MAGNET contributing writer Jud Cost is sharing some of the wealth of classic films he’s been lucky enough to see over the past 40 years. Trolling the backwaters of cinema, he has worked up a list of more than 100 titles—from the ’20s through the ’80s—that you may have missed. A new selection, all currently available on DVD, appears every week.
Blue Velvet (1986, 121 minutes)
The best movies of David Lynch are an intoxicating blend of film noir and surrealism. For all his “boy next door” charm, the slightly weird side of Kyle MacLachlan (later to star in Lynch’s cult TV classic Twin Peaks) makes him the director’s perfect leading man.
Jeffrey Beaumont (MacLachlan) is a college student who’s returned to Lumberton after his father, a hardware store proprietor, suffers a stroke. On his way home from the hospital, while taking a shortcut through the woods, Jeffrey picks up a rock to toss at a green beer bottle near a shed. When he bends down to pick up another, he finds, instead, a severed human ear, crawling with ants, lying half-buried in the grass. He carefully drops the ear into a nearby paper sack and takes it to a friend of the family, Detective Williams of the Lumberton police.
Jeffrey meets Williams’ daughter, Sandy (Laura Dern), a senior at Central High, when she steps out of the shadows as he’s leaving the detective’s home that night after inquiring about the case. “Are you the one who found the ear?” she asks. “I hear things. My room is right above my father’s office.” One name that keeps coming up, she says, is Dorothy Vallens, a local torch singer who lives in the Deep River apartments, close to where Jeffrey found the ear. “They had her under surveillance for a couple of months.”
Jeffrey picks up Sandy the next day in his mom’s red convertible and takes her to Arlene’s Diner to discuss his plan, while lumber trucks rumble by outside. “There are opportunities in life for gaining knowledge and experience,” he tells her. “Sometimes you have to take a risk. I’ll bet someone could learn a lot by getting into that woman’s apartment.”
Dressed in old coveralls and toting a bug-spray unit from the hardware store, Jeffrey climbs the seven floors to the singer’s apartment the next afternoon. Telling Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) he’s the pest exterminator, he gains entry to her home and pockets a spare set of keys hanging near her stove while he’s spraying her kitchen.
Jeffrey and Sandy catch a few songs by Vallens the next night at the Slow Club to make sure her apartment will be empty when he unlocks the front door. Sandy will honk the car horn four times to warn him when Vallens returns. “I don’t know whether you’re a detective or a pervert,” she tells him nervously. “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he answers. Unfortunately, the car horn is masked by the flushing sound of Vallens’ toilet as Jeffrey relieves himself. Now he’s trapped inside as the singer suddenly enters her apartment and begins to disrobe while Jeffrey peeks helplessly through the louvered doors of her bedroom closet.
