Zen-Hur

On the dark screen the words appear: "A G-String Enterprise." Called Pull My Daisy, the film is written and narrated by Jack Kerouac, the least dreary of the Beat writers. The cast is drawn from the highest level of Beat society; Poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky all play themselves. As a result, the first pure-Beat movie gives an authentic impression of beatnik habits and tastes.

"Early morning in the universe," says Narrator Kerouac at the outset, by way of scene setting. On the screen, a beautiful but weary woman opens the shutters of her pad. (She is played by Delphine Youngerman, who calls herself Beltiane.) Outside is Manhattan's Bowery; inside are her little boy and, hung on a chair, her absent husband's "tortured socks."

As in home movies, the characters on the screen mouth lost words. On the sound track Kerouac talks on, speaking for them. Visitors knock. "Button your fly and go answer the door," says Kerouac for the mother. The little boy opens the door. Enter Poets Ginsberg and Corso. They drink beer and wine, smoke marijuana, look out the window, where "90-year-old men are being run over by gasoline trucks." The audience now knows that Pull My Daisy is not just another she-bugs-me, she-bugs-me-not story.

The husband, a railroad brakeman (played by Painter Larry Rivers), comes home. He has invited a High Church bishop for tea. The bishop is like 20 years old, and he brings his mother. Not all the Beats are pleased. Ginsberg: "I'll go in the bathroom and watch television." Corso wonders if the bishop knows about "beer bottles that come in magic candlesticks. Is alligators holy, Bishop? Is everything holy? Are we all in heaven now and don't know about it? Jamambi, jamambi, jamambi, jamac." After that, the plot thins, but it is the flavor that matters. On the floor, walls, ceiling are "toothbrush cockroaches, coffee cockroaches, peanut butter cockroaches," and "the Empire State has fallen into the Gowanus Canal."

As strange as anything about the 28 minute film is the fact that its producers --Swiss-born Photographer Robert Frank, 35, and Painter Alfred Leslie, 32--financed it ($20,000) largely through Wall Street's Jack Dreyfus (the Dreyfus Fund) and Stock Market Letter Writer Walter Gutman (Shields & Co.). After its recent premiere at the San Francisco Film Festival, Judge Barnaby (Matador) Conrad declared: "I liked it until Kerouac got the 'smart jacks'--what I send my child to bed for doing." But Producers Frank and Leslie, now busily showing the film to distributors, are confident that it will soon thumb a ride with a glossy, full-length Hollywood feature, carry its cryptic message of the Beats to the neighborhood theater--and even the village squares.

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