Les rats des caves

Hooray I thought, another San Francisco movie that TnT shows from time to time and I can't think of a better place to set a beat generation based production than here. The good news is that there is plenty of location shots set around the North Beach/Telegraph Hill exteriors but bad that most of the interiors are the usual Paramount style back lots that just oozes, well, not authenticity anyway. the acting style is labored and theatrical almost like pantomime and if you think of a less plausible West Side Story with the singing removed you would be pretty close to what can be seen here. The acting particularly from the female lead is over the top whiny and mostly unsympathetic making this a movie to watch but with the sound turned down.

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.

...and I shall begin by saying that this movie (once I found it) was exactly what I expected. In the spirit of later 'films' such as Psyche Out and The Trip, this one delivers the same one dimensional portrayal of a sub-culture that the makes were loath to understand, grasp or even approximate.

I will not disparage the good name of the actors involved. I will disparage the names of the script writers and everyone else involved in the embarrassingly inept screen play of this film, but you'll have to look them up as I care not to.

Oh boy, where to start. First, the presence of real jazz cats with their music and some lovely location shots around Coit Tower are about the best things in the movie, other than the physical attractiveness of the principle actors and actresses. The staging is pure hack Hollywood with groups of old 'young' people standing around silently as the principles deliver their lines and then shuffle off like zombies. It makes me wonder what first time theater goers must have made of this back in 1960 when Beatniks were a thing (thank you Dobie and Maynard). I was just a lad, but my sister was 18 and had some Kingston Trio albums. We took a trip to San Francisco about that time and stayed at a motel near Fishermans Wharf. I later moved to 'the city' after High School and joined in with the hippies. I was always appalled at the way hippies and beats were portrayed on TV and in movies; which explains why this movie and it's shortcomings did not surprise me one bit.

One thing has done is cause me to pursue other Peppard films such as 1968's What's So Bad About Feeling Good?, which I have never seen. Also need to brush up on his other efforts as I believe him to be a terrific actor of some depth and he is certainly a great looking fellow. Honestly, as a celebrity he's everything that Robert Redford is supposed to be, but isn't. Ok, that's it. I warned you.

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.

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.