The last real earthquake to hit cinema was Blue Velvet. There is much of what noir does best in here: Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey Beaumont slips past the safety rails and hops right into a raging maelstrom of guilt and evil as blithely as any noir protagonist ever did; and Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth is just the necessary incarnation of nightmare that Steve Cochrane was in Arthur Ripley’s The Chase (1946), the most surrealism-propelled crime film ever to sleepwalk out of the Dark City. But perhaps it is Isabella Rossellini’s femme fatale Dorothy Vallens that is Blue Velvet’s greatest gift to posterity. There is something sharply porno-entomological, something of the implacable godless terror with which insects mate and devour, and something terrifyingly true in the bearing of this bravely performed character. Nuns at Rossellini’s old high school in Rome held a series of special masses for her redemption after the release of this film –still a hilarious, red-hot poker to the brain after twenty years. GM (3/1/06)
D, G: David Lynch
F: Frederick Elmes
E: Duwayne Dunham
DA: Patricia Norris
S: Alan Splet
M: Angelo Badalamenti
PE: Richard Roth
CP: De Laurentiis Entertainment Group
Isabella Rossellini, Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Laura Dern, Hope Lange
Park Circus
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Born in Montana, US, in 1946, he shot his first short, Six Men Getting Sick, in 1966. His filmography as a director spans more than 40 titles, including The Elephant Man (1980), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). He was an Oscar nominee for Best Director in three occasions, and won the Palme d’Or at Cannes...
