Coffee and Noir: ROAD HOUSE

every instance of coffee in noir: 053

You can learn a lot about a character by how they take their coffee: sugar? cream? more whiskey than caffeine?

I’m cataloging every noir scene where coffee plays a role — rote and ritual, soul-dark or cream and sugar, served from dingy diners to shiny penthouses.

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Inviting someone up to your room or letting yourself into theirs is a running theme on Road House; in fact it’s Pete’s (Cornel Wilde) opening move when Lily (Ida Lupino) walks into his office.

So, fittingly, private rooms are where the coffee is drunk.

First, Jefty walks past two men drinking coffee, eating pancakes, and smirking about it being a Sunday morning visit. The breakfast tray is a perfect pretext to let himself into Lily’s bedroom.

Jefty opens the blinds (complete with live lighting change!), then uses the coffee as a pretext to assume intimacy, sitting next to — and later, on the edge of — Lily’s bed.

The whole scene is nearly four minutes, but just know while Lily makes more eye contact with coffee than Jefty — and smokes plenty — she doesn’t take a sip of coffee the whole time.

Unlike a few scenes later, where Lily repeats the move . . .

only into Pete’s room, not Jefty’s.

Again there’s an unspoken intimacy; yes Lily knocks (giving more courtesy than Jefty gave her, a show-don’t-tell character beat), but Pete is shirtless and shaving.

Note the blocking and framing, how Pete is doubled at the top of the scene, and the shot moves with him through liminal spaces. This is a gorgeously shot and composed film, which holds on shots partly because they’re beautiful, partly because it knows how magnetic the four leads are.

They they sit for a drink and tête-à-tête, director Jean Negulesco showing off Lupino’s legs and Wilde’s hands and both their eyes to stunning effect.

This coffee Lily actually drinks, clearly preferring her own skills.

If that sounds like a metaphor for something else, it’s not the only one in this superb little noir . . . though you’d likely never guess what the second, very extensive, one is.