The Beat Generation

Oh boy. One of the weirdest films in the noir cycle, Charles Haas’ The Beat Generation is highly entertaining in spite of itself. Ostensibly about a cop (Steve Cochran) who trails a serial rapist (Ray Danton) after he attacks and impregnates the cop’s wife, the film is a pastiche of out-of-left-field elements — some goofy, some unnerving — that somehow grip the viewer: a beatnik café that resembles an opium den, two cops — one in a wig — pretending to make out in a car, a human pyramid on a beach, Robert Mitchum’s son, Charlie Chaplin’s son, a priest’s pro-life lecture to a pregnant woman, an underwater harpoon fight in SCUBA gear, and Vampira reciting awful poetry with a rat on her shoulder. The pacing is right on the money, the acting runs from awful to acceptable, and the dialogue is woefully weak (“far out” and “play it cool, chick”), but the film entertains in part by exaggerating the silliness of youth culture (these beatniks could just as easily be hippies or Millennials) and presages the explosion in late 50’s/early 60’s juvenile delinquency films. And Louis Armstrong is on hand for a jazz solo!