May

25

Bucket Of Money (Part 2)

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 25, 2007 |

Art imitates death.

When I said that Roger Corman’s film A Bucket Of Blood made art history, I wasn’t joking or trying to be facetious. It is easily the best of Corman’s films, and if that seems like setting the bar low, bear in mind that Corman gave early assistance to some of Hollywood’s biggest and most respected names. His reputation as a second-rate director, in addition to failing to consider his contributions, is ironic, since A Bucket Of Blood is about a man with artistic ambitions who fails to achieve them.

Walter Paisely is an awkward, slightly mentally retarded man which, in the conformist 1950’s, makes him an automatic outsider. He works as a busboy at a coffee shop and admires artistic types whose cups and spoons he carts away. He wants, more than anything, to be an artist himself. He lacks imagination and skill to create anything original. Frustrated by his lack of talent, Paisely discovers a short cut to success when he accidentally kills his landlady’s cat and molds clay around its body. Praised for the lifelike quality of his “sculpture”, he quickly moves on to human subjects, which earns him even more praise. Even when he’s achieved success, though, Paisely is a joke. He dresses in a striped suit with a paisely cravat and carries a long cigarette holder, behaving the way he thinks a “real” artist should. His new friends, art critics who love his work, crown him with paper and give him a toilet plunger for a scepter. As the film approaches its climax and he’s chased by an angry mob, Paisely’s shadow is projected on a high wall. He’s become one of his own works of art: a dark imitation of reality whose stature is an illusion.

Film is, of course, a collaborative effort. While Corman showed real skill as a director, Charles B. Griffith (who also wrote many Corman films, including Little Shop Of Horrors, Attack Of The Crab Monsters, Naked Paradise, and Creature From The Haunted Sea) turned out a sharp, clever screenplay. It would be easy to read the film as an indictment of a decadent art establishment, particularly when a woman shows her appreciation of Paisely’s art by giving him a bag of heroin, but when the hideous secret of Paisely’s “art” is revealed highbrow and lowbrow are united in their outrage. Actor Dick Miller, who seems to have made a career of playing small and supporting roles in numerous movies and television shows (including Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, earning him his own page in Memory Alpha), takes a character who could easily have been a caricature and instead turns Paisely into a tragic figure, eerily reminiscent of the destructive innocence of Lenny in Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men.

In 1959, the year the film was made, Abstract Expressionism had run its course. It was three years after artist Richard Hamilton’s collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, which is credited with giving Pop Art its name, appeared, as well as three years after the death of Jackson Pollock. Any earlier and Paisely’s representational art would have seemed retrograde, but the tide of art was turning against abstraction. Significantly at one point the coffee shop owner, who discovers Paisely’s secret ahead of everyone else but fears the police, encourages him to try abstraction. What’s done can’t be undone, though.

Paisely’s “art” also bears more than a passing resemblance to the early sculptures of artist George Segal (1924-2000), who was associated with the Pop Art movement. As far as I know, though, Segal never murdered anyone, and the similarity is only superficial. Paisely’s figures are caught at extraordinary moments: a cat with a knife in its side, a man with his skull split open, a woman being strangled. Segal’s figures are more mundane: they sit at tables or on beds. They stand on a sidewalk waiting for the light to change in his work Walk, Don’t Walk. Segal did a Holocaust memorial, which was a shocking and terrible event in history, but the beauty of his work is in the ordinariness of his figures. Details are elided with plaster so we can more easily project ourselves onto them. While Paisely’s “art” was all about death, Segal’s is a celebration of life. He asks us to see the ordinary as something extraordinary. For Paisely the ordinary was a curse. As for Roger Corman, he gave us a marvellous film that works on so many levels: art, art history, satire, black comedy, film noir. And he never lost a dime.


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