Dry Ice Factory

After being bowled over by The Man I Love (1947), I went looking for more Ida Lupino in the noir mode. By luck, more than anything, I picked up what is apparently the only other film in which she is the central character. In fact, it would appear that Road House was a project largely driven by Lupino, who picked the script, which was then rewritten to give her a bigger role.

It's another odd movie if you come to it looking for a classic noir. It's more of a melodrama, but a noir melodrama, somewhat reminiscent of other noir melodramas such as The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and Desert Fury (1947). Lupino plays a big city torch singer who is hired by a rural road house run by a spoiled rich kid (Richard Widmark) and his loyal best pal (Cornel Wilde). As Kim Morgan points out in the DVD commentary, one of the interesting things about the film is that Lupino plays the cool, hard-bitten, worldly character normally played by guys like Bogart or Mitchum. Initially -- coming at it from a classic noir angle -- I assumed she was going to be the femme fatale who leads one of the two men to his doom, and that's apparently how it was originally written. But instead she plays an experienced woman who knows what she wants and goes after it. The two guys are a bit clueless and passive in comparison.

The story lurches in a strange direction in the third act, in which the jealous Widmark reprises his infamous deranged character from Kiss of Death (1947). This part of the movie feels very hysterical and artificial, which is actually something I loved about it. The best noirs have a dreamlike or nightmarish quality. It helps if they are studio bound, because it heightens the artificiality and the sense that it's some kind of weird fantasy. The action in Road House explodes out into a lakeside cabin in an an artificial forest, with a sweaty, bruised Widmark chasing through the shadows like a drunken demon. Ida has a gun, but this time the femme fatale is on the side of the angels.

The other odd thing about this movie is the character of Susie, played by Celeste Holm. Initially Susie reacts with disapproval to the big-city girl moving in on her territory, and because she has all the hallmarks of the Good Blonde (contrasting with Lupino's dark, aggressive sexiness), her character seems to be another signal that Lupino is the dangerous femme fatale. However, over the course of the movie the two women slowly become allies. This is very unusual in film noir. Kim Morgan says that the director, Jean Negulesco, is one of her favorite directors of women's movies. Amongst other things he directed Joan Crawford's Humoresque (1946). It could be that he just had a feel for women and their relationships with each other. It's a subtle touch in Road House that lends it a surprising power.

Next up in the Lupino queue is Raoul Walsh's They Drive By Night (1940). Lupino also directed a few movies (one of the few women -- if not the only one -- to direct in Hollywood in the '50s), and I'd like to check out some of those as well.

The milieus of the film, the dingy apartment Petey shares with her family and the beach bar where she meets San contrasting with the flashy nightclub and its patrons, represent the dual impulses of the main character. For Lupino as Petey is the true protagonist of the film and what disturbs her, more than the antipathy between these two environments through which she moves or her tenuous relationship with the impenetrable San, is the sense of imprecise but tangible malaise which those around her both experience and engender. ... The songs which she sings in The Man I Love capture her emotional vacillation from the idealism of the title song and "My Bill" to the hopelessness of "Why Was I Born?"

-- Film Noir, An Encylopedic Reference to the American Style, 3rd Ed.

Wow. This is a very unusual picture. Is that why it's so obscure? Directed by Raoul Walsh, who got his start in the early days of Hollywood (circa 1913) and kept working into the '60s. By 1947 (or 1945, when The Man I Love was actually filmed) he was such a master of Hollywood genre film-making that he could move effortlessly between genres within a single film, as he does here. Crime film, musical, noir, romantic melodrama -- it should be a confusing mishmash, but instead feels incredibly sophisticated. Part of that is down to Ida Lupino in the lead role. She is just magnificent as the sexy, smart, tough, and tender torchsinger, Petey, on the rebound from a failed relationship, playing temporary matriarch for her troubled sisters and brother, making her way through a dark and disillusioned post-war America, fixing the problems she can but still running aground on hidden shoals of the heart.

Even as as a musical, this is quite different from other Hollywood musicals of the era. The songs, by George Gershwin, comment on the feelings of the characters, but it's all within the context of performing musicians. The film captures the feeling of late night jazz jams like nothing else I've seen. You feel like you're hanging out in a bar with a band that's really feeling it. All shot in film noir style, with sharp shadows and lazy lattices of cigarette smoke.

Walsh once again (as in his great Western noir, Pursued) gives a ninety-minute movie a novelistic density. There doesn't seem to be a wasted move, and the storyline is always evolving, even if its less about plot than about character, feeling, and atmosphere. Early on the slimy nightclub owner, Nick, makes a move on Petey's married sister, Sally, who blows him off. He threatens her, reminding her that her brother works for him. A few scenes later, the worthless wannabe-gangster brother brings her a Christmas present, a beautiful gown. It turns out to be a gift from Nick, and she rejects it. Next scene, Petey shows up at Nick's nightclub dressed in the gown. She's going to get him off her sister's back. She auditions for him with a song. He's glued to her thereafter, but she's quite capable of fending him off, still looking for a man she can love, somebody worthy of her.

There are a lot of subtle visual touches. At the beach club, the owner comes up to say hi to Nick and to be introduced to Petey, whose reputation as a singer has spread around town. She pointedly does not offer her hand to him. He puts his own hand on her shoulder, and she gives it a little look of contempt. She doesn't make a scene, but she lets everyone know where they stand with her.

I suppose this is the kind of movie that will never be widely popular. The cast is too obscure (no Bogart, no Bette Davis), the director is too obscure, the genre too mixed, too contradictory, not quite fatal enough for true film noir, yet too downbeat for a musical. Perhaps it's a film for aficionados. Martin Scorsese loves it, and it's one of the "musical noirs" (along with My Dream Is Yours) that he styled his New York, New York after. It really is something. And I haven't even mentioned the bitch-slapping that Lupino gives one of the men who loses his cool over a no-good woman!

By the way, I got this as a download from the Warners Archive. It's ten dollars cheaper than buying one of the archive movies as a DVD-R (once you take shipping into account), yet there are definite disadvantages. It has DRM that supposedly keeps it from being played on any other device than my computer. There are no chapter stops, so you pretty much have to watch the whole movie at one sitting or start over from the beginning. I can't watch it with my normal movie software, so I can't take screen caps. Still, the ten dollars cheaper is significant. I may get more movies this way, perhaps more Raoul Walsh. (I've previously ordered two Jacques Tourneur movies as DVD-Rs.)