My husband and I recently purchased our first home and it’s a cute 1954 suburban California ranch house that needs a lot of work. We’re trying to restore our home’s original vintage charm and in the process we’ve been watching some older films that make use of suburban locations and highlight mid-century design. One of my favorite examples of this is the 1961 comedy Bachelor in Paradise. The movie was directed by Jack Arnold who is best known for the classic horror and science fiction films he made including Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), It Came from Outer Space (1953), Tarantula (1955) and The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957) but in the ’60s Arnold’s interests seemed to shift a bit. He started making comedies like The Mouse That Roared (1959) with Peter Sellers as well as Bachelor in Paradise and A Global Affair (1964) that both featured Bob Hope.

The comedies that Bob Hope appeared in during the ’60s are often dismissed by critics and for good reason. Hope’s combination of slapstick humor and snappy comebacks had somewhat run its course. His style of humor was seen as slightly outdated at a time when younger funny men like Jack Lemmon, Jerry Lewis and Peter Sellers were making their mark in Hollywood. But I personally enjoy some of the movies Bob Hope appeared in during the ’60s such as the adulterous comedy The Facts of Life (1960) as well as this silly suburban sex farce.

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If literary legend Jack Kerouac were still alive he would be celebrating his 88th birthday tomorrow. Unfortunately Kerouac left us much too early at age 47 but his work lives on. Often called the father of the Beat movement, Jack Kerouac’s jazz-fueled spontaneous writing style doesn’t easily lend itself to film adaptations. The most grievous example of this is the 1960 film adaptation of Kerouac’s short novel THE SUBTERRANEANS directed by Ranald MacDougall and produced by Arthur Freed for MGM. THE SUBTERRANEANS was the first full-length film adaptation of a Jack Kerouac novel and it’s not an easy movie to recommend. The film is badly cast and plays like a poorly misconstrued parody of the Beat Generation. It also takes extreme liberties with Kerouac’s original story. So why am writing about it? As a novice jazz enthusiast the movie appeals to the music lover in me and as someone who was born in the Bay Area, I find the San Francisco setting extremely enchanting.

THE SUBTERRANEANS was originally a semi-autobiographical story written by Kerouac in just three days and published by Grove Press in 1958. It details the brief interracial romance between Leo Percepied (filling-in for Jack Kerouac) and a young African American woman named Mardou Fox. Some of the highlights of the book include Kerouac’s description of the clubs that he was frequenting at the time and an encounter with jazz legend Charlie Parker.

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