May 14, 1989 | Patrick Swayze was on last weekend, flashing smiles and pumping hands, cracking jokes and fielding questions, bounding from one interview to the next at New York’s U.N. Plaza Hotel with all the indefatigable zeal of a behind-in-the-polls presidential candidate in the snows of New Hampshire.
The Houston actor was indeed campaigning, tirelessly promoting his first major studio release since the international smash success of Dirty Dancing, the movie that made him a star. Nearly two years after Dancing steamed up movie screens, Swayze’s back in action in Road House, the film that, justly or not, will be viewed as the acid test of his box-office appeal.
Industry insiders are wondering: Was Dirty Dancing a freak-hit flash in the pan, or just the beginning of a beautifully profitable career? Road House will provide an answer, or at least some gauge to measure just how far, and how permanently, Patrick Swayze has arrived.
It marks quite a change from the sweetly sentimental ‘60s musical romance that was Dirty Dancing. In fact, there’s nothing that’s sweet about Road House, a luridly violent melodrama in which large-breasted women dance on table tops while rowdy good ol’ boys smash chairs across each other’s heads. Swayze plays Dalton, “the best damn cooler in the business,” a world-class bouncer who’s hired to clean up a seedy Missouri honky-tonk where bloody brawling is a nightly spectator sport.
The small town has a crooked kingpin (Ben Gazzara) who doesn’t much like Dalton. So the kingpin sends over some of his bully boys to rough Dalton up. A lot of bully boys are seriously brutalized during Road House.
Dalton claims to hold a Ph.D. in philosophy. Judging from the two-fisted (and two-footed) mayhem on screen, he obviously took Nietzsche’s words of wisdom to heart: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Swayze sees Dalton as an almost tragic figure, an intelligent man who is appalled by the violence of his profession. Unfortunately, Dalton is very good at his work, and he cannot walk away from it.
At least, that’s Swayze’s take on it. And he explains his interpretation with such sincerity and passion, you really want to share his vision, even though you know full well that the movie in his mind’s eye is nowhere to be seen on screen.
“A big part of the reason why I agreed to do this movie is that, in Texas, I grew up with this mentality,” Swayze said, referring to the rowdy, ready-to-fight mentality of the roadhouse patrons. “It was all around me. Probably, subconsciously, I still wanted to work out, hopefully, the last of my angry young man syndrome. So Road House was very much a cathartic experience.”
Beneath the blood-and-beer surface, Swayze insisted, Road House really is a movie that takes a stand against violence.
“But the best way to get a message across to people,” Swayze said, “is not by slapping them across the face with it. The best way is just by becoming, and holding up, a mirror. And letting them see this guy, Dalton, who’s killing himself with all this stuff.
“See, it’s always intrigued me, why men go into bars, and how, if a fight doesn’t break out by midnight, you start fighting amongst your friends. I mean, what is that? Is it frustration, and feeling stifled in life as a human being? Or are the dreams you had, these mighty dreams, just sitting somewhere, in a shoebox on a shelf? Or is there a relationship that’s killing you?
“And if you don’t release this stuff in some way, is it gonna turn into wife beating or murder or something?”
Sam Elliott (Mask, Murder in Texas) co-stars in Road House as Dalton’s lean, leathery mentor. When told about Swayze’s high-toned description of their film, Elliott grinned and shook his head, almost as if to say, “Well, there he goes again!”
“I’ve had that conversation with Patrick more than once,” Elliott said. “And I’ve never come away quite fully understanding where he was coming from.
“I mean, OK, here I am, I’m gonna beat the (expletive deleted) out of everybody for an hour and a half — and then they’re gonna know I’m against violence?”
Even in his gentle mockery, however, Elliott emphasized his great respect for Swayze.
“I love this kid,” Elliott said. “I mean, I love this kid. I think he’s a good actor. And he’s a good guy.
“And there isn’t anybody (in Hollywood) who can physically do what this kid does in this movie.”
There was tension on the set, Elliott conceded, but it had little to do with blocking fight scenes, or disputes over delicate nuances of character. Rather, the tension was generated by Swayze himself, as he strove for, and demanded perfection.
After Dirty Dancing, Elliott said, Swayze was “in the hot seat. And he was scared to death while we were making this movie, because being in the hot seat was new to him.
“But he’s in better shape now than he was the last time I found him. He’s more relaxed, he’s not looking over his shoulder so much.”
Swayze is so relaxed these days he’s even willing, when pressed, to admit to other, far less grandiose reasons for making Road House.
“You know,” Swayze said, “the movie is what it is, it’s action-adventure entertainment. And while I was growing up in Texas, I loved those movies.
“I don’t necessarily want to do another Road House too soon in my life. But I do want to make as many of these kinds of movies, physical movies, before the body goes completely.”
It’s a race against time for the 36-year-old Swayze: After filming an extraordinarily rough fight scene for five days on a riverbank he had to have 80 cc’s of fluid drained from his damaged left knee, an old injury that ended his New York dance career with the Harkness, Joffrey and Feld companies.
“I want to get my jollies by doing all these things. I want to do my epic romantic hero, my Errol Flynn movie — I’m dying to do that stuff, too. And I figure, I’m not getting any younger.”
And if Swayze has his way, he’s not getting typecast, either. Yes, there will be a Dirty Dancing 2, but will be in it only if he’s satisfied with the script, only if it takes the characters into interesting new directions. And only if it doesn’t interfere with other projects.
With his wife, actress-dancer Lisa Neimi, Swayze is working on a dance film. And by the end of summer, he’ll be seen in another action melodrama, Next of Kin. After that, Swayze will attempt another change of pace, with Ghost, a supernatural romantic comedy in which he plays a recently deceased young man who returns to Earth to protect the woman he still loves.
“The only point of view I’m coming from is, every time people think they have me pegged, I try to come out of left field with a curve ball. I’m real excited about the combination of movies I have here. Because Road House, like I say, is what it is, action entertainment. But then Next of Kin is much more of a dramatic film.”
Actually, Next of Kin has been described by at least one wag as “The Untouchables Meet The Hatfields and The McCoys.” Swayze stars as a Chicago cop from the hills of Kentucky. Not surprisingly, he sees the movie as more than just another shoot-‘em-up.
“It’s really about brothers, and family loyalties,” Swayze said. “And a man being torn between those loyalties, and having to make a very difficult decision.
“Do his loyalties stay with his family in the hills, in a place where the tombstones read, ‘John Doe, Died Such-and-Such a Date, Avenged Such-and- Such a Date’? Or does he remain loyal to his wife, and his unborn child, and the law?”
Patrick Swayze made the movie sound very interesting. But, then again, he did the same thing for Road House.
