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Lynch in Blue Velvet remembers the overture, a bit of pastoral effulgence undercut by the sinister notes of Lalo Schifrin's score and the sight of an artificially aged Walter Matthau in his yellow sedan. A modest caper in rural New Mexico, botched, natch, fatalities include the mastermind's wife (Jacqueline Scott). (He allows himself a farewell kiss before pouring powder over her corpse and detonating the getaway car.) "Last of the independents," former circus barnstormer and professional crop duster and occasional bank robber, "has a ring of finality." The expected plunder of a few thousands turns out to be a windfall of three quarters of a million, it delights the accomplice (Andrew Robinson) but unsettles the protagonist, who knows mob money when he sees it. "No such thing as worrying too much, not when you got the fuzz and the Mafia after you at the same time." An absolute masterpiece of laconic ingenuity and limpid form, plus a covert Don Siegel self-portrait in the pragmatic operator negotiating corporate "combines." Matthau's hangdog suavity is the calm center, his opposite number is Joe Don Baker as the blithe contract killer with smoking pipe and trim cowboy hat and feminine moniker. "Yeah, I didn't figure you for Clint Eastwood." The cavernous anonymity of Reno offices contrasts with marvelous detail work in seamy dives—a bordello's blend of chain-link and plastic, a gun shop run by the wheelchair-bound geezer (Tom Tully), the domestic studio of a passport forger (Sheree North), a Chinese ping-pong parlor where the director himself cameos as a sore loser. The underworld front (John Vernon) yearns for a sort of bovine peace, what's the worst thing that can happen to a cow? "A short circuit in the electric milker." Vehicular combat in the junkyard ends with the victor popping a stick of gum in his mouth to contemplate his charred foe, the Siegel survivor par excellence. With Felicia Farr, Norman Fell, Woodrow Parfrey, William Schallert, Benson Fong, Marjorie Bennett, and Kathleen O'Malley.
--- Fernando F. Croce |