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Edited on Sat Mar-25-06 11:23 PM by BigMcLargehuge
Warning - explicit language below.
Road House: The Citizen Kane of American Film
Patrick Swayze broke into the big time with his Golden Globe nominated performance in the family friendly smash Dirty Dancing. A film that aside from being my late grandmother's all-time favorite movie, won an Oscar for best original song, introduced Jennifer Grey to the world as more than that asshole Ferris Beuller's sister, and gave us our first real glimpse of Jerry Orbach playing against type. It is also a film I have never managed to sit through for longer than the opening credits. Contrapositively, I have watched all of Road House, including the credits, over 1000 times. In fact, I watch Road House whenever I bump into it at any time and any place, on cable TV.
Hot on the heels of Dirty Dancing came Steel Dawn, which if I remember correctly, was a futuristic sword and sorcery movie also starring Brion James. Steel Dawn went directly to cable/VHS.
Steel Dawn was also shot in 1987, but it languished on the shelves until Dirty Dancing made Swayze a star.
So there was no surprise that upon the big release of Road House there would be some controversy. The uproar sprung from the slick ad campaign that simply showed a nicely smiling full-size Patrick Swayze dressed in happy preppy upwardly mobile clothes in front of a sign for the film. See, all those nice middle aged folks and early teens swept off their feet by the pure and unadulterated romance of Dirty Dancing (starring that nice young man, Patrick Swayze) stormed the theaters on Road House's opening weekend where in the first ten minutes were treated to butt fucking, redneck whiskey-bottle dentistry, and the first of a seemingly endless series of mammoth bar brawls that probably would have brought the National Guard had they occurred in the real world.
At its heart, Road House is a classic western, but condenses all of the western stereotypes, sweeping vistas, evil men with thugs, pretty girls who alternate between life as punching bags or former punching bags of the villain, and rednecks, into a single setting, the saloon. Which, if you take more than two seconds to think about it, is a pretty cool way to carry the idea over into a modern setting. This isn't really anything new, John Carpenter did it with Assault on Precinct 13 (AKA Rio Bravo) and more recently John Singleton's Four Brothers (AKA The Sons of Katie Elder).
Road House is also a martial arts picture that borrows the souls of both TV series Kung Fu and Chuck Norris action picture Lone Wolf McQuade. Dalton is the lone hero (with a few disposable pals) who brings the might of his ass-kicking, Chuck Norris Action Jeans wearing, combination ballet dancing/Wing-Chun movie-fu fury to the wrongdoers of Mudfuck.
Road House is also a romance picture between Patrick Swayze and Sam Elliot (although all the non-anal sex occurs between Swayze and scrunchy-faced Kelly Lynch). Think of it as Brokeback Mountain without all those disturbing mature themes and adult situations to confuse you.
Road House is also a Zen Buddhist exercise, with Dalton being the very embodiment of compassion and wisdom. His character has a masters from NYU in Philosophy, but when asked what discipline, answers "Man's search for faith. That sort of shit …" Which is either a Zen koan, or proof that he graduated at the bottom of his class.
Road House also features David Keith's only single-line performance in his entire career. His only line of dialogue — "Whiskey's runnin' low."
It's a virtual tour de force. I wonder how much they paid him for that single line?
Meet Dalton (all the best western heroes have only one name) a professional bouncer who is so amazing he is sought out by the nouveau riche owner of country-western-blues-bland shithole, The Double Deuce, in Mudfuck, Alambama (or local equivalent) Frank Tilghman (Kevin Teague) to clean up his place. Teague, for all intents and purposes, is the weirdest man ever to play the saloon owner in need of a professional bouncer ever, and literally every scene where he gazes longingly at Dalton, appears that at any second his member will explode from his pants and attempt to insert itself into the hero.
In fact, this overt homoeroticism goes for just about every single male character in the movie. Even the blind guy (Jeff Healy) looks like he wants to spend ample hours smooching away the night with Patrick Swayze, or at least, since he's sightless, sniffing Dalton's crotch until his face falls off.
What Tilghman doesn't tell Dalton is that the town of Mudfuck is under the control of villainous businessman, and 4 foot nine inches of pure evil, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara). So evil, in fact, that at the denouement of the film, it takes four point-blank blasts from four shotguns to bring him down.
Wesley runs the town, but no mention is made of how. He lives in a gigantic palatial mansion literally 30 feet from where Dalton rents a room above the barn of local corn liquor distiller Emmitt (Sunshine Parker filling in for the long dead Gabby Hayes). He explains to Dalton that he brought the Photomat to town, he brought the Mall to town, and he was in the process of bringing JC Penney to town too. How? No fucking idea. But it doesn't matter. Wesley could be a cattle rustler, mine owner, gunslinger, or any of the other typical black-hat-wearing monsters from any John Ford western.
Dalton gets to know the other oppressed townspeople too, Red the owner of the auto-parts store, and Pete Stroudenmire owner of the local Ford dealership. Who else lives in town? No idea, so they are all irrelevant, but we can assume from the relationship between Red, Tilghman, Emmitt, and Stroudenmire, that they too wish for some hero to rescue them from the miniscule clutches of Brad Wesley. Who knows, maybe he steals their mail or something…
Anyway, like in all western, romance, martial arts, Zen films, the other townspeople are completely unimportant unless they are standing around in the back of the Double Deuce as Dalton and his team of bounders beat the ever-loving shit out of Brad Wesley's goons.
Think of it as Shootout at the OK Corral. No one cared about anyone but the Dalton gang, Doc Holiday, or Wyatt Earp. No matter what the outcome, the townspeople would still get up the next day and do their regular townspeople-type jobs, eat dinner, have sex with the good ladywife, and fall asleep watching Carson. Any of the events between the principal players, while ostensibly about the rights of the masses, amount to little more than a my-penis-is-way-bigger-than-your-penis contest even if the filmmakers want you to think otherwise.
Like any good western too, Dalton has to suffer. His suffering comes in the form of Wade Garrett (Sam Elliot), another pro bouncer, and Dalton's Zen Master, who comes to visit and decides to stay. Think of him as the Charles Bronson character from The Magnificent Seven. He's rough and mean and can apparently consume an unlimited quantity of beer. Wade rides sidesaddle to Dalton's heroics yet still manages to be the lone voice of reason. That voice, of course, must be silenced, and it is for this reason and this reason alone that he is killed.
Road House offers the quintessential American belief in justice via extreme physical violence. Nowhere in the town of Mudfuck are there any law enforcement officers, politicians, or civic organizations. Those are far too complicated. Instead, it's better to smash the bad guy's knee and let him crawl home, than to bother with all this boring Law and Order bullshit. And in that respect, Road House is a perfect film in that it distills the entire American experience down into 90 scant minutes, has at least three gratuitous boobie shots, and reams of macho single-line dialogue that could have been written by chimpanzees. It's easy to understand, the characters are archetypes, and the plot is totally linear. There is even room for a little lingering guilt as Dalton has already killed another man before the film starts, and as mentioned for leverage by Brad Wesley, was absolved through a self-defense, defense in the regular (as far this film is concerned) law enforcement and judicial world. So it establishes early on that any killing of another man can be successfully avoided with the belief in self-defense. Compounding this idea is that when forced into a similar situation with Wesley's A-#1 hired good, Jimmy, Dalton, like in the events before the film tears out his throat then kills all of Wesley's guards (except the comic relief one) and goes mano-e-mano with the villain.
Road House is pure. It never makes any excuses for the absolute insanity spooling out across the screen. Characters are beaten to a pulp only to reappear five minutes nary a scratch, whole buildings are engulfed in massive arson fires but no one asks who started it, Wesley's goons drive a monster truck through the showroom of a Ford dealership, yet since there are no police in town to deal with it, goes unpunished until the end where the victims of Brad Wesley's fury finally turn the tables like the townspeople at the end of High Noon and rush to the aid of their hero. In this case, dispatching him like the Nazarine Brotherhood of The Omen — with shotguns.
The film is so over the top that by the end of the first hour that Brad Wesley could have turned into a giant fighting robot commanding an interplanetary army of radioactive space badgers, and it wouldn't have seemed all that far fetched. Consider the setting, everyone likes to go and get a few drinks, listen to white-boy blues, and hit on poofy haired women, right? In Road House the Double Deuce has a steady, and growing, clientele even though every single night ends in an enormous brawl. For all the money Tilghman has put into the place, it's still a shithole. The only difference is he has higher quality breakaway furniture, can afford to hire Keith David to utter one line "Whiskey's runnin' low" and the band doesn't have to sing behind a barrier of chicken wire. So even for all of Dalton's work, the place hasn't changed even an iota. That is in and of itself the very essence of Zen.
So ignore all the hoity-toity blathering about Oscar winners, complex foreign films, or films with both a conscience and at least one toe in reality, and bask in the awesomeness of Road House — The Citizen Kane of American film.
Hell, it's probably on cable right now!
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