"Patrick Swayze stars in the greatest movie of all time!"

The Jeff Healey Band--"Confidence Man" (mp3)
The Jeff Healey Band--"Angel Eyes" (mp3)
The Jeff Healey Band--"Don't Let Your Chance Go By" (mp3)

My homage to Patrick Swayze, who passed away Monday night at the age of 57, follows something of an odd and circuitous route. I never saw Ghost, watched only snatches of Dirty Dancing, don't know much of anything about him before or after. All I know is that he starred in what must be considered the greatest movie of all time: Roadhouse.

Well, okay, we won't go that far, but it was the role he was born to play, the movie he was born to make, the tribute that will last.

You really can't even argue against it. Roadhouse is an immensely satisfying film that does everything a movie should do for a youngish male (and female) audience.

PLOT: In a parallel universe, across the midwest of the United States there are huge, lawless roadhouses where patrons come to drink, oogle women, play pool, and fight. There's one outside of Kansas City that is struggling because it's situated in a town where one man owns everything and everyone, and he doesn't like competition. So, the owner of the roadhouse goes in search of the best bouncer there is. Word is that Dalton, the character played by Patrick Swayze, is the best. Honest and principled, he's still a gun for hire. Sound like the Old West? It should. Swayze is something of a Shane character, something of a sheriff brought in to clean up a dirty town, or, more exactly, a loner who does what he does for pay but can't help getting personally involved.

ACTORS: It's a good cast, knowns and unknowns. Sam Elliott plays Wade Garrett, a mentor to Swayze's Dalton (who knew that bouncers had mentors?), who gets called in when the situation becomes unmanageable. Ben Gazara plays Brad Wesley, the bad, bad man who runs the town, even while saddled with that wimpy character name. He also continues the sacred tradition of lead heavies who should easily get their asses kicked by someone like Swayze's Dalton, but, though 20-30 years older, manages to use some martial arts of his own to make it an even fight for awhile. Kelly Lynch plays doctor and love interest, fresh off of the extremely lame Cocktail.

SEX AND ROMANCE: People say that Top Gun is the ultimate romantic movie of the 80's, but I prefer the understated romance and "R"rated sex of Roadhouse more, especially considering where Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis are today. Kelly Lynch's character, a doctor, is sweet and shy, hiding her beauty, as movies like to do, behind a pair of glasses, when we first meet her. And, eschewing violence, she tries to stay out of the crossfire, merely performing her medical role, until circumstance and Swayze's charm tip her emotions his way. When he takes her up against the fireplace, logistically, it must be his taut abs that he is pleasuring her with, but it doesn't matter. We've seen those abs, those battle scars. We buy it. And women get a lingering shot of Swayze's butt.

ACTION: How about action so over the top that when Swayze uses a martial arts move to rip another guy's heart out of his chest at the end of the movie, it seems natural and right and just and in keeping with the rest of the movie? There are bar fights, parking lot fights, martial arts fights, pool cues uses as lethal weapons, knives, guns, you name it. Swayze's background as a dancer must have helped here, and it reminds us that for his brief reign as action hero, he was meant to be moving, meant to be physical, not wrapped up in a parka with a gun as he was in Red Dawn.

MUSIC: Sure, a movie like Top Gun has a cheesy hit soundtrack full of jacked up production and commercial appeal, but Roadhouse one-upped movies like that big time. They got a real band, a working band, the Jeff Healey Band, and worked them right into the movie as road buddies of Swayze's character, blurring the line between fiction and reality. Healey, arguably the finest blind blues guitarist of his generation, has since passed away, but when Roadhouse came out, he was at his peak--he had a popular CD out and then a movie, too. He had a big, fat sound and fresh cover songs by the likes of John Hiatt and ZZ Top mixed in with his competent originals. The dude could play. And over the closing credits, he played a cover version of a Dylan song only heard in concert, "When The Night Comes Falling From The Sky." Cool.

TAGLINE: If you are a male, you remember the tagline from this movie. Most of us have heard it in one context or another. Everytime people meet Swayze's character for the first time, they say the same thing: "I thought you'd be bigger." Yeah, heard that.

Roadhouse was both moral and immoral, violent and filled with touches of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, narcissistic and voyeuristic, overacted and underdeveloped in terms of character. But I would compare it to another 80's cult classic, Big Trouble In Little China, a movie that has no business working on any level, but that is hard to turn off when you come across it while flipping channels. All of the reasons Patrick Swayze was a star for awhile are on display in Roadhouse; they aren't sophisticated reasons. They don't have to be. In Roadhouse, as in life, he fought the good fight, no matter what the odds, and we should grant him his little piece of celluloid and DVD immortality for his endeavors.

Jeff Healey is available at Itunes.