Wild at Heart: David Lynch’s fifth film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1990, just one month after Twin Peaks premiered on ABC. The jury was led by Bernardo Bertolucci, with judges including Sven Nykvist, Anjelica Huston, Aleksei German, and Mira Nair. Knowing nothing else, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a belated win for Blue Velvet, and an acknowledgment (and tacit approval/sponsorship) of Lynch’s place in the zeitgeist. But when the Palme was announced, it was roundly booed; longtime Lynch critic Roger Ebert was especially vocal. Barry Gifford later recalled, “All kinds of journalists were trying to cause controversy and have me say something like 'This is nothing like the book' or 'He ruined my book'. I think everybody from Time magazine to What's On in London was disappointed when I said 'This is fantastic. This is wonderful. It's like a big, dark, musical comedy.”
Indeed it is: Wild at Heart is two hours of adrenalized sex, violence, and florid monsters, “really insane and sick and twisted stuff going on,” as Lynch said. Whether you hook into it or not largely depends on how you respond to Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern. Their affair makes Body Heat look like a Disney movie, and as they speed across the country away from Wicked Witch and Evil Mother Diane Ladd, they fuck over and over and dodge demons of the American underbelly. Wild at Heart is an expansion of Blue Velvet’s opening scene: in that movie, the camera pushes into the lawn and down into a world of darkness and deafening insects. The shot lasts a few seconds; Wild at Heart is 125 minutes. Delirious and hermetic, it’s the closest Lynch ever came to self-parody. It loses steam for me about 45 minutes in, probably because I don’t respond to Cage or Dern at all, but, like all of Lynch’s films, it’s undeniable at a certain level. Other than Inland Empire, he never made a film of such pure image and sound—no wonder then that, for many, this is Lynch’s best.
Act of Violence: A superior noir by Fred Zinnemann, a reliable journeyman who continued working past the collapse of the studio system, a director who made many good movies but no masterpieces. High Noon is overrated: politics aside, the structure makes it an unendurable bore. Gary Cooper goes across town, person to person, looking for help. Everyone says no, but they have their reasons. It’s a movie that has some contempt for the Western genre; no one wonder it’s the go-to pick for people who “don’t usually like Westerns,” at least as far as Classic Hollywood goes. Later, Zinnemann made a fine movie of The Day of the Jackal, introducing Edward Fox, but otherwise, his only really great movie is From Here to Eternity. His career is a monument to liberal respectability: A Hatful of Rain, A Man for All Seasons, Julia, The Men, and The Nun’s Story (and Oklahoma!).
Act of Violence is another story. Van Heflin and Robert Ryan play former best friends, estranged four years after the end of World War II. Ryan’s out for revenge: when they were in a Nazi POW camp, Heflin tipped off the guards that Ryan and several others were planning an escape attempt. Naively, he thought he spared their lives. He was wrong. Ryan got out with a limp, but he still wants to kill the informer. Heflin’s wife (Janet Leigh, 11 years before Psycho) doesn’t know why her husband is so nervous all of a sudden, until he tells her—and us—what he did during the war. One of the first films to deal with complicated WWII issues like this, Act of Violence remains bracing precisely because Heflin admits to collaborating with the Nazis. He’s not the heavy, nor coded as a “foreigner” or a dropout or a freak in any way—he’s all American, and he talked to the Nazis and took the food they gave him. “I ate it. I ATE IT!!!”
Heflin has to die—his guilt is too strong. He almost has a nervous breakdown near the end, flashing back to the POW camp as he runs through a tunnel screaming. He stands in front of a moving train and jumps out of the way at the last second; in the end, he takes a bullet for Ryan, who changed his mind but still hired a contract killer to make sure everything went smooth. That guy (familiar face Barry Kroeger) dies too, burnt to a crisp in a fantastic car crash, and Heflin dies on the ground; Ryan walks away with his wife. Somehow, it’s only 82 minutes.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @MonicaQuibbits