The Cobalt Club Screening Room

This week, we're gonna go in an entirely different direction. This is total escapism in a time when we're effectively locked up. I've been posting these on that EVIL social media site for friends and relatives. I describe them as a way to hopefully stave off the effects of Cabin Fever. All in 4k or better, so that if you can and want to, you can throw them onto a big screen and just drift away to another place.  First up, grab your virtual snorkeling gear:

Two Hours of Coral Reefs and Tropical Fish

Next, we'll stay in a tropical paradise but not get our feet wet. 85 minutes of flying around some amazing scenery.

Flying Over Kauai, Hawaii.

Next we're headed to the Mediterranean for some of the most amazing scenery in the world.

Three Hours of Santorini, Corfu and Athens, Greece.

Oh, I do tend to get distracted, don't I? But join me now, on another series of adventures. A mixed bag today, starting with:

Baby Face Nelson (1957)

Starring: Mickey Rooney and Carolyn Jones.

Five Weeks in a Balloon  (1962)

Starring: Red Buttons, Fabian and Barbara Eden.

Pinky (1949)

Starring Jeanne Crain and Ethel Barrymoore.

Caught In the Draft (1941)

Starring Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour and Lynne Overman.

And another of my Cabin Fever escape attempts. This one an incredible eight hours of the scenery of Iceland.

Post #386: If you go looking for Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliott swaggering into a seedy plywood club and bar serving up hard liquor and split knuckles, you won't find them in Richard Widmark's more refined little slice of Elk- and Moosehead Heaven south of the Canadian border known as Jefty's, giving the title to today's feature, *Road House* (1948). Because this *Road House* boasts a piano bar, bowling alley, and a mountain lodge ambiance, not to mention a charmingly creepy, grinning owner. Carrying on his father's tradition, Jefferson T. "Jefty" Robbins holds sway over his enterprise while daily management falls on the hefty shoulders of his long-suffering best friend, Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde) who has to contend with Jefty's long line of female "talent" he brings back from trips to Chicago. His most recent torch singing infatuation is Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino), a hard line chanteuse with a voice dredged up from the bottom of a bottle of bourbon and an unflinching glare that would make *Frozen*'s Elsa shed perspiratory ice cubes in sheets.

Pete's driven down this bumpy road before, cleaning up after Jefty and sending his sirens packing after he grows tired of them, and this one's probably no different, even though Jefty makes a point of telling him Lily's "different" from the rest--she's a smoky sparkplug and much more than what Pete calls "the new equipment." Hoping to save himself some time and trouble, Pete immediately takes Lily back to the train station rather than the town hotel, pitching her an extra two hundred for her time and a nice little pat on the head to send her on her way. She reciprocates with a blistering open handed slap across his face and a mandate that she's staying to collect her salary for the duration. It's love at first fight, even though it smolders for a time before finally igniting.

Director Jean Negulesco deals the noir game from the bottom, simultaneously adhering to and dispensing with the genre's hallmarks: *Road House* is dense with coiling cigarette smoke and shadows (today such a cinematic reliance on everybody smoking would surely be excised, thanks to the Surgeon General), dark passions, obsession, paranoia, sociopathic narcissism and secrets; at the same time, Lupino's Lily is far from the glamorous femme fatale, though she is the apex of a love triangle, there are no slick city landscapes teeming with alleyways, and not a lot of glistening rain is soaking the asphalt. But it's Lupino's demeanor and voice that embrace and reject the female lead mold--she entrances her audiences with her singing (not dubbed, she's actually singing and accompanying herself on piano), causing co-worker Susie Smith (Celeste Holm, fresh from her Oscar win) to remark in awe, "She does more without a voice than anybody I've ever heard!" She wins over Pete and has Jefty salivating over her like a Pavlovian pinscher, even as she dismisses him with a condescending pat on the hand.

Clearly Jefty envisions a future with Lily, so giddily attracted to her that he plies her with clumsy attempts at wooing, taking her breakfast in bed, hovering around her like a halo of tobacco, and even demanding Pete to give her lessons in bowling, which becomes a less than subtle sexual metaphor as Pete works out his frustrations by--"woo, throwing rocks tonight, Dude," at those curvy little pins in repressed desire. . . because she's Jefty's girl, why can't he find a woman like that?

The sexual tension mounts when Jefty leaves town for a week-long hunting trip, to give him time to decide if he will really make the leap into matrimony, leaving Pete and Lily to admit to themselves what is painfully obvious to all but Jefty--they are seething cauldrons of desire for one another. But when Jefty returns starry-eyed with a marriage license--remember, this is Richard Widmark, for God's sake--we're in for a twist on the adage "Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned." Confronted with the ugly truth that he's being cuckolded, even though he lays absolutely no claim to Lily outside of his own mind, Jefty snaps into full-scale revenge mode, allowing him to channel his inner Tommy Udo (from *Kiss Of Death*, 1947) and maneuver the couple into serving him in private ownership.

It's probably me, but on repeat viewings, *Road House* seems to plant visual clues calling up the horny old cuckold imagery so prevalent in Middle English fabliau tales. Watch carefully in Jefty's first scene in the office: It's the first meeting between Lily and Pete, and Jefty stands between them (Why don't you just meet me in the middle?), poised carefully in front of an elk head mounted on the wall. Darned if he doesn't seem to be wearing elkhorns, the universal symbol of the cheated-upon. And to further the analogy, what's the name of the hotel where Lily is housed? The Antlers Hotel. I picked up on that the first time I watched the film, and it just keeps getting more noticeable each time I revisit it. Jefty feels he *owns* LIly, and her "cheating" on him with his best friend calls for retribution which fuels the final third of the film.

For Jefty women are all about possession. They are commodities, properties to be bought and consumed, as he says to Pete early on, "Yeah, she's independent. But all gals want the same thing, Pete - a guy to take care of 'em. I can take care of Lily." And Lily, conversely and initially, needs neither Jefty nor Pete, just a job that pays. She says, "Doesn't it enter a man's head that a girl can do without him?" which will become the war chant of feminists in the years to come. Thus she breaks the mold enforced by years of male subjugation and perhaps unknowingly perpetuated or bought into by Susie who appears to be waiting at the Fotomat for her prints to come, in the image of Jefty or Pete.

So the contradictions of traditional noir and our particulars were not completely popular at the time Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck was peddling the film: "This is a bad script," he told director Jean Negulesco. "Three directors have refused it. They don’t know what they’re doing, because basically it’s quite good. Remember those pictures we used to make at Warner Brothers, with Pat O’Brien and Jimmy Cagney, in which every time the action flagged we staged a fight and every time a man passed a girl she’d adjust her stocking or something, trying to be sexy? That’s the kind of picture we have to have with Road House. Now take it and do it like that."

What we have here, then, is not just a failure to communicate because the characters at times remain mysteries even to themselves, but a classic, moody melodrama that ratchets up the tension with each passing minute. Widmark's Jefty commands every scene with his unpredictable, mercurial personality, a volatile chameleon clacking rocks together to initiate a spark in a dynamite shed, damn the consequences. Ida Lupino is diamond hard, compelling in a slinky, dangerous indifference that flouts the conventional Gilda sensuality in favor of her own magnetism. Cornel Wilde is broad stoicism, a brick shouldered uncarved block whose motivations are on display on only through the audience's searching--he is not one to telegraph his feelings at all, which lies in direct contrast to Jefty's incredible meltdown. And God bless Celeste Holm for being the only "normal" person at the Road House, constantly deflecting her ultimate disappointments with life with clever asides and freshness.

Yes, you'll find one good brawl in Jefty's Road House when a burly patron takes too much of a shine to Lily's sophisticated song stylings of "One More For The Road" and "Again," which was introduced by this film, and ends up making a shambles of the place. But this is nowhere near the mindless face-smashing, gun toting, bloody pulp producing glamorized by Swayze and Elliott forty-one years down the road, because this is a House erected when character, mood, sharp dialogue and style were important. It's 95 tense minutes of noir with sharply shadowed cinematography by the great Joseph LaShelle extolling the power of a *promise* of violence rather than a tiresome production of pummeling. And as an added enticement, you won't find a single mullet in the whole film. Now THAT alone is worth celebrating.
Enjoy.
Jeff

I'm in a weird mood. OK, weirder than usual. So, let's get this thread cranked up again and see what weirdness ensues. Starting with:

Werewolf in a Girls' Dormitory (1961)

Starring: Barbara Lass and Carl Schell.

This one's for you Jeff. Just to prove that Ya can't out-cheese the cheesemeister.

The opening monologue in this one seems oddly familiar. And no, this is no Fantastic Four CG fest.

Teenagers Battle The Thing (1958)

Starring: Bob Clymire and Jan Swihart.

And last, but how could there possibly be least?

Teenage Caveman (1958)

Starring: Robert Vaughn (Though he denied it) and Darah Marshall.

Oh, Great Gouda Master, I bow to superior intelligent cheesiness. (Boy, is my work carved out for me)
Jeff

ghemrats wrote:(Boy, is my work carved out for me)

Everyone knows you don't "Carve" the cheese. You Cut the cheese. (Insert rim shot sound effect here)

Bob Vaughn denies it lol its on film. Did he deny Chud II and Battle Beyond the Stars. He was in some real stinkers so a younger indiscretion set him up for later aged cheddar....

Seamus wrote:Bob Vaughn denies it lol its on film. Did he deny Chud II and Battle Beyond the Stars. He was in some real stinkers so a younger indiscretion set him up for later aged cheddar....

Boss, I love Battle Beyond the Stars (Aka. John Boy In Space) for the same reason I love so many other stinkers. It's just good silly fun. And in my humble opinion, Robert Vaughn's acting peaked in The Greatest American Hero. A series which I'd love to see get a somewhat more serious remake.

Yes I am also a fan of BBTS but I think an actor should embrace the cheesed hood of it all. B movies and C movies for Cheese are always a great way to spend an afternoon. Passed this on to my daughter who just loves the cheese and has her friends hooked to these movies and TV shows. Nothing better than the fromage the stinkier the better....

Space Cadet wrote:

Seamus wrote:Bob Vaughn denies it lol its on film. Did he deny Chud II and Battle Beyond the Stars. He was in some real stinkers so a younger indiscretion set him up for later aged cheddar....

Boss, I love Battle Beyond the Stars (Aka. John Boy In Space) for the same reason I love so many other stinkers. It's just good silly fun. And in my humble opinion, Robert Vaughn's acting peaked in The Greatest American Hero. A series which I'd love to see get a somewhat more serious remake.

I just looked back at my post. I can't believe I transposed Robert Vaughn and Robert Culp. But then again, they both pretty much made careers of playing the same type characters.

Bob Culp and Bob Vaughn are the same person I never saw them together. They both played spies thats enough for me. They also starred in Airwolf as Archangel.

Today, I'm gonna give you folk's a minor hobby. An entire Youtube channel, that just screams "Explore ME". This is the PizzaFlix Channel. I'm not even gonna describe it. Just trust me on this one.

And Jeff, the real gold is in the stuff you've probably never heard of before. But there's lots of classic stuff you'll recognize as well.

https://www.youtube.com/c/PizzaFlix/videos

OK, I decided to come back and edit this just a bit. If the front page for this channel seems disjointed, click the playlists tab at the top. And Jeff, there's a playlist with 81 noir films in it. But that's just the tip of the iceberg on this channel. There's also lots of pre-code and more and more.

Space

Oh, it's Christmas! It's Christmas!
Thanks, Dennis. I'm psyched (or psycho).
Jeff

You're welcome. And here's an extra special bonus, which happens to be another personal favorite of mine. Anyone who mentions the Ben Stiller remake of this movie from 2013, gets various rude noises and obscene gestures flung in their general direction.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947)

Starring Danny Kaye, Virginia Mayo and Boris Karloff.

I just watched the yesterday machine. Such a large block of cheese I was almost crushed under the weight of its curd. Dear me that was an awful movie. They had me at Nazi time machine it just wasn't bad enough to be good.

This is just a teaser. But I'll try to get back into a regular cycle here at The Screening Room. As I mentioned over in The Balcony, I'm a huge Edward G. Robinson fan. But I really enjoy his non gangster roles. Here's a great example in excellent Youtube quality.

Mr. Winkle Goes to War (1944)

Starring Edward G. Robinson, Ruth Warrick and Ted Donaldson.

Wilbert Winkle, a henpecked, mild-mannered, middle-aged bank clerk and handyman finds himself in the midst of battle in the South Pacific.

As long as I'm here, how about...

Good Sam (1948)

Starring: Gary Cooper and Ann Sheridan.

Sam Clayton has a good heart and likes to help out people in need. In fact, he likes to help them out so much that he often finds himself broke and unable to help his own family buy the things they need--like a house.