Road House

source: Road House

Moviecut—Road House

Unlike many of the other film-noir films; the setting is a "sinister" bowling alley, which is more and more suspenseful, as you don't know what Richard Widmark will do next. Ida Lupino, Celeste Holm and Cornel Wilde are the perfect foils, setting off Widmark in this film; the settings alone are original; the acting superb, and I wish they still made them like this!!!!. You will enjoy the mystery, the cast of characters, and the final outcome of this movie. You definitely will not be able to predict what happens. Rent it as soon as you can for a dark, rainy night!.

Lupino gives a premier league performance. Take her rendition of "One for My Baby, One More For The Road": it's an object lesson in how a conventionally beautiful voice is NOT required in order to triumph as a singer. Although she croaks the number rather than sings it, she acts it as if the character has felt every ounce of suffering in the lyric - and then some.

Ida Lupino drifts into town on Widmarks dime, see? Gonna be a songbird at his bowling alley/cabaret. Only it's like this. She's the wrong kind of dame - she's trouble with a capital "ouble." Sings like a canary that chews glass and has a 4 pack a day habit. She disrupts everything that was good about Palookaville. Soon lumberjacks are destroying perfectly good liquor bottles to fight for the right to ruffle her feathers. Widd's got designs on her too, but she falling heavy for Cornell Wilde, a rugged hunk of beef who really knows how to work a dame's 7-10 split. Meanwhile, Celeste Holm can't scare up the interest of anything with a Y chromosome. What happens? Well it's noir so whatever it is, the dames won't be marching off in white, and someone's gonna wish they'd kept their nose to themselves.

When the Chicago singer Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino) arrives at the Jefty Road House hired by the owner Jefferson T. 'Jefty' Robbins (Richard Widmark), the manager Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde) gives a cold reception to her. Jefty asks Pete, who is his best friend, to drive Lily to the local hotel. However Pete drives her to the train station instead and asks Lily to go back to Chicago. She refuses to go and her performance is successful in her debut. Soon Pete changes his opinion towards Lily and the accountant and cashier Susie Smith (Celeste Holm) informs that the public has increased not only in the roadhouse, but also in the bowling alley. Jefty feels attraction for Lily, but when he travels, Lily and Pete fall in love with each other. When Jefty returns, he brings a marriage license and proposes Lily; however she dumps him and Pete and she decide to travel to Chicago and leave the town. However Jefty frames Pete and reports a hake theft to the police. Pete is arrested and found guilty by the jury. However Jefty proposes to the judge that Pete continues to work for him instead of going to the prison. What is the intention of Jefty? "Road House" is an engaging film–noir with a storyline of unrequited love and obsession. Ida Lupino has an impressive performance, singing with a wonderful husky voice. The first performance of the famous song "Again" is the soundtrack of "Road Movie" sang by Ida Lupino. This film is also the third appearance of the outstanding Richard Widmark and his insane smile on the cinema. Cornel Wilde and Celeste Holm complete the dream cast of this unknown gem. My vote is eight. Title (Brazil): "A Taverna do Caminho" ("The Tavern on the Way")

Currently I'm taking a Film Noir class in college and I must say this is one fine piece of work. Ida Lupino is so overwhelming there are no words to express it but Richard Widmark is surely the finest actor in Noir! He was soooooooo creepy - a real human monster. The fight scene in the bar was hysterically funny though. It looked like it had been lifted out of a Western. Cornel Wilde was also sensational and I wish I'd seen this before meeting him years ago.

What a tremendously under-rated film classic. The wonderful Ida Lupino was as sultry and sensual as one could get, especially in the 1940s. How about the scene at the lake when she improvised and made her own bathing suit. I would have liked to see her in a bikini. She turned a routine role as a hard luck woman singer into a great performance. Richard Widmark is one of my all-time favorite actors. Why he has never received a Career Achievement Award from the Academy is mind boggling. No actor in film history has given so many memorable performances portraying sociopaths and psychopaths. I will skip the fine plot as so many others have explained it but will say that this is a great film noir that holds up exceptionally well even 60 years later. Cornel Wilde and Celeste Holm were also outstanding in less flamboyant roles. Holm was superb as the good hearted woman who was in love with Wilde who thought of her only as a good friend. Wilde gave a fine naturalistic performance as the stable and hard working good guy whom Widmark turned against out of jealousy and eventually hatred. The direction, screenplay and cinematography were also top notch, and "Again" is a classic song that has endured the march of time and is still played on jazz and oldie stations regularly. Come on Acadamy! Give the great Widmark a Career Achievement Award.

The main attraction here are the amazing performances by Ida Lupino, and Richard Widmark. Jean Negulesco was able to capture it all in this tale of passion gone wrong. Lily Stevens arrives at Jefty's Road House to entertain in the lounge area. Jefty, has offered her 250 a week, a sum that in Pete Morgan's estimation is a lot more than the place can afford. Pete offers money to send Lily back to Chicago because he senses she will bring chaos between him and Jefty, the man who has been generous to him and who, he feels, will fall again for this chanteuse of mysterious origins. Thus begins one of the best films of that era. It's a noir because of the elements, but actually it might be considered a semi-noir since it's not an obvious one. Ida Lupino had a way for 'talking' her songs at the Road House. She had a style that got to the lounge patrons that heard her sing. Her interpretation of "It's a quarter to three" is done faultlessly. Her voice, a combination of alcohol and the cigarettes she positions at the piano's lid while singing, contribute to create a portrait of the sultry woman she is. She sings "Again" twice; her rendition of that song makes it impossible for anyone else to sing it without comparing it to what Ms. Lupino did with it, much better! Richard Widmark was the favorite looney in the 40s. His acting was always an exercise on intensity. He always played the weird roles on the screen. In "Road House" he appears almost normal until he realizes that Lily will never love him. He has to get his revenge on Pete who has stolen Lily's affection away from him. Jefty will stop at nothing in order to get her back. Thus he accuses Pete Morgan, his loyal friend, of stealing the week's receipts. Cornel Wilde plays a passive role as Pete. He too falls for the charms of Lily, but at the same time, Lily wants him because she sees in him her own salvation from joints and a ticket to a normal life. Celeste Holm is the other principal. Her role is not as well defined. She should be resentful of Lily, but she is a kind soul who accepts the fact that Pete never loved her. Ultimately, she is the one who solves the puzzle of the missing money. "Road House" should be seen more often.

'...and then by bus to a throaty restless obsessed temptress 'thrush' slouched in mortal danger atop a white piano, singing the blues and chain-smoking, somewhere in the long, dark, wet and winding night between Chicago and 'the coast.' – James McCourt, "Mawrdew Czgowchwz" Jean Negulesco's Road House must have inspired that sentence (or rather fragment). With her voice shredded by Scotch and Luckies, Ida Lupino is the thrush, the canary, whose smoldering cigarettes leave a bar-code of burns scarring the smart paint of her white piano. She's been brought up from Chicago by Richard Widmark to lure paying customers into the cocktail lounge of his establishment – Jefty's Road House – up in the piney woods a few miles from the Canadian border. (On one side, it's a bowling alley – that kind of joint; the only game in town). In the past, Widmark has been known to engage no-talents who strike his romantic fancy. So when Lupino arrives, Widmark's boyhood pal and now Man Friday Cornel Wilde, cruel to be kind, tries to send her packing. He fails ('Silly boy,' she scolds him after slapping his face). But Wilde was wrong; Lupino brings down the house at her debut, with a gravelly, sprechstimme rendition of the Mercer/Arlen 'It's A Quarter To Three.' ('She does more without a voice than anybody I've ever heard,' marvels Celeste Holm, another worker toiling under Widmark's thumb.) Maybe it would have been better had she packed. Widmark assumes that Lupino's as mad about him as he about her and runs off to get a marriage license. But after starting off on the wrong foot, Wilde and Lupino find a grudging romance kindling between them, to Holm's chagrin – she assumed she was Wilde's girl. (The whole plot's based on unfounded assumptions.) When Widmark stumbles upon the truth, he frames Wilde for stealing the week's take. And that's only the start of Widmark's delusional plot to redress the wrong he thinks been done him, to an extent that Lupino turns on him: 'And you know what else? Your mind's gone. You're crazy, Jefty. Crazy!' Since, in film noir, that's about the worse thing you can say to someone with a mad little glint in his eye (and demented giggles to match it), Widmark goes totally unhitched.... Like the following year's Beyond The Forest, Road House is an overheated melodrama set in the cool climate of hunting lodges and icy lakes where loons (not only the avian kind) call through the dusk. It's a pastoral backwater where routine passions build up to explosive force, without the many vents cities offer for release. (We see it in a drunken bear of a backwoodsman who comes violently onto Lupino, thinking her torch songs were sung not for a paycheck but expressly for him.) Negulesco was working at the top of his game in Road House, as was Widmark (though we had seen his gleeful psycho before). With his constitutionally dour manner (maybe it's just his face), Wilde was not one to set celluloid aflame, but the part of victim fits him; Holm, alas, has to grapple with a thankless, ill-thought-out character (it's an Eve-Ardenish part that needs another splash of vinegar). But Lupino gets one of her best roles, and runs with it. Scion of a British theatrical family whose roots go back to Renaissance Italy, she never received the star treatment or the prestige productions her talents deserved (she did, however, help to shatter the directorial glass ceiling). As Lily Stevens, world-weary chanteuse of a certain age, she stays the headliner in a dark, accomplished and entertaining movie. It's a late-show treasure that makes a television an appliance worth having.