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Lynch's Blue Velvet and Demme's Something Wild begin here, in the year of Sunrise. An attic dweller who reads O'Neill for the romance, the lovelorn dweeb (Harry Langdon) can at last cover his pale calves with the titular birthday gift and venture outside. "Don't worry, Mother. Those pants will not go to his head." The Prize of Beauty comes in the form of the vamp on the lam (Alma Bennett), who's amused enough by his bicycle wooing to give him a kiss still not forgotten when time comes to marry the virtuous maiden (Priscilla Bonner). With his mind on the underworld fugitive, the groom takes the bride out to the woods with a pistol in his pocket. (A brief shot of sunlight piercing through as the tiny figures amble into the immense forest is right out of Lang's Siegfried.) Reality refuses to play ball with the wannabe Bluebeard, who's bopped by boomeranging horseshoes and smacked by tree branches until he sits disconsolately with top hat crumpled over staring eyes. The dreamer's lot, certainly a Frank Capra theme, is directly expressed as a weighty crate on Langdon's shoulders, then envisioned as an alligator repeatedly snapping at his backside. Even life-sized ventriloquist dummies have their part to play in this singular slapstick nightmare, which pushes beyond the nightclub curtain and into a hail of backstage bullets. His world dangerously dilated, the protagonist blinks accordingly: "Why—I'm surprised—my goodness!" Cronenberg has the resolution in A History of Violence. With Gladys Brockwell, Alan Roscoe, and Betty Francisco. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |