Bad Times at the El Royale (2018)

 

The following is part of the Secret Places and Trippy Houses blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room

“I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die.” Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison Blues

“They brought their cult to California because everybody does.” Dashiell Hammett, The Dain Curse

One night in 1969, four strangers – kindly Father Flynn (Jeff Bridges), redneck salesman Laramie (Jon Hamm), lounge singer Darlene (Cynthia Erivo) and hippie chick with attitude Emily (Dakota Johnson) – check into the El Royale, a fading Atomic Age lodge built right on the border of California and Nevada – a painted red stripe of demarcation runs down the middle of the lobby.

Including Miles (Lewis Pullman), the hotel’s only employee, none are exactly what they initially seem.

The same can be said for the curiously vacant Royale. Unbeknownst to its guests there is a hidden corridor running behind the rooms, each with a two-way mirror allowing for unseen surveillance or discreet filming.

When Laramie, in truth an FBI agent on special assignment, discovers wire taps and the two-way mirror in his room, he locates the secret passageway. Looking through the mirrors undetected by the room’s inhabitant is like viewing diorama exhibits in a living museum as the guests reveal their secrets in the “privacy” of their rooms: Flynn taking apart his room, floorboard by floorboard, while Emily has a bound and gagged girl in her room.

Jon Hamm on a dark and stormy night

Later, Miles reveals that under orders from “management” he sometimes secretly filmed visiting VIPs. (Flynn looks through one reel revealing a well-known politician in flagrante delicto, a sociopolitical conspiracy red herring that goes nowhere. Director/screenwriter Drew Goddard crams a few other circa-1969 historical events into the script; only one, Miles' Vietnam service, has any bearing on the plot).

Historical aside: While the Hotel Royale is fictional, the Cal-Neva Lodge was a resort and casino straddling the border between Nevada and California on the shores of Lake Tahoe. In 1960, Frank Sinatra purchased the resort with several others, including Chicago mobster Sam Giancana. Allegedly, John and Robert Kennedy used the lodge to carry on extra-marital affairs.

When Emily blasts one of the guests with a shotgun, it sets off a series of events – including the appearance of Billy Lee (Chris Hemsworth), a psychotic cross between Charles Manson and Jim Morrison – that bring on the “bad times.”

Hemsworth reviews the mystery film

Goddard knows his way around secret places and trippy houses. In his The Cabin in the Woods (2011), there’s a two-way mirror and secret entrances leading to underground passageways, all central to the plot, gateways to understanding why and how things are happening. In Royale, the secret corridor is an ingenious device that provides glimpses into the characters’ behaviors and intentions, leading us to continually readjust our perceptions: “He’s good, no he’s bad, wait he’s definitely good.”

Like The Cabin in the Woods, which turns teen slasher movies upside down and inside out, Bad Times at the El Royale is another genre-bender, Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians on acid, as a group of strangers assemble in a vacant hotel on a dark and stormy night and the bodies start dropping.

The film’s MVPs are Bridges, Erivo and Pullman. Flynn and Miles are well-realized characters with backstories, although Darlene is a bit one-dimensional; taken together, however, they forge a bond and the emotional core of the movie. Hemsworth’s Billy Lee is scarily evil.

MVPs Bridges and Erivo

Considered a box office flop when it was released, Bad Times at the El Royale is a clever, suspenseful movie that manages to keep its bursting-at-the seams plot and characterization together. It's worthy of a second, or if you’ve yet to check it out, an initial look. 

And be careful standing in front of hotel mirrors. You never know who might be behind them.

Another tale of two cities

I needed to get this out before circumstances change.

Three of the four teams left in the baseball postseason are expansion teams: Milwaukee Brewers, Seattle Mariners and Toronto Blue Jays and there’s still an outside chance that two will meet in the series.

In baseball, that’s not uncommon. In 2023, the Arizona Diamondbacks played the Texas Rangers, the Rangers having started as the expansion Washington Senators in 1961. In football you need to go back to 1972 when Dallas played Miami, as the only time expansion teams met in the Super Bowl.

(Who knows about the NBA and the NHL. Basketball and hockey have added so many teams over the decades, and franchises have moved so many times I don’t have the knowledge or the patience to track their lineages).

There’s a longtime connection between Milwaukee and Seattle. The Brewers began as the Seattle Pilots, an expansion franchise always short of cash playing in a beat-up minor league stadium. Following just one season in Seattle and a winter and spring of bankruptcy claims and court decisions, the team was acquired by Bud Selig, who made his fortune with a car-leasing business, and moved to Milwaukee a week before the 1970 season began.

Moving the team from the Northwest to the Midwest was rare balm for a city that had already been left at the altar when their Milwaukee Braves carpetbagged their way to Atlanta in 1966, amidst whispers that some of its blue-collar, unionized assembly line jobs might also shift to the non-union South.  

In 1970, Milwaukee was still an economic force in the Midwest, and it wasn’t just beer that made Milwaukee famous. Along with Pabst, Miller and Schlitz, there was meatpacking – and as an offshoot – leather tanneries, Harley Davidson and Allis Chalmers which built tractors and agricultural equipment. Most would see their profiles reduced or be gone within the next decade or so.

Meanwhile Seattle, a boomtown in the 1960s, was trying to keep from falling into an abyss. The region's fortunes and employment were mostly dependent upon one company, Boeing. In 1970, the company began a 17-month period without a single new order from any U.S. airline. Suddenly building a new ballpark didn't seem like a priority anymore.

With the Pilots' move to Milwaukee approved less than a week before the start of the season, the Brewers had no time to design new uniforms and were left to rip “PILOTS” off the front of their existing uniforms and sew on "BREWERS". Hard pressed for time, the team blew the dust off this ancient minor-league Milwaukee Brewer “beer-barrel man” image:

In 1970, Seattle and the State of Washington sued the American League for breach of contract. The lawsuit continued until baseball offered to give Seattle an expansion franchise in return for dropping the suit. The Mariners began play in 1977 owned by a consortium led by entertainer Danny Kaye, who was enough of a fan that his gravesite includes a bench with images of a baseball and bat.

The Mariners have been a study in frustration ever since, not fielding a winning team until 1991, holding the longest postseason drought in any of the four major league sports (2001 to 2022) and, as of today, the only active franchise to never appear in a World Series.

It may also be worth mentioning that this year saw the final act in the Mariners-Pilots connection. In 1977, rubber-armed pitcher Diego Seguí, 40 and in his last of 15 major league seasons, became the only player to play for both the Pilots and the Mariners, finishing with an 0-7 record. Segui died this past June at age 87.

Rolling with it

Steve Winwood showed Mozartian skill playing the keyboards at age four, and by the time he was 14 was playing and singing in a professional band, the Spencer Davis Group.

The band's Gimme Some Lovin', which he wrote, played organ and sang lead on entered the Billboard chart at #100, hitting #7 for two weeks in early 1967. Seemingly recorded with no thought towards sound balance, its loud, sweaty party rush doesn't give the listener a chance to catch a breath. 

Cue the Summer of Love footage of dancing hippies as an artistically restless Winwood left Spencer Davis to form Traffic. The band spent several months woodshedding in a rural cottage without electricity; when they needed to plug in electric guitars they ran an extension cord to a neighbor's home. 

Traffic's 1967 album Mr. Fantasy is a whirlwind of flutes, sitars and psychedelic effects, a perfect soundtrack for the times. Winwood's voice kept things close to earth and the band remembered that extension cord for the guitar workout Dear Mr. Fantasy, a cut presaging the sound of Jimi Hendrix and Cream. 

Traffic's promotional video for Paper Sun, the single off Mr. Fantasy is a strange one, filmed at the British Museum of Natural History. 

Only year later Winwood was on the run again, joining Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker to form Blind Faith, whose debut was opening for the Rolling Stones at a free concert in London’s Hyde Park. Following a brief tour of the U.S., they imploded. 

Winwood declined an offer to join Crosby, Stills and Nash – having survived the ego trips and drugs that sunk Blind Faith, he could be forgiven for not wanting to join another volatile environment. He did a memorable jam with Hendrix on Electric Ladyland’s Voodoo Chile and played keyboards on the B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf in London session albums before reforming Traffic. 

Traffic 2.0 was a staple of FM radio; John Barleycorn Must Die (1970) and The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys (1971) charting at #5 and #7 in the U.S. respectively. They were versatile enough to be heavy (Pearly Queen), jazzy (Low Spark, Glad) or rustic folky (John Barleycorn). Winwood broke up the band in 1974 and did keyboard session work with Lou Reed, Toots and the Maytals and George Harrison, including playing the synthesizer on Marianne Faithful’s Broken English single. 

Then, while many of his contemporaries stumbled about figuring how to update their sound, Winwood had a career renaissance. His album Arc of a Diver (1980), was a one-man production, performing all the singing and instrumentation, as well as engineering himself. The record included the single When You See a Chance (#7). 

Back in the High Life (1986) went triple platinum, with the single Higher Love reaching #1 and earning Winwood Grammy Awards for Record of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance. Roll with It (1988) and its title track (a rewrite of Junior Walker’s Shotgun; Holland, Dozier and Holland received writing credits) hit #1 on the album and singles charts. 

Smug rock fans felt Winwood's embrace of synth-pop was a sellout, a betrayal of artistic integrity. In truth, it's the sound of a virtuoso musician understanding and adapting, something he's done countless times during his career. 

Seeing Winwood today in concert is a thrill, having listened to his music for nearly 60 years. But Winwood, as with Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, Paul McCartney, any artist with that kind of long-tailed legacy, is also holding up a mirror as we see ourselves in them, all of us trying to come to grips with our own mortality. Same as watching a Robert Redford film or a video of Mark Volman goofing around with the Turtles. Best to just roll with it.