Movies - The Cool and the Crazy

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	Movies - The Cool and the Crazy

The Cool and the Crazy is a 1958 motion picture that was distributed by American-International Pictures. The producer of the film, Elmer Rhoden Jr., was president of the Kansas City, Missouri-based Commonwealth Theaters chain, a prominent chain of motion picture theaters with stretched through Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Back in 1956, Rhoden Jr. had seen that teenagers were the best new audience for films (as television was drawing most adults out of theaters), and had come up with the idea of starting his own small film complex in Kansas City to produce low-budget teen exploitation films for these audiences, primarily for showing in drive-in theaters. Already, such teen films as Rebel Without a Cause, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and Rock Around the Clock had been huge successes. It was the glory years of the independent regional filmmaker, and with $45,000 raised with the help of local businessmen, Rhoden Jr. hired Kansas City filmmaker Robert Altman, just starting out back then, to make the juvenile delinquency melodrama The Delinquents, which was sold to United Artists and released in 1957, grossing $1,000,000 and also firmly establishing Altman as a film director.

The success of The Delinquents encouraged Rhoden Jr. to put up even more money (about $170,000) for a second delinquency film in Kansas City. Rhoden Jr. began with thinking up a title and nothing else (The Cool and the Crazy) and, due to the fact that Robert Altman was directing television shows in Hollywood, Rhoden Jr. hired Kansas City writer and a friend of Altman's - Richard C. Sarafian - to write the screenplay for the film. Sarafian went on to direct television shows and films in California during the 1960s and 1970s.

Plot

The Cool and the Crazy tells the story of Ben Saul, a reform school graduate who is transferred to a Kansas City high school. There, Ben's clowning in class ticks off the local gang of tough guys, but he soon wins all of their admiration when he begins buying them beer, taking them to dances, giving them "kicks," and then finally turning them on to marijuana. Ben is working as a frontman for a local marijuana ring, but the local police detective is hot on his trail. When a marijuna-crazed addict teenager whom Ben has sold the drug to, dies trying to hold up a filling station for drug money, the police question him and events begin to spiral out of Ben's control. In the dramatic (or melodramatic) finale, Ben ends up killing the pusher for more marijuana only to find that there is none, and gets his just deserts in a fiery car wreck. Then there is an obligatory moralizing segment, where a policeman screams at the surviving addicts, "Is this what you call 'kicks'?! Sooner or later, if you don't wise up you're all gonna wind up like this, one way or the other."

Production

Rhoden Jr. was pleased with the script and although he mostly relied on Kansas Citians for his previous production, this time he hired a good number of Hollywood people. The four lead actors, Scott Marlowe, Dick Jones, Dick Bakalyan, and Gigi Perreau were all from California, and the director, William Witney, who some have called the master of the action film, and several other members of the crew were also from movieland.

However, it was still basically a Kansas City production. More than thirty skilled amateur performers from Kansas City, including radio announcer Shelby Storck and community theater regulars Leonard Belove and Joe Adleman, were in the cast, and local cameramen, film technicians, and makeup artists were involved with the crew. The film was shot in about two or three weeks on-location in Kansas City sometime in the latter part of 1957. The gritty, realistic locations included a Kansas City high school, where most of the students got a chance to be in the film, a run-down Aberdeen Hotel in downtown Kansas City, a greasy spoon called Pat's Pig, Penn Valley Park and the Indian Scout Statue overlooking the city, the Blue Note Club, the renowned Kansas City jazz hall, and several real, impoverished-looking homes and neighborhoods on the "wrong side of the tracks" in the city. In the filming, Rhoden Jr. had cooperation from many local businesses and also from the Kansas City Police Department, who were contacted for several reasons. The producers wanted their portrayal of delinquency and teenage marijuana usage to be accurate, and also they figured the police would assist them in blocking off streets for filming, etc.

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