A Bucket of Blood (1959)
A talentless, lovelorn busboy at a beatnik coffeehouse accidentally kills his landlady's cat, panics, and coats it in clay — and finds himself hailed as a sculptural genius, with worsening consequences for anyone who models for his next piece.
Shot in five days for the price of a B-picture’s catering budget, A Bucket of Blood is Roger Corman’s sharpest satire of the era’s beatnik pretensions — a joke about art-world gullibility that gets funnier, and grimmer, with every corpse Walter varnishes.
Background
Corman made this for American International Pictures with screenwriter Charles B. Griffith, who wrote it as a comic riff on the coffeehouse poetry scene of the late 1950s. Dick Miller plays Walter Paisley, a dim busboy desperate to be taken seriously by the beatniks he serves. Miller was a Corman regular, and Walter Paisley became a running in-joke: he gave the name to characters in several later films by Corman’s circle.
What to watch for
Watch how the satire works on two levels. The art crowd praises anything delivered with enough confidence, and Walter is the only person in the room who knows what his “sculptures” really are. The same team, Corman, Griffith and Miller, reused the underdog-gets-fame-by-killing structure a year later in The Little Shop of Horrors, so the two films make a natural double bill. Poet Maxwell H. Brock’s recitations are the best-aged joke here: pompous verse over bongos.
