If you’ve ever tried to sit down and actually watch the Pull My Daisy film, you probably felt a little lost within the first five minutes. It’s chaotic. It’s grainy. It looks like a bunch of guys just got drunk in a loft and decided to point a camera at each other while Jack Kerouac rambled into a microphone in the background. Honestly? That’s exactly what it is. But here is the thing: this twenty-eight-minute short is basically the "Patient Zero" for American independent cinema. Without it, you don't get Cassavetes, you don't get the French New Wave's influence on the U.S., and you certainly don't get the romanticized image of the Beat Generation that we still obsess over today.
It was 1959. The Eisenhower era was suffocatingly polite. Then comes this movie. It wasn't just a film; it was an invitation to stop caring about "the rules."
The Myth of the Unrehearsed Masterpiece
Most people think Pull My Daisy was entirely improvised. That’s the big lie everyone bought for decades. Because the film feels so loose and jagged, the legend grew that Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie just let the cameras roll while the poets did their thing. In reality, it was meticulously planned. Alfred Leslie later admitted that they spent weeks rehearsing. They did multiple takes. They moved furniture. They were trying to look like they weren't trying.
It’s a fascinating contradiction. You have these icons of "spontaneous prose"—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso—acting out a script based on the third act of Kerouac’s unproduced play, Beat Generation. Kerouac wasn't even on set during the filming. He recorded the narration later, reportedly fueled by a fair amount of wine, watching the silent footage and reacting to it. That voiceover is what holds the whole mess together. It’s poetic, weird, and deeply funny.
The Cast of Characters
Look at the screen and you’re seeing the heavy hitters of a movement.
- Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso play themselves (sort of).
- Larry Rivers, the painter, plays Milo, the railway brakeman.
- Delphine Seyrig plays his wife. This was her debut, and she went on to be a massive star in European art-house cinema, most notably in Last Year at Marienbad.
- Alice Neel, the legendary portrait painter, shows up as the Bishop's mother.
The plot? It’s thin. Milo’s wife invites a straight-laced Bishop over for tea, hoping to show off their "refined" friends. Instead, the Beat poets show up and ruin everything by asking the Bishop ridiculous metaphysical questions like, "Is a cockroach holy?" or "Is baseball holy?"
📖 Related: Big Brother 27 Morgan: What Really Happened Behind the Scenes
It’s a collision of worlds. The old, stiff religious order versus the new, dirty, jazz-infused spontaneity of the kids in the loft.
Why the Style of Pull My Daisy Changed Everything
Before this, movies had to be "polished." Even the gritty noirs were carefully lit with high-contrast setups. Pull My Daisy threw all that in the trash. Robert Frank, who had just published his seminal photography book The Americans, brought a photographer’s eye to the motion picture. He didn't care about "good" lighting. He cared about texture. He cared about the way smoke curled in a room and the way a person’s face looked when they were actually laughing, not "acting" laughing.
The camera moves in ways that feel invasive. It’s handheld, shaky, and intimate. This "snapshot aesthetic" became the blueprint for the next fifty years of indie film. When you see a mumblecore movie today or a lo-fi documentary, you’re seeing the DNA of the Pull My Daisy film.
The sound design was equally radical. Since they couldn't afford sync-sound (recording audio and video at the same time), Kerouac’s narration does all the heavy lifting. He voices every character. He describes the inner thoughts of the people on screen. He makes fun of the Bishop. It creates this strange, layered reality where you aren't just watching a story; you’re being told a story about a story. It’s meta before meta was a thing.
The Famous "Holy" Sequence
The heart of the film is the interrogation of the Bishop. It’s hilarious because it’s so awkward. Ginsberg and Corso are leaning in, eyes wide, pestering this poor man who just wants to drink his tea.
👉 See also: The Lil Wayne Tracklist for Tha Carter 3: What Most People Get Wrong
"Is the Bishop holy? Is the bedpost holy? Is the room holy?"
This wasn't just nonsense. It was a direct application of the Beat philosophy—the idea that everything, no matter how mundane or "dirty," contains a spark of the divine. They were trying to break down the walls between the sacred and the profane. In 1959, this was borderline sacrilegious. Today, it feels like a quintessential hipster hangout, but back then, it was a genuine cultural middle finger.
The Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie Partnership
We have to talk about the directors. Robert Frank was the moody, quiet genius of photography. Alfred Leslie was a bold, abstract expressionist painter. They weren't "filmmakers" in the Hollywood sense. They were artists experimenting with a new medium.
Their collaboration was brief and eventually soured. Leslie spent a lot of time in later years trying to correct the record, making sure people knew how much work went into the "spontaneity." He even released a book that broke down the frames of the film to show the deliberate composition. He didn't want it to be remembered as a "home movie." He wanted it to be seen as a piece of formal art.
Frank, on the other hand, seemed more comfortable with the ambiguity. He moved further into filmmaking after this, but Pull My Daisy remains his most accessible (if you can call it that) work. It captured a moment in time that was already disappearing by the time the film was released. By 1960, the "Beatnik" was already becoming a caricature on TV shows like The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. This film caught the real thing before the costume shops started selling berets and bongo drums.
✨ Don't miss: Songs by Tyler Childers: What Most People Get Wrong
How to Watch It Today
If you find a copy of the Pull My Daisy film now—usually on YouTube or through a boutique distributor like Gherman—don't expect a linear narrative. Don't look for a "point."
Instead, look at it as a time capsule.
- Watch the background. Look at the clutter in the loft. That’s real 1950s New York City grit.
- Listen to the rhythm. Kerouac’s voice isn't just delivering lines; it’s playing jazz. He hits certain vowels and pauses in a way that mimics a saxophone solo.
- Ignore the "acting." Focus on the faces. These people were friends. They were part of a movement that changed literature and art forever.
The film is short—under half an hour—but it feels dense. It’s like a heavy meal. You might need to watch it twice to catch the jokes Kerouac is burying under his breath.
The Lasting Legacy
Why does a weird short film from the fifties still get talked about in film schools? Because it proved that you didn't need a studio to tell a story. You didn't even need a script, technically (even though they had one). You just needed a vision and some talented friends.
It paved the way for the New American Cinema Group. It gave permission to filmmakers like Jonas Mekas and Stan Brakhage to get even weirder. It’s the bridge between the high-art aspirations of the European avant-garde and the raw, dirty energy of American street culture.
Practical Steps for Film Enthusiasts
If this brand of "anti-filmmaking" interests you, don't stop at Pull My Daisy. To really understand where this comes from and where it went, you should look into these specific areas:
- Check out Robert Frank’s photography. Specifically The Americans. It provides the visual context for the film’s grittiness.
- Read the original play. Look for Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation. It helps to see what he kept and what he threw away for the movie.
- Explore "Shadows" by John Cassavetes. Released around the same time, it’s the other pillar of early American indie film. It’s longer and more "movie-like," but it shares that same improvisational DNA.
- Look for the "Pull My Daisy" poem. The title comes from a poem co-written by Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Neal Cassady. It’s a "cadavre exquis" (exquisite corpse) poem where each person wrote a line without seeing the one before. That same spirit of "let's see what happens" defines the film.
The Pull My Daisy film isn't for everyone. It’s messy, it’s loud, and it’s occasionally annoying. But it is undeniably alive. In a world of over-polished, AI-generated, and focus-grouped content, there is something deeply refreshing about watching a bunch of poets get drunk and argue about whether a cockroach is holy. It reminds us that art doesn't have to be perfect to be important. Sometimes, it just has to be real.