Pull My Daisy
More than a film about the beat generation, Pull My Daisy is a beat experience on film, a free improvisation on a scene from an unproduced play by Jack Kerouac, who provides the narration. Though it has moments of hilarious spoof on the fifties subculture, Pull My Daisy is a tragi-comedy, or a tragi-documentary on that culture. The setting is the Greenwich Village living room of Milo (Larry Rivers), an ex-junkie whose wife, Delphine Seyrig, hopes to convert him to the middle class. To this end, she invites a bishop of unidentifiable religious faith to their home. Milo invites a few poet friends--Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky--who engage the priest in what the filmmakers describe as “a mad evening, an insane visit, a heroic and bedraggled circle.” The film was shot silent; in the added soundtrack, Kerouac speaks for all the characters, also commenting freely on their actions. The spontaneous narration has the immediacy of Kerouac's poetic reality; “Friday morning in the universe” is his opening line. Pull My Daisy was awarded the prize for Best American Experimental Film at the 1959 San Francisco Film Festival. It remains a crucial early work of the New American Cinema.