User Reviews

Supervising film editor: MARGARET BOOTH. Photographed in CinemaScope and Eastman Color by Joseph Ruttenberg. An Arthur Freed Production.

Copyright 1960 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. New York opening at the Beekman: 6 July 1960. U.S. release: August 1960. U.K. release: floating from July 1961. Australian release: 4 August 1960. As there was never any intention to put the movie into general release in the U.K., there was no London trade show (as required by law if a movie is to be generally released) and no press preview. The film was not submitted to the British Board of Censors either. 89 minutes.

NOTES: After a disastrous preview of the completed movie at the Encino Theatre on 20 January 1960, M-G-M studio chief Benjamin Thau handed the entire project over to the studio's chief cutter, Margaret Booth, who was given carte blanche to re-edit the picture any way she wished. With Thau's blessing and tacit approval, she then proceeded "to mutilate the movie beyond recognition" (to quote director/screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, who himself replaced both the original director Denis Sanders and the original writer, Robert Thom). What was left of the 1957 Jack Kerouac novel was close to zero. In fact, Kerouac's name no longer figures on the official credits issued by the studio's publicity department, although still given prominent attention in many of the department's press release "fillers".

Negative cost: an unbelievable $931,725, of which about $31,725 actually shows up on the screen. Initial world-wide rentals gross: an equally unbelievable $1.5 million which was presumably earned back entirely in the domestic market by renting the movie at flat, fixed rates to unsuspecting exhibitors. Even so, with the addition of distribution expenses, the movie still ended up in the red at M- G-M to the tune of at least $200,000. Not bad though! I can think of at least a hundred M-G-M disasters that lost more than this one!

COMMENT: A dull and totally unsuccessful adaptation of the Kerouac novel, here reduced to the lowest levels of a TV soap opera. Although both Peppard and Caron seem quite at home with the banal, dialogue-bound, cliché-ridden and totally unappealing script, it signally wastes the talents of Roddy McDowall and Janice Rule. Miss Rule was in a difficult position. She was married to the original screenwriter, Robert Thom, and was tempted to leave the production. "I often thought of doing so," she told me, "but I didn't because I felt that at any moment I would be fired from the cast just like June Walker – who was replaced by Anne Seymour – and be entitled to receive my full pay, as specified by my contract."

MacDougall's exceptionally dull direction does nothing to relieve the tedium. Even Joseph Ruttenberg's photography seems totally routine.

The famous musical producer, Arthur Freed, has made a commendable effort to enliven the movie with a little jazz – Gerry Mulligan has a small role as an unlikely minister – but the operative word here is "little".

When any youth/counterculture "movement" starts getting portrayed in mainstream movies and television, it goes thru the Hollywood "homogenizer" and comes out all safe and pedestrian for the average movie-goer, but about as far from the truth as you can get. Not only was this movie a cheat to the Kerouac novel, but to the Beats as a whole. It's funny to see how Hollywood "suits" chose to portray the counterculture. They're strictly cardboard cutouts, mouthing hip sayings and going thru the motions. George Peppard looks especially uncomfortable thru the whole mess... and what EVER impelled the beautiful and talented Leslie Caron to take the role as his flighty, mentally unbalanced love interest?

Hollywood gave the same treatment to the hippies a few years later, such as British actor Richard Todd portraying a Timothy Leary-type LSD guru (!!!), and James "Book 'Em Danno" MacArthur a radical underground newspaperman in 1967's "The Love-Ins". Check it out if you want some good (unintended) laughs!

Not that "The Subterraneans" is all bad -- there are some terrific jazz performances worth seeing. But this was definitely a movie worthy of parody, which George Peppard himself would provide in the (infinitely superior) 1968 comedy "What's So Bad About Feeling Good?". In that picture, he and Mary Tyler Moore (!!!) are old "Beats" in a Greenwich Village flophouse, wallowing in their own miserable, pointless existences. When they are infected with a "happiness" virus from an imported toucan, they quickly clean up their acts and ditch the "bohemian" lifestyle! Peppard even goes back to his old job as a Madison Avenue advertising executive!

Like "The Subterraneans", "What's So Bad About Feeling Good?" is hard to find, having never been released on VHS or DVD, so about all you can hope for is a grainy bootleg copy off the internet. After seeing "The Subterraneans" again for the first time in decades, I can see it's not likely to be released on DVD any time soon! Can only hope "What's So Bad About Feeling Good?" does get the full restored treatment on DVD sometime. It's a funny 1960's comedy, and George Peppard looks much more at ease in the role!

I have not read, nor will I read the Jack Kerouac novel that this is based on, and I can understand why it failed big time. Even if this has any reality to what life as a beatnik was like in the late 50's and early 60's, it is still one of the worst movies of that era. The opening is very similar to the 1933 musical "Going Hollywood", but instead of Marion Davies leaving her school out of the blue to find life elsewhere (like Suzanne Pleshette would do in "Rome Adventure" just two years after this), George Peppard walks out of his boring life living with clinging nurse mother Ann Seymour advise himself in the South Beach community of San Francisco. He befriends a group of outsiders which includes Leslie Caron (looking ridiculous in a Shirley MacLaine wig and seemingly trying to come off as a French Gloria Grahame), Roddy McDowall and Arte Johnson who I expected at any minute would break into one of future cast mate Henry Gibson's "Laugh-In" poems.

It's hard to believe that this film came from producer Arthur Freed after all of his classic musicals, and he utilizes the song coffee time from his 1945 flop "Yolanda and the Thief" for jazz singer Carmen McRae. It's obvious that he's trying to be hip, but that makes the film fail all the more. I realized after a while that I was looking like the audience members in "The Producers" with my shocked horror expression over the ridiculousness of everything that I was seeing. This is hideous on so many different levels that it can't even be described as a cult classic, as there was nothing that made me laugh at it. Peppard and Caron are so mismatched, and her character never stops spouting the most ridiculous of philosophies and analogies. McDowall and Johnson do their best to try to rise above the ridiculous dialogue, but artist cheated by lousy direction. Janice Rule does the best she can as the romantic rival. At least the sets are interesting, if tacky, but who goes to the movie to analyze the sets outside of set directors? This is the San Francisco that should have collapsed in 1906, and perhaps in the next earthquake, all the prints of this can be buried there. But awards should go to people who can honestly say they made it all the way through. Absolutely painful in every way.