Les rats des caves

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.

This MGM film starred the lovely Leslie Caron so great in MGM Musicals such as American In Paris and Gigi and two up and coming MGM stars: George Peppard and Jim Hutton. Both Peppard and Hutton had 7 year contracts and MGM was still at the time of filming the Number 1 studio in Hollywood. Howard Strickling a maestro of PR set George Peppard to be in the mold of a Spencer Tracy: A great Actor, and Hutton who has a brief role as a combination in the vein of Jimmy Stewart and Jack Lemmon. See this movie just too see Peppard as a lading Man and Hutton in a brief role

This movie about the "beatnik" scene in the Bay Area fails. Leslie Caron is miscast and George Peppard made the most of this casting to move onto Home From The Hill with 2 other MGM contract players: Luana Patten and George Hamilton, Jim Hutton would team up with another MGM contract star Paula Prentiss in Where The Boys Are, a smash hit also starring other MGM contract stars Yvette Mimieux. George Hamilton and a great actress Paula Prentiss whom Hutton would mean up with at MGM: Where The Boys Are, Honeymoon Machine, Bachelor in Paradise and Horizontal Lieutenant. Jim Hutton did A Period Of Adjustment with Jane Fonda at MGM and then went on a 15 month suspension until MGM released him from his 7 year contract. Hutton was supposed to do the role Russ Tamblyn did in How The West Was Won but the deal fell thru. Hutton got his release from MGM having to do Looking For Love, a Connie Francis film which had cameos by the MGM stars Yvette Mimieux, George Hamilton and his former co star Paula Prentiss.

MGM was a great studio in the early 60's.

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.

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.

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.