $3,000 upfront, figuring that something this stupid was bound to bomb. It made $4 million.
The Blob’s premise is direct and to the point. A small town called Phoenixville in Pennsylvania is invaded by aliens. Or maybe alien singular, it’s hard to tell. Because this hostile visitor is an amorphous mass of goo that must be jelly ’cos jam don’t shake like that. It doesn’t do too much leaping (unless you count the jerk-edit special effects), but it’s very good at sliding across the floor, killing puny humans by absorbing them. Steve McQueen is Steve is the boy who leads a group of teens who foil its evil plan to turn Earth into a giant trifle.
Like all ’50s teen movies, it has A Message designed to tell its target audience what it wanted to hear. The adults of Phoenixville, including cops and doctors who can usually be relied upon to make The System run smoothly and tend to the needs and desires of dumbass civilians, don’t believe The Kids when they tell ’em that a killer mousse is on the loose. They think that all teens are juvenile delinquents, and are therefore fucking with the townsfolk for kicks and shit. And the fact that The Blob cleans up after itself doesn’t help.
But The Kids are right and The System is wrong. So wouldn’t the world be a better place if adults stopped labelling kids juvies (or hooligans or hoodies or chavs or gangstas) and just listened to them, because we believe the children are our future and they could maybe save us all from bad stuff like The Bomb and The Commies, if we only gave ’em a chance. How very ’60s. Indeed, the the-older-they-are-the-dumber-they-be theme is punched home from the very get-go, when The Blob’s first victim and incubator of Blobular destruction is an old man who decides that the best way to examine a meteor-type object that fell from the Heavens and emits weird noises is to poke it with a big stick. By the end of the movie, brave young Steve hasn’t just taught the town toughs the value of united action against a common enemy, but is effectively marshalling a military operation.
But hey . . . subtext schmubtext. The pleasure of watching The Blob lies in ingeniously cheap special effects plus hysterical overacting in the face of the least scary serial killer in movie history. The Blob itself is a silicone . . . well . . . blob with added red vegetable dye. The crew shook it about a bit and pushed it through holes and the film was run at high speed to make it like it was going somewhere. This reaches a peak of low-budget hilarity when The Blob becomes ginormous enough to cover an entire diner where Steve, his simpering girl Jane (Corsaut) and her pesky kid brother are trapped. This was apparently done by placing the silicone gunk on a table next to a photograph of the diner, then shaking the table until The Blob rolled off, and then running the film backwards. CGI has ruined everything.
The day is finally saved when our puny humans accidentally discover that The Blob doesn’t like the cold. The townspeople freeze it with fire extinguishers, and then an Air Force plane parachutes the defeated alien into the Arctic Circle. (Does this explain Blobal Warming? Blobal Warming! Blimey. Tough crowd.) With tongues firmly in cheeks and eyes firmly on potential sequels, the words ‘The End’ fill the screen . . . and then morph into a question mark.
Critics have pondered the hidden meaning of The Blob’s chilly demise. Many sci-fi movies of the time were interpreted as thinly veiled comments upon America’s struggle with the Soviet Union. This struggle was called the Cold War. As The Blob absorbs more solid American citizens and grows in size, it becomes increasingly red. Get it? Good. I suspect that this is wishful thinking. But it’s a very enjoyable pastime, projecting big political metaphors onto dumb B-movies. The Blob’s most famous moment does make for a nice comment about the power of cinema and its grip on teenagers, though.
Steve and teen-friendly Police Lieutenant Dave (he doesn’t appear to have a surname – he’s very informal) call a mass night-time meeting outside the supermarket where The Blob is holed up to warn the good townsfolk about the ever-growing, pulsating threat within their midst. Their reaction is half-panic, half kid-fearing scepticism. Meanwhile, most of the town’s teens are at the cinema’s midnight ‘spook show’, watching an old classic called Daughter Of Horror. Guess where The Blob’s heading?
While the teens laugh hysterically at the old movie’s camp horror, a far camper horror is oozing through the cinema air-vents. The poor old projectionist becomes the filling in a big doughnut. Soon, in a set of genuinely convincing, funny and beautifully composed shots, screaming kids are trampling each other to death in their desperation to escape the treacly terror. The increasingly jammy-looking Blob squirms magnificently through the cinema doors, contrasted with a sign over the diner that flashes ‘Home Baking’. Priceless.
THE 400 BLOWS
1959
Starring: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Claire Maurier, Albert Rémy, Patrick Auffay, Guy Decomble
Dir.: François Truffaut
Plot: Why it’s big and clever to be a juvenile delinquent.
Key line: ‘He’s beyond all limits.’
The French title of this movie is Les Quatre Cents Coups. It is the debut film of François Truffaut and, along with Les Cousins by Claude Chabrol, Hiroshima Mon Amour by Alain Resnais and A Bout De Souffle by Jean-Luc Godard, launched the movie thing we’ve come to know as the nouvelle vague, or the French new wave. It’s also, far more importantly, the genesis of this book and my previous book on film, Popcorn. Because, to my eternal shame, I only saw it for the first time in 2006, at the Duke Of York’s Playhouse in Brighton, just five years ago. But I went into the cinema a film fan, and came out a movie geek, with all my previous fears of foreign and ‘art’ film banished for ever. No piece of art has had such a profound effect on me since I first heard Public Enemy’s ‘Rebel Without A Cause’ single sometime in 1988. It didn’t just make me want to write about film. It made me able to.
The 400 Blows is the semi-autobiographical tale of Antoine Doinel, a 13-year-old Parisian boy who falls foul of parents, school and the French justice system, played by the extraordinary Jean-Pierre Léaud. Léaud, a real-life wild boy who went on to star as Doinel in four further Truffaut movies, is the key element here. The young actor was just 14, and, just as The 400 Blows argues that children’s ideas and desires are more important and interesting than those of the uncomprehending adults around them, Léaud’s performance proves that children are better at playing children than adults. Doinel is the first fully rounded and utterly believable adolescent youth ever put onscreen. Without Truffaut and Léaud, no Mick Travis (see here), Billy Casper (see here) nor Jimmy The Mod (see here). But also, no John Hughes. When Truffaut situates his camera at the back of the classroom during the school scenes, forcing us to watch like one of the naughty pupils at the back, he forever changes the viewpoint in teen movies from ‘them’ to ‘us’. The 400 Blows is a monochrome dress rehearsal for The Breakfast Club (see here).
If Antoine is Truffaut, his best friend René Bigoy is based upon Robert Lachenay, Truffaut’s school friend and this movie’s assistant director. Although both insisted that the events are a mixture of things that happened to them and people they know,
Truffaut was a school dunce, lost and found himself in books and films, played truant in the streets of Montmartre, lied constantly and was sent to a juvenile detention centre. What he chooses to do with this is cinema’s first visual poem on the subject of adolescence.
The 400 Blows begins in a classroom, with bored boys handing around a girlie calendar, and Antoine getting caught. The grainy, dirty detail of schoolroom and playground is quickly established, and it’s vital to keep in mind that movies simply didn’t look like documentaries in 1959. These scenes are the beginning of cinéma vérité. You can see just how much of this was shot guerrilla-style by the various street scenes, where passers-by will suddenly notice the camera and catch our eye in an unselfconscious way that no actor could pull off so naturally. Truffaut literally filmed the pulse of his city’s life while saving a lot of money on getting streets closed down and hiring hundreds of extras to do what people do quite naturally.
The movie’s comedy lies in the it’s-funny-’cos-it’s-true detail. The curly-headed boy trying to copy a literary passage being recited by the crabby, authoritarian teacher, repeatedly making mistakes, and tearing more and more pages from his exercise book until there’s nothing left. The kid is cute, his ineptitude funny; but the teaching is inept and pointless, too. This is a revenge movie; the vindictive masterpiece of a boy told by monsters in bleak classrooms that he’d amount to nothing, now able to look down on lowly, loser teachers from his lofty perch as doyen of a new cultural demi-monde.
In a later comic scene, cheekily ‘borrowed’ from Jean Vigo’s Zéro De Conduite, a bizarre PE class involves jogging through the streets in civilian clothes while a teacher in shorts blows a whistle. Kids keep breaking off to hide in doorways until the teacher is blithely leading no one at all, which all reminds me that, at my secondary school in London, ‘cross-country running’ actually involved tramping around Muswell Hill, with the more rebellious kids taking it as an opportunity to lag behind and have a fag. We were 12. Not a lot really changed between the ’50s and the ’70s.
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