The Beat Generation is a police procedural whose main journey isn’t through an underground world of beatniks but through the misogynistic hang-ups of its protagonist, who must learn that being a man doesn’t mean hating women. We’re not reading into it; this is explicitly spelled out, as it would be in an afterschool special.
Dave Culloran (Steve Cochran) is the cynical, abrasive cop whose partner (Jackie Coogan) lectures him several times about being a “woman-hater”. The explanation offered is that his first wife was “a tramp” and this soured him on all women — so it’s a dame’s fault. When he questions a beaten-up rape victim (Maggie Hayes), he practically snarls an accusation that she’s a cheating wife who fought with her boyfriend and is lying about it.
It’s a disturbing scene because the audience knows he’s wrong. We’ve already seen what happened, so we feel the unfair, insulting sting of being disbelieved ourselves, of having our own knowledge disregarded after having experienced an unpleasant event. This marks an interesting use of irony that’s not common in cop movies.
On the pretext of owing money to her husband, smooth-talking Stan Hess (Ray Danton) talkes his way into the house, where the victim was listening to jazz records while trying to hula hoop. (These details are both absurd and plausible and provide a more interesting spectacle than housework or reading a magazine.) We quickly realize that Stan is some kind of compulsive ritual serial rapist known as “the aspirin kid”. The story becomes even darker and more fraught when he targets Culloran’s wife Francee (Fay Spain), who has already complained that her husband monitors and interrogates her.
Spoilers are unavoidable here if we’re to discuss what makes the movie unusual. In a couple of carefully placed landmines in the story, Francee is not only raped by Hess but becomes pregnant without being able to tell who the father might be. She spends a lot of screen time agonizing over this and, at one point, seeks help for an abortion. Nobody says the word, but there are frank and fraught discussions about illegality and ending pregnancy. After consulting with a Catholic friend (Irish McCalla) and a priest (William Schallert), Francee arrives at an emotional attachment that doesn’t want to know the baby’s origin. That’s a culturally safe choice that prevents the movie from being ridden out of town on a rail, but we just don’t expect this kind of dialogue in a 1959 movie, though we’ll discuss in a moment why that’s a pivotal year.
Francee’s story is one example of how, although the movie follows the points of view of both Culloran and Hess, who are presented as emotional doppelgangers, it also follows the POV of women and makes careful choices to align the viewer’s sympathies against the men, even the “hero”. There are two primary women: Hess’ “good wife” and the peroxided, tight-bloused “trampy” divorcee Georgia Altera (second-billed Mamie Van Doren). Her name marks her as an “other” woman, and she gets the best lines. “You’re a pretty little policeman,” she tells Culloran when he’s sweet-talking her. At the climax, when Culloran tells Hess “Why don’t you leave her alone?” she spits out, “Why didn’t you leave me alone? When it comes to women, you two make a good pair!” Snap!
In what’s surely a self-consciously symbolic struggle that takes place underwater with one of the most phallic of threats (a speargun), Culloran must literally submerge to his depths in order to wrestle with his worst self, who is revealed as an infantile “lunatic” — “just like I’ve been”.
In an unlikely if diabolical twist, Hess has a second doppelglanger in a buddy called Arthur Jester (heavy-lidded Jim Mitchum, son of Robert). Georgie sets her cap for Jester in a turnaround from the men’s plans when he shows up to pull his buddy’s rape stunt. Aside from a trick to confuse the cops, it feels like Hess wants to get closer to Jester by insisting he participate in his modus operandi. Georgia eventually calls them boyfriends. Oh, she’s dangerous, that one.
Come to think of it, Hess’ M.O. is to chat up various men and learn about their lives, then go rape their wives, which feels an awful lot like a displaced way to be intimate with the husbands. That’s how Culloran literally picked him up after almost running him over. In the opening scene, Hess’ alleged girlfriend whines that he’s always so remote from her, and he pulls away when she takes his hand. Then he fumes at his rich daddy, whose imminent fourth wife is a young bombshell who happens to be a former girlfriend of Hess. He calls her “mommy” with a snarl, implying who knows what oedipal complex; perhaps he’s symbolically attacking his mother or stepmothers, or revenging himself on his father through them.
Later, there’s what appears to be a gratuitous bit of action about shooting a Lover’s Lane bandit, and this involves the presumed comic relief of Culloran and his partner pretending to be lovers, with the latter in drag while they’re necking.
Another interesting detail is a beaten-up wife who habitually has her drunken husband arrested and then refuses to press charges because “he doesn’t really mean it”; plus, “who else is going to work?” She frustrates the cops. This socially insightful vignette has no purpose except to add another facet to its world of female victims and the men fed up with them. It’s the kind of thing you expect to see in a socially conscious TV drama of the ’70s.
Why is all this coming forth in a 1959 movie with the MGM logo? Actually, MGM picked up this obviously low-budget item from producer Albert Zugsmith, who had previously worked with Universal and was now going independent, but it’s still surprising for Hollywood of the time and the kind of thing that wouldn’t have been possible a few years before. It was only two years earlier that 20th Century Fox’s big-budget version of Peyton Place had cleaned some of these elements out of the scandalous novel, and now here’s a sordid little melodrama with a woman seeking an abortion.
From the ’30s to the ’50s, the major studios were subject to the Motion Picture Production Code, which stated: “Seduction and rape are difficult subjects and bad material from the viewpoint of the general audience in the theatre… (c) Where essential to the plot, they must not be more than suggested. (d) Even the struggles preceding rape should not be shown.” The studios simply avoided rape except in the most elliptically suggested ways and never made it the theme of a film. A major exception was achieved for Johnny Belinda (1948), where the deaf-mute status of the victim literalizes the unspeakable nature of the topic. In The Beat Generation, however, these tenets are violated in a way that would have gotten the script rejected a few years earlier.
It has much to do with Otto Preminger, who “broke the Code” by releasing unapproved films independently: The Moon Is Blue (the characters talk about being a virgin!) and The Man with the Golden Arm (the hero is a heroin addict!). Their success led to some modifications in the Code. In 1959, Preminger released the hit Anatomy of a Murder, a courtroom drama with much technical discussion of rape as a central theme, which got the film temporarily banned in Chicago. This is also the year of A Summer Place, a glossy hit in which unwed teens (Sandra Dee and Troy Donahue) create a pregnancy, although it all turns out all right.
In this loosened atmosphere, Zugsmith decided to produce this picture as one of his several with Marilyn Monroe wanna-be Van Doren. Some of these were directed by Charles Haas, who was very experienced with industrial and U.S. Army films and spent most of his career in TV; his widescreen direction is efficient if unspectacular. Zugsmith was embarking on a new phase of his career marked by exploitation. Soon would come Sex Kittens Go to College, an idiotic Van Doren comedy whose European edition included striptease routines. By the mid-60s, he’d be turning out such titles as The Incredible Sex Revolution and Sappho Darling, but he was still treading lightly in The Beat Generation.
Critics perceived cheap sensationalism (as opposed to the expensive kind) because it was still new for mainstream movies to address these topics. Another, subtler reason is an ambience created by the absence of background score and more than rudimentary sound effects. There’s plenty of diegetic music heard in clubs and on radios and records, but otherwise the film is cloaked in a damp vacuum from which people shout their lines.
The most interesting element, as we’ve indicated, is the script by Richard Matheson and Lewis Meltzer. Prior to a previous Zugsmith/Van Doren effort, High School Confidential, Meltzer had co-written The Man with the Golden Arm, direct evidence of the Preminger effect. Matheson was most prominent as a science fiction guy. Zugsmith had produced and Matheson had scripted (from his own novel) The Incredible Shrinking Man, whose hero dwindles physically along with his economic status, as his wife must bring home the bacon while he’s unable to perform his husbandly duties.
His novel I Am Legend is told by a guy who spends most of his time brooding drunkenly over having killed his undead wife, agonizes over celibacy, and then is confronted by another woman who regards him as a monster and murderer. After The Beat Generation, Roger Corman tapped him to scipt House of Usher, the first of his Edgar Allan Poe movies with Vincent Price. In other words, Matheson wrote about lots of neurotic, obsessive, sexually stymied males, and this movie fits smoothly into that output.
We’ve managed to get this far without addressing the film’s most prominent marketing hook and its least important element: the “beat” thing. Beatniks were imaginary creatures invented as comic stereotypes in the ’50s, along with nagging wives and hilarious drunks. They could be found everywhere from Sid Caesar’s TV skits to MAD magazine, and even TV suburbia had been made safe for them when Bob Denver played lovable hepcat Maynard Krebs on The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. In theory, the beats were supposed to be people who read Jack Kerouac and hung out in small jazz clubs, wearing goatees and black sweaters, snapping their fingers and reciting gibberish. As far as pop culture was concerned, they were good for an easy laugh.
That’s this film’s beat, as it were. The first scene supposedly takes place in one of these hangouts, a nightclub where Louis Armstrong performs the title song. That’s pretty high-end and mainstream for these alleged dropouts. We later catch a song by Cathy Crosby (daughter of Bob, niece of Bing), while trumpeter Ray Anthony (Van Doren’s then-husband) has a dramatic role as Georgia’s surly ex-husband. Anyway, Hess makes the scene, reading some woman-hating Schopenhauer and slinging some lingo, man, but we learn that he’s only using the milieu as a cover, and he’s really as contemptuous of it as Culloran, in another parallel between them. “Maybe I’m too old,” Culloran grumps to his partner.
The beatnik women are built while the men are aging schlubs played by the likes of Charles Chaplin Jr. and Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom. Vampira, known as a TV horror hostess, shows up as a poetess. The drawn-out and ludicrously unbelievable climax takes place at a beach house packed with these cartoonish types who, although nobody ever says it, must either be drunk (there’s a bar), stoned. or both, because there’s no other explanation for their bongo-beating, guitar-strumming hysteria, which involves dancing amid various mimed antics. This justifies the tagline: BEHIND THE WEIRD “WAY-OUT” WORLD OF THE BEATNIKS! It’s a timely example of a movie aimed at the middle-class squares while somehow blaming rebellious youth for something or other. An alternate title, The Rebel Age, makes it sound related to Rebel Without a Cause.
The widescreen image on this Blu-ray is in great shape. There are no extras.