CHICAGO SUN-TIMES, September 9, 1988

Vibrance, Magic are on the Menu at ‘Bagdad Cafe’

By Roger Ebert

The heavyset German lady, her body and soul tightly corseted, her hair sprayed into rock-like permanence, is having a fight with her husband, right there in the Mojave Desert. They are in the middle of some kind of miserable vacation, touring America as a version of hell. She can take no more. She grabs her suitcase and stalks away from their Mercedes, he drives away into the red, dusty sky, and she walks to a miserable truck stop and asks for a room.

An opening that makes you stop and think, doesn’t it, about how cut-and-dried most Hollywood movies are.There would seem to be no place in today’s entertainment industry for movies about fat German ladies and homesick truck stops, and yet “Bagdad Cafe” sets us free from the production line of Hollywood’s brain-damaged “high concepts” and walks its own strange and lovely path. There is poetic justice in the fact that this movie, shot in English in America by a German, is one of the biggest box office successes in recent European history.

The German woman is named Jasmin (Marianne Sägebrecht), and she is appalled by the conditions she finds at the Bagdad Cafe. It is simply not being run along clean and efficient German lines.

The proprietor is a free-thinking black woman named Brenda (CCH Pounder -- yes, CCH Pounder), who shares the premises with her teenage children, a baby, a bewildered Italian cook, a tattoo artist and a shipwrecked former Hollywood set painter who is played by Jack Palance as if he had definitely painted his last set.

Jasmin sets to work. She gets a mop and a pail and begins to clean her room, while the motel regulars look on in amazement. Back and forth she goes, like some kind of natural force that has been set into implacable motion against dirt. Gradually her sphere extends to other rooms in the motel, and to the public areas, and she gives Brenda little lectures about cleanliness and the importance of maintaining high standards for the public.

Day by day, little by little, however, Jasmin herself is changed by this laid-back desert environment. Her too-tight hausfrau dresses give way to a blouse that billows outside her slacks. A stray wisp of hair escapes from the glistening spray, and then finally her hair comes tumbling down in windswept freedom. And she reveals that she can do magic tricks.

Yes, magic tricks. After she whips the cook into shape and the truck stop’s restaurant begins to do some business, she starts entertaining some of the customers with close up illusions, which eventually grow in scale until the Bagdad Cafe is presenting its own cabaret night after night, with all the regulars pressed into the act.

All of this sounds rather too nice, I suppose, and so I should add that Percy Adlon, the director, maintains a certain bleak undercurrent of despair, of crying babies and unpaid bills and young people who have come to the end of their ropes.

He is saying something in the 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’s 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 the situation. The charm of BAGDAD CAFE is that every moment is unanticipated, obscurely motivated, of uncertain meaning and vibrating with life.

THE DENVER POST, WEEKEND, May 18, 1988

No One’s Normal in ‘Bagdad Cafe,’ But They Fit

By Howie Movshovitz

After seeing the lovely eccentrics in BAGDAD CAFE, movies about normal people are boring. Every character in the movie is odd, the setting is out-of-the-way and the movie itself is offbeat. It’s a beautiful, funny, sweet story about the most unlikely people becoming friends.

Jasmin Meunchstettner (Marianne Sägebrecht) is a German tourist driving through the West with her awful husband, a parody of a lederhosen-clad Bavarian and a rotten driver as well. So Jasmine grabs her suitcase and walks off in the middle of the Nevada desert.

She comes to a windswept gas station, cafe and motel. When she asks Brenda (CCH Pounder) for a room, Brenda is amazed -- no one ever wants a room at the Bagdad Gas and Oil Cafe and Motel. But Jasmine moves in and eventually becomes a part of the group, which includes among its assorted oddballs the always-angry Brenda, her daughter Phyllis, Debby the sexy tattoo artist and Rudi Cox, the former Hollywood set painter who lives in a trailer.

The story is about how Jasmine transforms this group into a family. She enters on foot dragging her suitcase, a quiet, friendly, chubby German woman in a feathered, Bavarian-style hat. Brenda, a thin black woman, is annoyed that anyone ever wants anything from her. She’s hostile to Jasmine and suspicious enough to call the sheriff (a tall Indian with long braided hair hanging below his cap) to check her out.

The director of BAGDAD CAFE, Percy Adlon (SUGARBABY), is a German in love with American characters and the bleak American desert landscape. Bagdad is like a dot on the moon, with no connection to the outside world besides the long highway that extends to the horizon and the huge sky.

The gas station, motel and cafe are all there is to this ship of fools called Bagdad. A group of people stuck in one limited space have to get along despite their enormous differences.

BAGDAD CAFE is the kind of movie that makes you blink because you think you’ve missed something. It goes around and around, from the cafe to the motel to the outdoors (where a backpacker shows Phyllis how to throw a boomerang) to the slow-talking Rudi (Jack Palance in fine, hoarse, slow-talking form). It turns like a whirlwind, giving short glimpses of action, and with each revolution it’s changed a bit.

What gets me about BAGDAD CAFE is the movie’s feel for the creativity of unusual or outcast people. Nobody in this movie has a chance in the outside world, but together they make the Bagdad Cafe a great place to stop. Jasmine learns magic, Brenda’s son plays piano and her daughter sings -- while the cafe audience grows bigger and more joyous.

It’s a story of lost people finding themselves. Once they catch on to how Jasmine accepts her own strangeness, the others do the same. It shows that characters don’t have to look like Hollywood stars to entertain and touch the audience.

“BRENDA” (THE DANCING CANE DUET)

Music by: Bob Telson

Words by: Lee Breuer

TRUCKERS: Brenda...Brenda...

BRENDA: You Boys Doin’Alright?

What Will It Be Tonite?

We Got Chili Size

We Got Banana Pies

TRUCKERS: Brenda...Brenda...

RON: Over, Easy, Two

PHYLLIS: You Mean You Want Eggs?

TRUCKERS: Uh Uh, We Want You

JASMIN: Leberkas mit Laugenbrezn

Weisswurst, Dicke, Saure Zipfel

Was ist das You Want To Eat Tonite

Kesselfleisch, Kohlrabi, Kutteln

Krautsalat und Fingernudln

BRENDA: Try Our New Desert It’s Called

The Garden of Delight

TRUCKERS: Brenda...Brenda...

BOB: Gimme Pheasant Under Glass

BRENDA: You Can Kiss My Sassafras!

We Got Donut Holes

We Got Jelly Rolls

RON: I Want To Live Right Here

On The Old Mohave

Live My Life In Low Gear

You Savvy

BRENDA: And Nothin ‘s So Tragic

Cause its All About Magic

BRENDA/JASMIN: Take It Away

Love Saves The Day

When It’s Showtime

At The Bagdad

Gas & Oil Cafe

RON: Give Me A Home Where The Coyotes Howl

Where The Weather is Fair And The Food Is Foul

In A Little Truck Stop Just A Mom No Pop

Operation

Home On The Gas Range, Workin For The Small Change

If You Feel Blue Get A New Tattoo

So Don’t You Start Shovin Cause Life’s Just A Lovin

Situation

JASMIN: Cup of Coffee

Home Made Eis

Negerkuss Da Wirds Ma Heiss

Was Is Das You Want to Eat Tonite?

Apfelstrudl Hold The Nudl

Old Bavarian Jodludl

BRENDA: Try Our New Desert

It’s Called The Garden Of Delight

JASMIN/BRENDA: And Nothin So Tragic

Cause It’s All About Magic

Take It Away

Love Saves The Day

When It’s Show Time

There’s No Time

Like Showtime

Like Showtime

At The Bagdad Gas & Oil Cafe

Next