The cafe is on a worn-out old brick street down at the wrong end of Rain City. It's the kind of place that doesn't need to advertise, because its customers are drawn there by their fates. One day, a young couple turn up in a broken-down camper. The kid is named Coop, and he knows he always gets into trouble when he comes to the city, but he needs to make some money to support his little family.
His girlfriend, Georgia, looks way too young to have a baby, but there it is, bawling in her arms. She's a blond with a look in her eyes that makes the Hawk's heart soar.
Coop falls into partnership with the wrong man, a black man named Solo who sits in a back booth at Wanda's and recites poems about anger and hopelessness. Before long, Coop and Solo are involved in a life of crime, and Hawk is telling Georgia she's living with a loser. Wanda stands behind the counter and watches all this happen with eyes that have seen a thousand plans go wrong. She hires Georgia as a waitress.
That turns Hawk into a regular customer. Wanda knows Hawk is in love with Georgia, because Wanda and Hawk used to be in love with each other, and once you learn to hear that note in a man's voice, you hear it even when he's not singing to you.
Coop and Solo are trying to sell hot wristwatches. Hilly Blue doesn't like that. Hilly is the boss of the local rackets, and lives in a house furnished like the Museum of Modern Art. The best way to describe Hilly Blue is to say that if Sydney Greenstreet could have reproduced by parthenogenesis after radioactive damage to his chromosomes, Hilly would have been the issue.
"Trouble in Mind" is not a comedy, but it knows that it is funny.
It is not a fantasy, and yet strange troops patrol the streets of Rain City, and as many people speak Korean as English. It does not take place in the 1940s, but its characters dress and talk and live as though it did. Could this movie have been made if there had never been any movies starring Richard Widmark, Jack Palance or Robert Mitchum? Yes, but it wouldn't have had any style.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7s7vGnqmempWnwW%2BvzqZmq52mnrK4v46tqaitkqGybrXNZqSippRifnqElQ%3D%3D