YEAR: 1973
DIRECTOR: Philip Leacock
PINBALL MODEL(S): Queen of Diamonds (1959, Gottlieb)
GAME LOCATION: Roadside diner
NOTES: The setting for this (sadly) overlooked, made-for-TV feature is a roadside diner located on a desolate stretch of American highway. Most of the film's action takes place in a single room, in which this pin-table is the least visually banal aspect of the space's mise-en-scene. The pin can be seen in dozens of shots throughout the film.
In what begins as a fairly run-of-the-mill "vulnerable strangers in an unfamiliar location" setup, the story becomes quite terrifying when the locals begin to overtly hinder the attempts of the outsiders to leave. The spatial promise represented by the American road is inverted by the film and reduced to a claustrophobic and inescapable stage of terror. The closed-boundary space of the pinball playfield serves as a pertinent metaphor for the plight of the woman and her husband, and as the film progresses, we get the sense that they are being "played," much in the way that a player manipulates the action of a pinball table.
