The Beat Generation

 
Director: Charles Haas
Year:  1959
Rating:  6.0

Hey, daddio, this is one kool kat movie where the hip beats meet the mean streets. Where the beatniks gather to strum guitars, read bad poetry with a live rat flung across a shoulder (Vampira), dance to their own inner beat and philosophize about Schopenhauer. And rather oddly this beatnik infested club has Louis Armstrong performing - Louis was always a hip cat though. But like many of these "youth" films of the 1950's such as High School Confidential and Blackboard Jungle there is a message in the bottle for the children of America.



But among this love fest that opens the film, there is a rapist and suddenly this film turns really nasty really fast. Totally unexpected. And explicit for the 1950s. Especially if you came in for laughs, giggles and universal love. Stan (Ray Danton) is smooth like vanilla pudding, charming, good looking and earnest - he also likes talking his way into the apartments of wives when their husbands are gone and raping and beating them. Danton is good at playing a creep. You want to see him run over by a steam roller. After he gets a ride from Dave (Steve Cochran) a cop, he decides to rape his wife as well.



Coincidentally, Dave is working on the series of rapes that Stan is responsible for. He isn't exactly a comforting cop to the women as he doesn't really believe them or questions them like they were asking for it - this was way before metoo obviously. When his own wife is raped he isn't much better and when she finds out she is pregnant and doesn't know who the father is abortion is brought up as a solution. Dave becomes obsessive about finding the rapist because he wants to do a blood check - meanwhile the wife suffers alone. It just keeps going down this dark path of obsession and perversion.



Mamie Van Doren doesn't show up in all her pointy bra glory till halfway through when Stan gets his buddy to try and do a copycat rape on Mamie. He is played by James Mitchum - spitting image of his father Robert but without the sex appeal unfortunately. But he is more than confused when Mamie basically wants to jump his bones as soon as he shows up at the door but her ex-husband (band leader Ray Anthony) walks in. From this point on we get a lot of Mamie.



A few other names of interest in the film - former child star Jackie Coogan is Dave's police partner, Cathy Crosby daughter of singer Bob Crosby and niece to Der Bingle is the nightclub singer, Charles Chaplin Jr son of another legend is the fellow who won't get off the phone in the club and the beatnik wrestler is Maxie Rosenbloom who was a champion boxer in his day and as Coogan's wife is Irish McCalla who has some cult status in her short career for She Demons and a TV show of Sheena Queen of the Jungle. So it has a fairly interesting cast.