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bloodied, he returns to Steve only to find that she is in love with the ringleader. As a last ditch effort to cling to Steve and escape his stuffy middle-class life, Charlie tries to impress her with a skydiving stunt that ends in tragedy.
When The Bloody Brood and A Cool Sound from Hell were made at the end of the 1950s, beatniks were at the height of their induction into the pop-culture vernacular. Although the Canadian entries seem to mimic the rash of similar American exploitation flicks such as A Bucket of Blood (1958), The Beat Generation (1959) and The Fat Black Pussycat (1963), beatniks never had it as good as they did within the understanding confines of EnglishCanadian film.
The Bloody Brood fared only slightly better. Although the violence in the film mostly occurs off-screen, its implied glass-eating scene got the film in trouble with the Hollywood Code watchdogs. It was enough to keep the film out of distribution for over a year, scaring off any potential interest from the major studios. Finally, it was picked up by Allied Artists, the second biggest competitor for the teen drive-in market. After a brief first run, The Bloody Brood was relegated to the bottom half of a crimethemed double feature that included an added gimmick— wax figures of famous criminals in makeshift cages behind the snack bar. This wasn’t exactly the fate Taylor envisioned for a film he once regarded as the “stepping stone”
to a Canadian film industry.
DRUG pushers and GANGSTERS-— the REAL criminals of these CANADIAN films.
In American drive-in films, beatniks are unfailingly portrayed as a dangerous threat to middle-class values. Audiences used to seeing anti-social drug addicts spouting bad poetry must have been shocked to see the beatniks in The Bloody Brood and A Cool Sound from Hell played as sympathetic, three-dimensional characters questioning the unwritten rules of adult society. These are young professionals skeptical of the status quo, and while their rebellion often brings them in contact with crime and drugs, distinct efforts are made to distance the beatniks from drug pushers and gangsters—the “real” criminals of these Canadian films.
A Cool Sound from Hell was completed in March 1959, just weeks before Furie left Canada. One can hardly fault Furie for continuing his career in England where he felt more appreciated. Distribution still hadn’t been found for A Dangerous Age, which had only been screened once in North America, by the Toronto Film Society. A Cool Sound from Hell debuted in the U.K. nine months later, to only slightly less glowing reviews than A Dangerous Age. Today, Furie’s second film is considered “lost” and may never have the opportunity to be rediscovered by a Canadian audience.
TAKE ONE
Peter Falk, right, in Julian Roffman’s The Bloody Brood >
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