About the film
- Directed by
- Percy Adlon
- Released
- November 12, 1987
- US theatrical
- April 22, 1988
- Certification
- 12
- Country
- Germany
- Starring
- Marianne Sägebrecht, CCH Pounder, Jack Palance, Christine Kaufmann, Monica Calhoun
More credits
- Language
- German, English
- Origin
- DE
- Studios
- Pro-ject Filmproduktion, Pelemele Film, BR, HR
- Written by
- Eleonore Adlon, Christopher Doherty, Percy Adlon
- Produced by
- Eleonore Adlon, Percy Adlon, Dietrich von Watzdorf
- Cinematography
- Bernd Heinl
- Music
- Bob Telson
- Also starring
- Darron Flagg, George Aguilar, G. Smokey Campbell, Hans Stadlbauer, Alan S. Craig
- Box office
- $3,732,660
A German tourist in a heavy tweed suit walks alone down a Mojave Desert highway, dragging a suitcase. She has just left her husband stranded in their car after a roadside argument. Nowhere to go, she ends up at the Bagdad Cafe.
BAGDAD CAFE (1987), originally titled Out of Rosenheim, is about Jasmin Münchgstettner, played by Marianne Sägebrecht, a Bavarian woman who checks into a run-down truck-stop motel run by Brenda, played by CCH Pounder, a woman drowning in debt and exhaustion.
The two could not be more different. Jasmin is soft-spoken, orderly, faintly absurd in her Old World formality. Brenda is sharp-tongued, overwhelmed, ready to snap at anyone who crosses her threshold. Neither wants the other there.
Jasmin starts cleaning, then organizing, then performing small magic tricks for truckers passing through, and the cafe begins, improbably, to come alive. Jack Palance turns up as Rudi Cox, a former Hollywood set painter who becomes fascinated by Jasmin and paints her portrait again and again.
Percy Adlon directs this as a fable rather than a plot-driven comedy, letting the desert heat and stillness do as much work as the dialogue.
Bagdad Cafe became an unlikely arthouse hit internationally, a small, odd film about hospitality, loneliness, and the sort of friendship that arrives without warning and rearranges everything around it.
How to see Bagdad Cafe (1987)
Streaming
United States
Free
Also available internationally
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Source: JustWatch
Physical media
More editions
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It also had the most hauntingly captivating song of any film before or since. Please let me know if you think anything comes close.
This is one of my favourite movies. Great acting, and scenery.
Great movie! Beautifully bonkers.
Braun wasser!
We still use this term to describe weak coffee 😝
Jack Palance the old hippie standing in the windy desert with the trucks booming by and UFOs lurking in the backstory. One of my favorite images in this standalone film.
One of my all time favorites
I can’t find my original list of recs, so here it is again with a couple additions;
Eric J Hanne please check out a few more (from my list of “quiet films”);
Local Hero (Burt Lancaster)***
Nobody’s Fool (Paul Newman)***
Paterson (Adam Driver)***
The Man In The Hat (Ciaran Hinds)***
Broken Flowers (Bill Murray)
The Straight Story (Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, David Lynch)***
Tea With Mussolini (Joan Plowright, Judi Dench, Cher, Lily Tomlin, Maggie Smith)
HIGHLY recommend all of them.
~~~~~~
The Station Agent (Peter Dinklage, Joey Canavale)***
The Quiet Girl – 2022, Ireland***
Our Mutual Friend – (Dickens) 1998, BBC/Masterpiece Theater***
Being There (Peter Sellers)***