| Bagdad Cafe | |
| Director: | Percy Adlon |
| Music: | Bob Telson |
| Cinematography: | Bernd Heinl |
| Editing: | Norbert Herzner |
| Distributor: | Island Pictures |
| Runtime: | 108 minutes (German) 95 minutes (U.S.) |
| Country: | West Germany |
Bagdad Cafe (sometimes Bagdad Café, titled Out of Rosenheim in Germany) is a 1987 English-language West German film directed by Percy Adlon. It is a comedy-drama set in a remote truck stop and motel in the Mojave Desert in the U.S. state of California.[1] Inspired by Carson McCullers' novella The Ballad of the Sad Café (1951),[2] the film centers on two women who have recently separated from their husbands, and the blossoming friendship that ensues. It runs 95 minutes in the U.S. and 108 minutes in the German version. The song "Calling You", sung by Jevetta Steele and written by Bob Telson, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 61st Academy Awards.
German tourists Jasmin Münchgstettner from Rosenheim and her husband fight while driving across the American southwest desert. She storms out of the car and makes her way to an isolated truck stop cafe, which is run by the tough-as-nails and short-tempered Brenda, whose own husband, after an argument out front, has also left. Jasmin takes a room at the adjacent motel. Initially suspicious of the foreigner, Brenda eventually befriends Jasmin and allows her to work at the cafe.
The cafe is visited by an assortment of colorful characters, including a strange ex-Hollywood set-painter and a glamorous tattoo artist. Brenda's son plays J. S. Bach preludes on the piano. With an ability to quietly empathize with everyone she meets at the cafe, and helped by a passion for cleaning and performing magic tricks, Jasmin gradually transforms the cafe and all the people in it.
The script was inspired by a road trip across U.S. Route 66 taken by director Percy Adlon and his wife Eleanor, a producer, in 1984.[3] The town of Barstow, California reminded the couple of "purgatory."[4] The German title is a joke based on Jasmin's lack of English: while she means to say that she is from Rosenheim, she actually says that she is "out of Rosenheim," with the title also making reference to Sidney Pollack's then recently released popular 1985 film Out of Africa. The film was shot in sequence.
The film received positive reviews and critical acclaim.[5] [6] [7] It holds an 85% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 20 reviews, with a weighted average of 6.8/10.
Roger Ebert awarded the film 3½ stars in his review:
[Percy Adlon] is saying something in this movie about Europe and America, about the old and the new, about the edge of the desert as the edge of the American Dream. I am not sure exactly what it is, but that is comforting; if a director could assemble these strange characters and then know for sure what they were doing in the same movie together, he would be too confident to find the humor in their situation. The charm of "Bagdad Cafe" is that every character and every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.The film was successful at the European box office, and was one of the most financially successful foreign-language productions in the U.S. at that time, grossing $3.59 million.[8] [9] [10]
The Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited this movie as one of his 100 favorite films.[11]
See main article: Bagdad Cafe (TV series). In 1990 the film was re-created as a television series starring James Gammon, Whoopi Goldberg, Cleavon Little, and Jean Stapleton, with Stapleton as the abandoned tourist, and Goldberg as the restaurant operator. In the TV version the tourist was no longer from Germany. The series was shot in the conventional multi-camera sitcom format, before a studio audience.[15] The show did not attract a sizable audience and it was cancelled after two seasons.[16]
The setting, Bagdad, California, is a former town on U.S. Route 66. After being bypassed by Interstate 40 in 1973, it was abandoned and eventually razed.[17] While the town had a "Bagdad Cafe", the film was shot at the then Sidewinder Cafe[18] in Newberry Springs, 50miles west of the site of Bagdad. The cafe became a European[19] [20] tourist destination; to capitalize on the film, in 1995, when it was purchased by new owners, they changed its name to Bagdad Cafe.[21] A small noticeboard on the cafe wall features snapshots of the film's cast and crew.[22]
The soundtrack features the songs "Calling You", written by Bob Telson and sung by Jevetta Steele, and "Brenda, Brenda" with lyrics by Lee Breuer and music by Bob Telson, sung by Jearlyn Steele, featuring the harmonica of William Galison, and also has a track in which the director narrates the story, including the film's missing scenes.
The principal piano pieces, performed by Darron Flagg, are preludes from Book I of Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier: the C major, no. 1, BWV 845; the C minor, BWV 846, no. 2; and the D major, no. 5, BWV 850.
For the film's 30th anniversary in 2018, StudioCanal reissued Bagdad Cafe as a 4K digital restoration on DVD and Blu-ray. In April 2021, Shout! Factory re-released the film digitally.