ROAD HOUSE
THIS MONTH’S NOMINATION for Cult status is Road House. Not the Patrick Swayze-rowdy Herrington ’80s barroom brawl classic — the original Road House (1948), directed by Jean Negulesco, starring Ida Lupino, Cornel Wilde and Richard Widmark. The lasting, if littlenoticed influence of Negulesco’s movie is as one of the key inspirations for the road house in Twin Peaks, which shares its handy location near gloriously strange woods abutting the Canadian border and is also an unlikely showcase for monotone torch singer/keyboard acts playing to audiences of drunken, plaid-shirted hairies.
Technically, Road House is a film noir — with a super-tough dame at the apex of a romantic triangle that leads to torment and violence — but its wilderness setting, small cast and fable-like plot are worlds away from the mean streets of traditional hard-boiled capers. Here’s the set-up for tragedy: flashy, childish, outgoing Jefty (Widmark) owns the road house (a combination of lumberjack bar, hunting lodge, cabaret and bowling alley) but his sober, solid, suspicious pal Pete (Wilde) manages the place. Jefty is in the habit of ‘discovering talent’, and imports Lily (Lupino) from Chicago, more interested in a quick shack-up than her skills as an entertainer. Lily turns out to be astonishing, with the sorely underrated Lupino (like co-star Wilde, among the first actors to go into directing) doing her own minimal-range singing as her cigarette burns a groove in the piano lid. She breathes through ‘One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)’ in a manner that would still seem New Wave (the clip’s on Youtube — check it out), prompting envious good girl Susie (Celeste Holm) to gasp, “She does more without a voice than anybody I’ve ever heard.”
After hard-bitten, sandpapery flirtation, Lily and Pete are drawn together — and Jefty takes it hard. Widmark had just broken through to stardom as a cackling killer in Kiss Of Death and reprises his act here, entrapping Pete by framing him for theft and getting him paroled into his custody for the purposes of torture. Like so many noir villains, the broad performance holds up because the character type is eternal — Jefty’s mix of gaslighting, sexual assault, bullying, selfhatred, closeted desire (he has a littlenoticed best pal called Lefty) and rich guy cruelty was in 1948 a portrait of a typical Hollywood big shot and is even more apposite in the age of Weinstein and Trump. The finale, set in misty studio forests, has one of the great acts of climactic violence in the cinema — with bloody-faced, demented Widmark alternately daring and begging a pissedoff Lupino to shoot him in the gut.
ROAD HOUSE IS OUT NOW ON DVD AND BLU-RAY