29 Dec 2016

Ida Lupino: Out of the Fog (USA, 1941) and Road House (USA, 1948)

Out of the Fog (USA, 1941)
Director: Anatole Litvak. Stars: Ida Lupino, John Garfield, Thomas Mitchell, Eddie Albert, George Tobias...

I’ve seen this movie many many times, but mostly in the 80s and early 90s. It was one of the three movies with the great Ida Lupino in it that CBC had in their Warner Bros. late night movie collection. But I had not remembered the scene with pinball machines in it until seeing my friend Mark Loeser’s supercut video that is projected in a loop at the North Star bar in Montreal.

Ida walks into a drug store / soda shop, and there’s a kid playing a Snooks (Stoner, 1939)...

The “kid”, played by Walter Tetley (better known as a voice actor due to his perennially adolescent voice) wins a payout, exclaiming “I hit it! I hit it! For once in my life I beat the machine!” then he rushes over to the bartender and says “Fourty-eight thousand! Pay me nine nickels!”. In those days, pinballs were flipperless gambling machines...

There’s something a bit strange about the backbox... it has a second section on top which isn’t seen in the flyers on IPDB.

Behind the Snooks machine is the one with the famous mysterious cabinet which could be a Rink (Genco Manufacturing Co., 1939), as seen in They Drive By Night (1940), also starring Ida Lupino, which I wrote about previously in this post.



Road House (USA, 1948)
Director: Jean Negulesco. Stars: Ida Lupino, Cornel Wilde, Celeste Holm, Richard Widmark...

An Argentine (Genco, 1941) pinball machine can be spotted in the opening credits and a few scenes...


Cornel Wilde and Richard Widmark (who plays Jefty, the owner of the titular road house) walking by the machine...

And to my knowledge, this is the only other movie scene where Ida appears in the same frame as a pinball machine...

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