The name’s Dalton…’ Nothing epitomised Patrick Swayze’s screen cool quite like 1989’s Road House, an action film very much of its decade.
Sandwiched between
Dirty Dancing and Ghost on Swayze’s CV, it cast him as ‘cooler’ (read bouncer) Dalton, brought in to clean up a Missouri bar.
Swayze, often the swoon-worthy romantic lead, was convincing as the level-headed but double-hard doorman who could take out the trash while still remembering to ‘be nice’. Despite some 80s excesses, Road House was a different kind of action film, and a different kind of hero, to what audiences in that era were seeing from the likes of Schwarzenegger and Stallone.