Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		2.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.0

Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats Blu-ray Movie Review

The beat goes on.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 23, 2012

Some readers here are probably tuned in enough to various pop culture flashes in the pan to remember the short-lived Chevy Chase talk show on Fox, a late night series that barely managed to eke out a run of five weeks on the air in 1993 before it was summarily canceled. One of the cooler things about the show (in fact, perhaps the only cool thing) was a little keyboard Chase had built into his stage, which he would noodle on for “bumpers” in and out of commercial breaks. There’s that oft-repeated adage that “everything old is new again,” which is really saying “everything is old”, and that seems to be the case with the “in dash” keyboard for a talk show host, at least from the evidence presented in the absolutely outré opening to John Antonelli’s 1985 documentary Kerouac, The Movie, about iconic “Beat Generation” author Jack Kerouac. The documentary opens with a clip from a 1959 Steve Allen Show (his variety series, not his legendary stint as host of The Tonight Show), which finds the host sitting at a grand piano (well, this was the veritable Dark Ages, not the hip and happening nineties), doodling out a series of bizarre little jazz chords as he “interviews” a shy and awkward Kerouac. That adage may in fact pertain to the weird situation of two talk show hosts having keyboards at their beck and call (albeit Allen’s being a “standalone” unit), but you’d be hard pressed to account for anything about the Beat movement being in any way a “retread” of something older, although it’s indisputable that the questing spirit that Kerouac epitomized is something uniquely American.

There’s a peculiar sort of individualism that seems endemic to the American Northeast, something that is evident in the character and writing of men as disparate as Thoreau, Whitman, composer Charles Ives and, yes, Jack Kerouac. Kerouac, born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, claimed to have been descended from a famous French baron, though the truth seems to be a good deal more pedestrian. There’s no escaping the fact that Kerouac’s nuclear family was dysfunctional, something which played an important part on young Jack’s developing psyche, and something which took on immense proportions when Jack’s older brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever. Jack’s Catholic mother turned obsessively to her religion, while Jack’s father turned obsessively to his religion, namely downing immense amounts of alcohol. Jack’s relationship with his parents, especially his volatile father, was marked by tumult for the rest of their lives.

Jack Kerouac – King of Beats, as this home video release has been retitled, deals with Jack’s childhood, adolescence and young adulthood with some cursory interest, including highlighting his brief, and briefly spectacular, career as a football player at Columbia. A hairline fracture put his athletic ambitions on the back burner, and that’s when he turned to an almost obsessive interest in literature, mostly with the writings of Thomas Wolfe. Kerouac soon decided that writing was his true calling in life, something which once again set him at odds with his parents, mostly his father. And truth be told, judging by the years and years of turmoil which would ensue from Kerouac’s abortive career, few would probably blame Kerouac mère and père from being so concerned. Even Kerouac’s burgeoning attempts to get his writing off the ground were interrupted by the little problem of World War II. Jack was already following in his father’s footsteps and tending to drink too much, and one day after a major bender he ended up enlisting in both the Navy and the Merchant Marines. He quickly decided on the Merchant Marine option, working as a cook. (Full disclosure: Jack served in the Merchant Marines with my late Uncle, and Jack later rented from my Uncle in New York City in the fifties.)

The best part of Jack Kerouac – King of Beats is in its examination of Kerouac’s struggle in the fifties and his subsequent success, short-lived though it was, after On the Road finally found a publisher several years after Jack had written it and been hawking it (to repeated rejections). With some very interesting interviews, including with Jack’s first wife, Allen Ginsberg, and a putative girlfriend who was there when he became a media darling for his appointed fifteen minutes of fame, this otherwise standard feeling documentary actually seems to get close to its subject in these segments. The documentary probably would have been more interesting with more of these first hand accounts than with several kind of awkward reenactments, including a silly sequence featuring “Jack” and another actor portraying Gary Snyder hopping about on a mountain ledge.

This piece is best in its smaller moments, such as its kind of surprising revelation about the one of Jack’s most famous achievements, the coining of the term Beat Generation. With subsequent images of goateed hipsters pounding on bongos (think Maynard Krebs in The Life and Loves of Dobie Gillis), many people assume that “beat” pertains to rhythm. Nothing could be further from the truth. Kerouac, who was attempting to divine his generation’s most defining trait, had come to realization that most young men and women who had just lived through World War II were at best furtive, desperately clinging on to whatever could get them through the night, so to speak. Kerouac therefore utilized the term “beat” to indicate that his generation had been pummeled by life and had few spiritual resources left. Interestingly, it was Jack’s relationship with Snyder, and Snyder’s interest in Zen Buddhism, that managed, for a while at least, to give Kerouac a bit of “the peace that passeth understanding”.

Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Jack Kerouac – King of Beats is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Kultur with an VC-1 encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. This feature was most likely shot in 16mm and this Blu-ray has obviously been sourced from a print, so expectations should be adjusted accordingly. Parts of this presentation pop adequately, with decent if not overwhelming detail, but really the bulk of this presentation is pretty soft and ragged looking, with more than obvious digital sharpening adding a glut of haloing around many objects. The most troubling thing about this transfer is a really peculiar quasi-slow motion effect which is akin to PAL transfer slowdown or "stutter", though Kultur insists this was sourced from an NTSC master, and admittedly audio is not affected at all. I discovered an extremely strange anomaly while taking screencaps that I've never encountered before in years of having done this, where the frame ping ponged back and forth second by second from a normal looking image to one that was horizontally split screen (see screencap 21 for an example). I'm assuming this means something went wrong in the authoring, mastering or production phase of this release that contributes to the weird stuttering effect.

Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Jack Kerouac – King of Beats features an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 mix that reproduces Peter Coyote's amiable sounding narration well enough. Talking heads are also clear and consistently reproduced, and the archival snippets of Kerouac sound better than might be expected. There's not much dynamic range here, as should probably be expected, but fidelity is certainly reasonable and the track has no egregious damage of any kind to report. There's nothing overly impressive here, but for a mid-eighties documentary, this audio holds up just fine.

Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Original On the Road Scroll with the Kerouac Voice-Over (SD; 2:34) shows the teletype scroll that Kerouac used to type out his stream of conciousness prose on, with Kerouac reading his words to shots of words being typed (with some frankly annoying accompanying typing sounds). The audio of Kerouac sports some audible damage.


• Rare Kerouac Interview Outtakes with William F. Buckley (SD; 7:57) features some odd little snippets from a Buckley interview. Kerouac appears to be perhaps slightly in his cups, but he's a good sparring partner for Buckley. Look for shots of Allen Ginsburg in the audience.

Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Jack Kerouac – King of Beats may not be the most in depth treatment of its subject possible, but it gets the basic facts out well enough, and it contains some really excellent interview segments with a variety of people who knew Kerouac intimately. Kerouac was such an enigma that any documentary about him would probably struggle to definitively pin down what the man himself was all about, but King of Beats is decently appreciative of its subject while not ignoring his obvious flaws. This Blu-ray can't do much with the source elements in terms of the fairly shoddy looking video, and it seems to have had some problems introduced at some stage in the transfering process. The documentary itself is quite interesting, and the supplements, though brief, are similarly compelling, but my recommendation is to hold off on purchasing this title until a definitive answer as to what happened with the video transfer is forthcoming.