Ida Lupino: Dressed to Bowl

My essay on Road House (the 1948 film with Ida Lupino, not the Patrick Swayze bar-bouncer classic) in up on the Turner Classic Movies website.

A minor classic of forties film noir with major pleasures, Road House (1948) is an unusual, and unusually fascinating, variation on the genre. Instead of the usual urban jungle, this road house is decidedly rural, a bar and bowling alley in the thick forest outside of a small town near the Canadian border. Ida Lupino is Lily, the big city chanteuse who sashays into the joint, all scuffed cynicism and brassy attitude. She’s the new “discovery” of the hopelessly smitten owner Jefty (Richard Widmark), who has discarded a string of similar sexy discoveries over the years. Cornel Wilde, at his most brawny beefcake and stolid, is the tree trunk of a manager Pete, who instantly clashes with this sassy dame. The antagonism is instant, the attraction a matter of time and the showdown with the explosively jealous and possessive Jefty inevitable, but the method of his madness (and it does indeed turn into full blown madness) is genuinely pathological. Even in the realm of film noir, a genre rife with unstable personalities and violent reactions to emotional betrayals, Jefty’s obsessively plotted vengeance is unusual to say the least.

Road House may sound tawdry, with a title that evokes a rowdy juke joint (the design suggests a rural nightclub bar with an aggressively rustic design), a romantic triangle that turns pathological and a performance from Widmark that evolves from immature hothead to dangerously erratic sadist. But for all its urban toughness in a back country town setting, it’s a handsomely made film with adult banter and a tough cookie with a tender center in British-born but thoroughly Americanized and streetwise Ida Lupino.

Read the complete feature here. The film is also on DVD, featuring commentary by film noir expert Eddie Muller and my friend and fellow MSN contributor Kim Morgan.

I don’t know that it’s really the DVD of the week, but I am very pleased that Honey West: The Complete Series has finally arrived on DVD. Anne Francis created TV’s sexist private eye as Honey West, the society babe who inherited her dad’s business and partner, Sam (John Ericson), a protective buddy and a flirtatious colleague. The show plays off her obvious assets (Francis was as curvy as they come) but also makes her a judo expert and a smart cookie. She’s the brains behind this outfit and Sam has no problem playing sidekick to the headstrong Honey. The half-hour P-I adventure show plays out in the high society glamour of the California sun, and the cool fashions and the swinging score create a groovy little series. Did I mention she has a pet ocelot?

The release is featured in the TV section of my MSN DVD column.

Also new this week are three new releases in the “Fox Film Noir” collection. My favorite of the three is Road House, a rural noir set in a rustic tavern with aspirations to class located near the Canadian border. What makes the film is the terrific cast: Ida Lupino as a throaty torch singer, Cornel Wilde as the manager and Richard Widmark as the unstable owner who hires Lupino and plans to marry her, little realizing she’s falling for his best friend, Wilde. Widmark gives one of his classic near portraits of a slide into revenge-fueled psychosis. My friend and colleague Kim Morgan teams up with Eddie Muller on the commentary for the disc. Also released this week are the moody but slack Moontide, Jean Gabin’s American film debut, and Elia Kazan’s realist noir Boomerang with Dana Andrews:

Elia Kazan’s true life drama of a murder in a small town belongs to the realist wave of American crime movies that newsreel producer Louis de Rochemont brought to Hollywood at the end of World War II. … This is not Kazan’s most gripping film and you can feel his straining to get out of the brightly-lit courtroom drama and back to the dramatic confrontations in backrooms and private dens and shadowy night-time streets, where the dirty business of politics favors power and money over justice. That’s where Kazan – and the film – works best.

Read the complete review here.

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