One of my favorite uses of beat culture is BEAT GIRL (1960). A teenaged girl is drawn to the decadence that is the beatnik scene in London. She has a bunch of beat pals over for a party while her father is away. He comes home unexpectedly and is appalled by the sight of beats in his house. He shouts, "Get out of my house, you jiving, jumping scum!" (See Internet Movie Database plot summary below.) Also, a tangential beat film is JAZZ ON A SUMMER'S DAY, a documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival (see review below). I'm sure there were plenty of beats in attendance. ----------------- BEAT GIRL IMDb plot summary: Paul, a divorced architect, marries Nichole, a woman from Paris. His teen daughter Jenny has fallen in with the English beatnik scene and likes to hang out in cave-like clubs to listen to jazz and rudimentary rock'n'roll. Jenny takes an immediate dislike to her mother-in-law, who is not that much older than she, and goes out of her way to make life miserable for Nichole. When Jenny discovers that Nichole is a friend of one of the strippers from the dance hall across the street, she investigates and uses Nichole's sordid past to embarrass her father. Meanwhile Jenny attracts the lecherous eye of Kenny, the owner of the dance hall. Summary written by Ed Sutton Jazz on a Summer's Day Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum From the Chicago Reader Bert Stern's film of the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival features Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong, Eric Dolphy, Chuck Berry, Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, Anita O'Day, Gerry Mulligan, Chico Hamilton, and many others. Stern's only film, shot in gorgeous color, is probably the best feature-length jazz concert film ever made. Despite some distracting cutaways to boats in the opening sections, the film eventually buckles down to an intense concentration on the music and the audience's rapport with it as afternoon turns into evening, with Mahalia Jackson's rendition of "The Lord's Prayer" a particularly luminous highlight. Stern doesn't seem to know what distinguishes mediocre from good or great jazz, because all three seem to get equal amounts of his attention, but he's very good at showing people listening (1960, 85 min.). At 12:00 AM 12/3/2001 -0600, you wrote: >Date: Sat, 1 Dec 2001 17:39:47 -0500 >From: Mary Celeste Kearney <[log in to unmask]> >Subject: films about the Beats >MIME-Version: 1.0 >Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" > >Hi - > >I'm looking for recommendations for films about the Beats, either narrative >or documentary. > > >Thanks very much, > >mary > > >Mary Celeste Kearney >Department of Radio-Television-Film >The University of Texas at Austin >Office: 512-475-8648 >Fax: 512-471-4077 Jeremy Butler [log in to unmask] ======================================================== The second edition of TELEVISION: CRITICAL METHODS AND APPLICATIONS is now available. More info at: http://www.TVCrit.com ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu