Drive-In Restaurants and Singing Carhops

Above we have Fred MacMurray pausing in the middle of his work day to have a beer at a drive-in restaurant in “Double Indemnity” (1944). Oh, the glamorous life of an insurance salesman.

The earliest depiction of a drive-in restaurant I can think of is “Moon Over Miami” from 1941 (covered here on this post from May 2008). Betty Grable and Carole Landis are singing carhops at Texas Tommy's in a rousing opening number dressed in cowgirl outfits. All their customers appear to be men driving convertibles, which is convenient because it lets us see the cowgirl outfits without obstruction. Think maybe that was what the director was thinking? Or just a coinkydink?

Just the thing you want to see come at you when you want a burger, apparently. Below we have a few more singing carhops in this 1950s short with scantily clad waitresses and leering male customers.


By the time “American Graffiti” (1973) came along, the drive-in restaurant carhop seemed to have become a symbol of the 1950s in movies and TV, yet we really don’t see them in too many movies of the era. Here’s a link to the opening scene of “American Graffiti which takes place at a drive-in restaurant in 1962. I don’t really know how common waitresses on roller skates were. That must have been difficult. Lots of customers accidentally covered in mustard and milkshakes, I imagine.

Evidently, at some point the clientele of drive-in restaurants seems to have switched from world-weary insurance salesmen plotting murders, and leering businessmen, to aimless teens pigging out on French fries and shakes in between drag races.

Below in this cartoon from 1956, “Rocket Squad”, which is a parody of “Dragnet”, Daffy Duck and Porky Pig tail a crime suspect in this futuristic space world to “Elsa’s Blast-Inn”. The push-button menu lists oleo as one of the sandwich condiments. Anybody remember squishing the capsule of yellow food coloring to turn the margarine from unappetizing white to faux-butter?


As long as we’re in the realm of cartoons, but shifting to TV for a minute, you might recall Fred and Barney bought a drive-in restaurant on a 1960 episode of “The Flintstones.” Also with singing carhops. “Here we come on the run with a burger on a bun….”

Some carhops skate, others dance and sing.

The A&W chain still featured drive-in style restaurants when I was young, but I think they’ve dropped them now. I don’t recall any of the waitresses either skating or singing. Just plunking the metal tray on the car door. Which was good enough when all I really wanted was my “Baby Burger” and my little mug of root beer.

What drive-ins do you remember? What other movies can you recall that featured scenes with drive-in restaurants?

Bowling Another Frame

Pushing the re-set button for a moment on our bowling alley theme (something you didn’t have to do in the days of human pinsetters, push any re-set buttons), here’s a look at Fred MacMurray getting his mind off his troubles in “Double Indemnity” (1944) as he takes off in the middle of the work day to go bowling. Such is the glamorous life of the insurance salesman.

In this scene, just as was discussed in this post from April, you can visibly see the pinsetters in the background jumping down to pick up the fallen pins. This film, however, though it was made during the war was set before the war. The director was careful to put male pinsetters in MacMurray’s pre-war bowling game and not the female pinsetters as was common during the war, shown in “Since You Went Away.”

And what’s that in the lane next to him? A woman wearing tailored trousers in public? Before the war? (Come to think of it, I always thought Barbara Stanwyck’s iconic tight sweater in this movie reflected World War II more than the pre-war era.)

The "Super" Market

Despite this intriguing scene from “Double Indemnity” (1944) (see blog post on the film here) where Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck discuss their nefarious plans in a supermarket, this bastion of American society doesn’t seem to have too great an importance in the films of the 1940s through 1950s, when supermarkets actually were a business idea building momentum to the point they became a social force in a new suburban society.

Jerry’s Market on Los Feliz appears to be one of the very early small, self-service markets, located in urban areas unlike the later suburban freestanding supermarkets with acres of parking lot.



By the time we have this scene with Kirk Douglas and Kim Novak from “Strangers When We Meet” (1960) (see blog post on the film here) which, since it takes place in suburbia, a supermarket scene could hardly be avoided, the venerable supermarket had hit its stride. A bit more grand than Fred and Barbara’s hangout, but nothing like the extravaganza SuperStores and Big Box and Bulk Outlets on the horizon for another generation.

The supermarket actually began in the early 1930s by Michael J. Cullen, who opened a barebones enormous self-service grocery store in Queens, New York. The store, and his resulting chain of them, were called King Kullen. Apparently this was the first movie connection with supermarkets, because name was supposed to be a parody of the name King Kong.

Most areas of the US did not really get supermarkets until the 1950s, but heard about their wonders like they might have heard about TV and atomic power long before the advent of these other post-war features of our lives.

Another early Hollywood connection to supermarkets comes in the form of this very first Mighty Mouse cartoon. “Mouse of Tomorrow” (1942) pre-dates Mr. MacMurray’s and Miss Stanwyck’s date in the supermarket by two years, and explains the origin of the Mighty Mouse, which had to do with a supermarket.

So new were the idea of self-service markets, that the word “super” used to describe the market sounded terribly new and terribly funny. We don’t even think the word “supermarket” sounds funny today, but in its earliest days, it seemed absurd referring to a grocery store as something “super.”

It is the conjecture of this cartoon that if it is such a “super” market, it must sell “super” products. A mouse, one of many in his little mouse community, is terrorized by nasty cats. He escapes into a supermarket, where shelves piled high with cans tower above the little guy. It is a frightening new world. When he eats the “super” soup and “super cheese” and washes with “super soap”, he is transfored in a “super” mouse, or, Mighty Mouse.

For more on the history of supermarkets and the heyday of the suburban discount stores, have a look at this really fun website: Pleasant Family Shopping. Maybe you’ll recognize your hometown store as it was back when.

Confessions On Tape

There must be something eternal about a guilty conscience, something that the guilty need to make eternal by recording their confessions for posterity.

In the recently discussed “Make Haste to Live” (1954) (see post here), Dorothy McGuire leads us to the flashback by setting herself down in her darkened office after hours, yanks a microphone to her mouth and starts blabbing the details of her sordid past to a reel-to reel tape recorder.



Fred MacMurray famously unburdened his guilty conscience with a Dictaphone machine in his darkened office after hours in “Double Indemnity” (1944) as he slowly bled from gunshot wounds. At the end of the film, we see several cylinders beside the machine he has used up. These old Dictaphones were like making records in wax, where the voice delivered an electrical impulse that was scratched onto the cylinders. (For more on "Double Indemnity" have a look at this post from January 2008.)

In “The Blue Gardenia” (1953), Richard Conte tries to trap Anne Baxter into a confession, and has a phone recorder and a transcriptionist standing by. He takes no chances, but gets no confession.

For that, Anne Baxter would have to be in a darkened office, all alone, talking to herself.

Would they have tapped out a text message on a Blackberry today? Speak into a mic to record their voice in digital files on their computer with Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software?

Double Indemnity (1944)

In “Double Indemnity” (1944), Barbara Stanwyck takes a chance in her career by playing a character without any redeeming values. She had played her share of fallen women before, but Phyllis Dietrichson was cold, and manipulative. Stanwyck, being Stanwyck, plays her not with the one-dimensional evil person who must and will get hers in the end, but adds that irresistible layering of complexity so that her Phyllis is compelling, and she seduces her audience as much as she does Fred MacMurray.

Fred MacMurray is masterful in his role as the insurance agent who gets sucked into planning an insurance scam involving murder. He is the epitome of the average Joe, a regular guy in a regular job, but not so upstanding that he’s above flirting with a married woman. It would be easy to play him simply as a hapless stooge ensnared in the web spun by Miss Stanwyck. Instead, he also, like Stanwyck, adds dimension to his character. His insurance agent is not just a patsy, or even merely complicit. He gets to be the mastermind of the plot. He weighs his conscience, and comes up wanting.

Mr. MacMurray had the ability to play nice guys, and louses, but he was also able to do something a lot of Hollywood actors in this period either never thought to do or were not allowed to do, and that is to play a guy so convincingly on the fence that he makes integrity seem not like a moral quality, but like a chance game one can pick up or decline, depending on the player’s next move. (He does this equally well in “The Caine Mutiny”, but that’s for another time.)

His father/son relationship with his boss, played by Edward G. Robinson, one of the greats, is fascinating and a very important linchpin to the story. Like many film noir movies, this one has a flashback. The entire film, in fact, is a flashback. It begins with MacMurray recounting the events to follow in his Dictaphone. The movies ends with Robinson, and police, putting two and two together without MacMurray’s taped confession. Robinson is MacMurray’s confessor, the one he turns to for chastisement and for forgiveness. He could have easily run after the crime, but instead he heads to his office to leave a confession to the man he respects most.

Directed by Billy Wilder, the script is by Mr. Wilder and Raymond Chandler. It is lean and muscular, not lyric. The cinematography provides the poetry, the murky Los Angeles night which opens the film, and the shots of the city streets.

The insurance company Fred MacMurray works for has its name printed on the office door, “Pacific All Risk Insurance.” The name is like a morbid joke, All Risk. We see how that rings true for MacMurray’s character.

The film was made during World War II, but is set in 1938, so we need no wartime influences to distract us from the story, which is all toughness, ruthlessness, and remorse at the same time. The only anachronism, which is perhaps forgivable, is Stanwyck’s sweater-wearing scene. The sweater girls of the 1940s (again, a topic for another time) was a provocative fad that became a fashion statement, but was not around in 1938).

MacMurray drives to Miss Stanwyck’s Los Feliz Drive Spanish-style home which he ruminates, “must have cost about $30,000, that is if he ever finished paying for it.” He is there to renew a car insurance policy for Stanwyck’s husband. Miss Stanwyck makes her first entrance wrapped in a towel, and after a bit of sexy banter, we sense that Fred is in some kind of danger the minute he leers in the direction of her anklet. He is there to reinsure the LaSalle and the Plymouth, but she drops a hint that he could make a bigger sale. Her, not just the commission on the accident insurance policy she wants to buy for her husband.

At first this regular guy with the regular job hightails it away from the vixen, as he suspects she wants to murder her husband for the insurance. “How could I know that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle.” What a great line.

We think, like Fred, that we know what Miss Stanwyck is all about, that we have her number. What surprises us, and Fred, is him. After only his first meeting with her, he cannot stop thinking about her, and especially about the idea of possibly knocking off her husband for the insurance. Though he is appalled and disgusted by the very thought, he cannot make himself stop thinking about it. He broods over it, and to his discomfort, finds himself compelled to wonder how such a thing could be accomplished.

When she arrives at his apartment later on, to clear up any misunderstanding on his part so she says, we see that she has him hooked. The scene in MacMurray’s apartment is intriguing. At first they skirt the uncomfortable subject, but soon, without speaking of it directly, they are encircling the problem and encircling each other. Studying each other. Studying the problem, making it not her problem of the overbearing husband from whom she wishes she could be free, but their problem.

We are informed that her husband is occasionally abusive. This sets up a little sympathy for Miss Stanwyck’s character, and how she makes herself vulnerable to him and to us, and keeping it genuine, is nothing short of marvelous.

Mr. MacMurray is not only seduced by her, he is seduced by her problem, and finds it tragically irresistible, a puzzle to master. Like a Rubik’s Cube. Perhaps like some detectives who might themselves, in some recreational mind game, think how to plan the perfect crime, so MacMurray, an insurance salesman, has already begun to plan how to pull off the perfect insurance scam. The double indemnity clause of the title is his idea. It is a $50,000 policy they mean to sell to her husband, and if he dies in a freak accident, the benefit automatically doubles to $100,000.

Committed to the plan, they meet infrequently thereafter, most famously at the Los Feliz grocery, which must have been one of the first self-service markets in the country. He smokes a cigarette in the store as they discuss their plot in whispers behind the canned goods. Unfortunately, it is at this point in the film I am always reminded of Steve Martin in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid” (1982). Dang, that was funny. It forever ruined the seriousness of the grocery store scene for me, but Martin in the sweater and the wig was funny.

All right, back to work. As MacMurray later puts together his alibi, we are taken along to see his intricate preparations, and we’re in the back seat with him when he tags along behind Stanwyck driving her husband to the train station. The murder, as MacMurray emerges from the back seat to strangle her husband, is done off camera. We only see Miss Stanwyck’s eyes, and her layers of emotion, as she stares right at us, not at the act of murder going on in the passenger’s seat next to her. She is sickened, and triumphant, and even possibly aroused by this violence which she has hoped for, but has not committed and has not even orchestrated. MacMurray, regular guy with a regular job, has done it all. When she tells Mr. MacMurray meekly that she will leave everything in his hands, she wasn’t kidding.

After the crime, MacMurray is no longer the man of action, senses heightened, alive with decision. He is sickened, perhaps not so much by what he has done, as being found out.

“I couldn’t hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man.”

His voice over narration throughout the film lets us know what Mr. MacMurray is thinking, so the film flows intimately, confidential, and personal. MacMurray is not really the stooge of an evil woman, but a decent guy who has succumbed not just to her charms, but to his own pride and greed. He makes it feel that it could happen to anybody. Barbara Stanwyck is, rather like MacMurray, an opportunist more than an evil mastermind. She sees a chance, she takes it. So does he. They are foiled, not just by the Code which demands evil be punished, but because if they were successful it wouldn’t be nearly as intriguing. They really would be evil masterminds. They wouldn’t be human. The doom of the Greek tragedy, that’s what makes the film great.

Porter Hall

Porter Hall played a variety of villains, and pompous characters both in dramas and comedies. Some were quite small roles, such as Mr. Belknap in “Going My Way” (1945), whose irritation at having his window broken by kids playing ball brings him to a war of words, not to mention ideologies, with Bing Crosby as Father O’Malley, and announces angrily that he is an atheist when he spitefully chucks the baseball back at Father. To which Crosby replies, when his baseball is returned, “You throw like an atheist.”

Mr. Hall takes it on the chin figuratively and literally through a good part of his career playing unlikable characters, sometimes with an unaffected and natural quality, like his role as Mr. MacCaulay in “The Thin Man” (1934), his third film, and sometimes quite comically over the top, like his neurotic Mr. Sawyer, the Macy’s store psychologist in “Miracle on 34th Street” (1947) who antagonizes Kris Kringle and gets smacked over the head with a cane for it.

His is identifiable in all his films, though in some you have to not blink or you’ll miss him, such as Senator Monroe in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939) or the reporter Murphy in “His Girl Friday” (1940), or Mr. Jackson in “Double Indemnity” (1946).

Mr. Hall acted on Broadway and in touring stock companies in the 1920s and early 1930s before he came to Hollywood. He was in his 40s by the time he appeared in his first film. This shifty, irritable villain, neurotic psychologist, and occasional atheist was a deacon in Hollywood’s First Presbyterian Church, and reportedly an engaging and well-liked man. Evidently, a very good actor.