It's the roadhouse Jimmy Stewart made famous

Despite status as footnote in cinema history, Upper Peninsula's Mt. Shasta Lodge remains log cabin classic

By JIM DuFRESNE
The Flint Journal
April 7, 1991

MICHIGAMME — In 1959, America watched a seductive young woman turn to a small-town lawyer on the silver screen and make an emotional plea.
“I’m lonely, I’m awfully lonely, Paul,” said the woman. “I wouldn’t have gone to that roadhouse if I wasn’t.”

The movie was Anatomy of a Murder, based on the novel by John Voelker. The starlet was Lee Remick, the leading actor was Jimmy Stewart, and that roadhouse was Mt. Shasta Lodge, where today travelers across the Upper Peninsula on US-41 still stop for a beer or the Friday night fish fry.

But few stop, says owner Bob Ball, because of its footnote in cinema history. He said he doesn’t expect that to change much, even with the recent death of Voelker, better known as author Robert Traver.

“Not many realize its role in the movie, and maybe I should have a sign or something along the highway,” said Ball. “I’d say most stop because the lodge looks comfortable, homey, and a little old-fashioned.

“People love places like that.”

Indeed, Mt. Shasta is what many people envision a roadhouse should be deep in the north woods.

Situated on a lonely stretch of road beneath its namesake bluff, the restaurant is a classic lodge. Its interior features polished wood floors, rough beams overhead, a fieldstone fireplace with a mounted deer above the mantel, and a honky-tonk piano in the corner.

It’s not fancy, but it’s comfortable — a place where almost every table has a view of beautiful Lake Michigamme on the other side of the highway.

Originally, the lodge was built just north of Ishpeming in the mid-1930s but was never finished because the contractor went bankrupt during the Depression.

The roadhouse sat empty for a few years until Ball’s parents purchased it in 1939, had it dismantled log by log, and moved it west to Michigamme, where they renamed it Mt. Shasta.

“They paid $1,000 for the lodge, but it cost them another $700 to have it moved,” said Ball.

That roadhouse appearance was preserved despite the move, and that’s what caught director Otto Preminger’s eye when he arrived in 1959 to shoot the film version of Voelker’s novel.

Other structures in Marquette County had a bigger role in the movie, most notably the Thunder Bay Inn in Big Bay. But few will argue that one of the most important scenes involved the lodge.

It opens with Stewart playing the piano alongside Duke Ellington and then seeing Remick, whose husband he was defending in court, dancing with other soldiers.

Despite protests from rowdy soldiers, Stewart pulls Remick outside. In the parking lot of the lodge, he warns her to stop her flirting ways if she wants her husband cleared of murder charges.

Most people are glued to the actions of Remick and Stewart, but those who let their eyes wander to the top of the screen see the sign as clear as day.

Right above the door is the Mt. Shasta sign, even though in the movie this is supposed to be the Halfway House.

Ball has a copy of the film because his wife is in it, standing in the background between two soldiers in an early scene.

Several scenes later, actress Eve Arden leaves a beauty parlor and walks past a woman sitting under a hairdryer.

“That’s my mother,” Ball said.