Bagdad Café
| Bagdad Café | |
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French-language film poster
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| Directed by | Percy Adlon |
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| Music by | Bob Telson |
| Cinematography | Bernd Heinl |
| Edited by | Norbert Herzner |
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| Distributed by | Island Pictures |
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108 minutes (German) 95 minutes (US) |
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Bagdad Café (also known as Out of Rosenheim) is a 1987 German film directed by Percy Adlon. It is a comedy set in a remote truck-stop café and motel in the Mojave Desert in the US state of California. It 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.
German tourists Jasmin Münchgstettner (Sägebrecht) and her husband fight while driving across the desert. She storms out of the car and makes her way to the isolated truck stop, which is run by the tough-as-nails and short-tempered Brenda (Pounder), whose own husband, after an argument out front, is soon to leave as well. Jasmin takes a room at the adjacent motel. Initially suspicious of the foreigner, Brenda eventually befriends Jasmin and allows her to work at the café.
The café is visited by an assortment of colorful characters, including a strange ex-Hollywood set-painter (Palance) and a glamorous tattoo artist (Kaufmann). Brenda's son (Darron Flagg) plays J. S. Bach preludes on the piano. With an ability to quietly empathize with everyone she meets at the café, helped by a passion for cleaning and performing magic tricks, Jasmin gradually transforms the café and all the people in it.
The film had positive reviews. It holds an 88% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film was successful at the box office, with a US gross of $3.59 million.
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 sitcom format, before a studio audience. The show did not attract a sizable audience, being aired against ABC's more successful series, Family Matters, and it was cancelled after one season.
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