Die Kellerratten

Tasteless adaption of a great beat novel. The big MGM studio setup is not suited for a story like this. A low budget B/W Noir style, would have suited the story better.

I just viewed this film for the first time. Janice Rule and Leslie Caron are excellent given the superfluous material; George Peppard is stiff and unconvincing.

If you take this film literally, the Beats represented party-loving, self-serving hedonists, rebelling against society with no particular purpose. In fact, the Beats and their literature provided a needed counterpoint to the conformity and staid complacency of American life in the 1950s. They were the forerunners of the Hippies, for sure.

Despite a shallow story line, the film is of historical interest as to how Hollywood (and maybe mainstream America) viewed the Beat generation in 1960, when the film was released.

The music is absolutely marvelous - it's great to see and hear jazz giants like Gerry Mulligan (also in an acting role), Art Pepper, Art Farmer and Shelly Manne.

A true period piece, worth seeing - once.

about an age and not about a period. about few people and a too strange love story. about a world very far by Kerouac novel and the real facts. so, only a sketch. and it is not really an error if its ambitious are not so high. because the basic bizarre piece in this movie it is the cast. why few not bad actors for a poor exercise to present an age ? than - the script ( the dialogs are almost fake ). not the lat, the story - chaotic and too pink. short, it is a trip of Hollywood in middle of a kind of revolution. but the reality is not part from its rules so, the result is far to be admirable. only interesting ingredient - the performance of Roddy McDowall. but it is not enough to be more than a sketch for a decent social portrait.

This film is good. The Beatniks it portrays were ( I wasn't there in San Francisco ) a rather dreary lot; at least the ones growing old in Paris that I met. A few were in the gay closet, and the rest either posed or wrote, and the rest is history. As for the film it gave them a glamour, and I have no idea how successful the film was. It is compromised in many ways by a too conventional ending, but most films were even the ' great ' ones out of Hollywood. So why do I find it good ? The dialogue for those who like T.V dialogue is maybe over the top, but the actors give a good delivery of the lines. Despite the relentlessly dull George Peppard he tries hard, and the superb performance of Leslie Caron almost literally drags him into life. She can do shifts of emotion in a split second from anger to cold scorn, then back to her joy of living, and this ' lost ' film is made excellent by her. Roddy McDowell is brilliant as the sexually ambiguous butterfly in the Jazz caverns of the city, and he can dance away with a rose in his hand as well as being profound and serious. Scott Marlowe is given too little to do, and his ferocity is not given full rein ( personally he would have been better in the Peppard role ) but sadly Peppard brought the middlebrows in. It is watchable, and very moving and Caron makes it so, as a troubled young woman who has had too many men and too many visits to the psychiatric ward. This is a long way away from the roles she is famous for. And all for the better. She is a complex actor and was made to play the 'girl ' in too many films, when in fact she could prove herself to be as good as Jeanne Moreau or Simone Signoret, blending a lack of traditional beauty but beauty that surpasses the usual definition of the word. Then there is Janice Rule and she is equally disenchanted with life, but like all survivors of emotional disasters she moves on. Any one who can find a copy of this film watch it more than once, as it is addictive, and please put the ' facts ' about the Beatniks aside.

If this film is hard to get a hold of, it's probably because anyone involved in it has tried to buy up and destroy the prints. Never mind the faithlessness to Kerouac -- this is about as close to the spirit and vision of Kerouac as Howdy Doody is to Shakespeare -- the script provides ample opportunities for the humiliation of actors, opportunities which, unfortunately are exploited to the full. George Peppard is miscast as a soul-searching intellectual writer, but seems to have the soul of a soft, fluffy robot. Roddy MacDowell doesn't speak his lines, but declaims them. The otherwise charming Leslie Caron has the depth of a neurotic paper doll. It's a kind of exploitation film: instant beatnik, just add intelligence. My compliments to anyone who can watch this for five minutes without cringing.