Movie at history of film series includes some heavy cruising

On Sunday evening, July 8. on the lawn of Carnegie Library in Oakland, a him entitled “The 1 lower Thief” was shown as part of the History of film series. The movie was made in 1961, directed by Ron Rice, and featured Taylor Mead, Eric ‘Big Daddy’ Nord, and a cast of “beatniks” from North Beach, San Francisco. Formal criticism of this very free form of film would be pretentious and unnecessary. The film is a series of scenes centering on the protagonist’s encounters with various people, places, objects and teddy bears. By far the most interesting part of the film for me was the last sequence, which consisted of our hero (or anti-hero) cruising a very “fifties-looking” guy all around an amusement park, finally going down to the beach with him, quick shots of fireworks and the surging ocean, and then The End. A minor, but really not so minor, irritation was that the page and a half of notes passed out to the “film buffs” before the movie didn’t make any mention of any gay influence whatsoever. At any rate, keep the title in mind just in case this film shows up on the late late show in 1995.