Elvis Goes to Oz: “Wild at Heart”

 I watched Wild at Heart in memory of the late Diane Ladd: it was one of three films for which she received a Supporting Actress Oscar nomination, though she never won the statuette. In 1974, she first earned a chance at Oscar glory for her supporting role as a feisty diner waitress (“Kiss my grits”) in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. She was nominated a second time in 1990 for Wild at Heart, and then a third time a year later for Rambling Rose. Remarkably, in the latter two films she played opposite her real-life daughter, the very talented Laura Dern. (There’s a Roger Corman connection too—Laura, born in 1967, was apparently conceived while her parents were on location, shooting Corman’s biker classic, The Wild Angels.)

 Wild at Heart was written and directed by David Lynch, who had burst into the public consciousness in 1986 with Blue Velvet. In that provocative film, which explored the perverse underbelly of an apparently wholesome mid-western town, young Laura Dern (about 17 at the time) played a schoolgirl whose sunny naïveté is in marked contrast to the perverse doings going on all around her. She was again to star for Lynch four years later, but in a highly different role. In Wild at Heart, Dern plays Lula Pace Fortune, a North Carolina cutie simply oozing with sexuality. Her man is Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage), a ne’er-do-well Elvis Presley enthusiast who treasures Lula even more than he does his genuine snakeskin jacket. Soon after the film begins, he’s carted off to prison, but when he returns it’s Lula he wants most. And the bulk of the film becomes their odyssey through the American South, heading for the distant dream of California.

 I hardly anticipated that this film is an unlikely nod to Dorothy and her friends easing down the Yellow Brick Road. (Instead of walking, the lovers cruise in a gaudy convertible, but the far-off Emerald City shines brightly in their eyes.) Of course an Oz story needs a Wicked Witch, and that’s where Diane Ladd comes in. As shrill socialite Marietta Fortune, she’s determined to separate daughter Lula from her lover, and it’s only gradually that we fully understand why. A widow, Marietta has several useful local men at her beck and call, and her intentions are hardly honorable.

 Though the film’s Oz references do not overwhelm the story, they give it a fanciful quality that sets it apart from darker Lynch projects. Nor does it fit tonally into the familiar “lovers on the lam” film genre, which encompasses grim dramas like Badlands and Natural Born Killers, as well as such older classics as They Live by Night (1948) and Gun Crazy (1950). It’s fun to spot the Ozian allusions, which include ruby slippers, a big pink bubble, and a real-life oversized Munchkin. True, Wild at Heart is not without its moments of graphic Lynchian mayhem. But its violence is of the comic book variety. And the ending is one that Lynch himself considered happily ever after, with true love conquering all, even wicked witches. (This was a marked change from the conclusion of the novel on which the film is based.)

 To the surprise of many (including critic Roger Ebert), Wild at Heart was cheered at the Cannes Film Festival, and received the prestigious Palme d’Or. Back at home, though,  Lynch learned his flick would be X-rated if cuts were not made. What I saw on DVD was still pretty wild. It may be perverse, but I liked encountering a “Dorothy” who could emphatically declare, “You got me hotter than Georgia asphalt.”  

 

A Palm Springs Noir, My Sweet

Palm Springs Noir? The words suggest steamy doings in bone-dry terrain: crimes amid the cactus, double-crossing and doubling down in the precious palm-lined oases that secure a lush life for some but hardly for all. Palm Springs Noir is a terrific new anthology from Akashic, which has made a point of publishing geographically-inspired noir story collections for decades. (Copenhagen Noir, anyone?) The editor of this latest volume in the series is Barbara DeMarco-Barrett—writer, editor, and desert-lover—who happens to be my longtime friend and colleague.

 The writers in Barbara’s collection (including big names like Janet Fitch and T. Jefferson Parker) were carefully chosen both for their talent and their familiarity with Palm Springs and surrounding towns. Each casts a jaundiced eye on the staples of this landscape: swimming pools, mid-century-modern décor, trailer parks, Airbnb rentals, gardeners spritzing the luxuriant foliage despite a dwindling water supply.

 Film Noir of course is the term that French cinéastes have applied to the tough-minded black-&-white thrillers that Hollywood churned out in great numbers circa 1940. Think Double Indemnity and other flicks in which dames like Barbara Stanwyck were up to no good. So it occurred to me to wonder, given how much Hollywood types in the Forties loved to frolic in Palm Springs, whether any films of the noir era depicted that locale. Eric Beetner, whose “The Guest” is one of the gems of the new collection, admitted to me that surprisingly few films were set in the Palm Springs environs during the noir era. While the ending of High Sierra was indeed shot near Palm Springs’ high-desert region, he mostly cited obscure entries like The Threat, “a good and underseen movie with the amazing Charles McGraw.” But Beetner also came up with a 1990 neo-noir that seemed worth checking out. Which is how I came to watch 1990’s After Dark, My Sweet, shot entirely in the Palm Springs-adjacent city of Indio. (Indio, a blue-collar town once best known for date-growing but now the site of the Coachella Music and Arts Festival, is the setting for a creepy Tod Goldberg story, “A Career Spent Disappointing People,” that continues to haunt me.)

 After Dark, My Sweet, based on a Jim Thompson novel, involves such noir staples aa a down-at-the-heels ex-boxer, a beautiful widow, and a shifty guy out to make a buck. There’s cool voiceover narration and a twisty plot about a kidnapping gone awry. Director James Foley, who got his start directing Madonna’s music videos, has a terrific eye for desert landscapes as well as for the watering holes of the rich and the would-be-rich. This is a noir with a difference, of course, because it’s shot in full color, thus depriving the film of the moody shadows that made 1940s cinema so evocative. In their place is Foley’s careful use of color, with its calculated splashes of crimson and blood-red. And the film’s big sex scene, carefully prepared for and long in coming, is far more explicit than anything the Forties might have been able to show. (Curiously, it’s male lead Jason Patric, not the stunning Rachel Ward, whose bare skin is on nearly-full display.) Patric, who also in 1990 would be featured as Lord Byron in Roger Corman’s regrettable return to directing, Frankenstein Unbound, makes a strong lead here, one both tender and volatile, smart and not-so-smart. And Ward’s character is perhaps more complex than most of the femmes fatales we know and love. But it’s Bruce Dern’s Uncle Bud I’ll long remember: a guy loathsome and yet almost lovable, a friendly fellow defined by greed, a true denizen of a film noir world.

 

Bruce Dern: The Mouth that Roars

 Last week I had another Bruce Dern sighting. I was re-watching the 2003 film Monster, in which a de-glamorized Charlize Theron plays serial killer Aileen Wuornos. There was Dern, as a kindly Vietnam vet who doesn’t realize his gal-pal is capable of murder. As always, he was wholly convincing.

Bruce Dern has racked up 144 acting credits since he started out in live TV in 1960. He’s been directed by Elia Kazan (Wild River), Sydney Pollack (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), Alfred Hitchcock (Family Plot), and Quentin Tarantino (Django Unchained). He earned a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination for 1978’s Coming Home. And this year he’s reveling in his Best Actor nod for Nebraska, Alexander Payne’s well-observed indie about a cantankerous old man with quixotic dreams.

It couldn’t have happened to a more interesting guy. In contrast to Nebraska’s taciturn Woody Grant, Bruce Dern is a compulsive talker. A few years back, he and I spoke about film in the Sixties. Of course we touched on Roger Corman, who directed Bruce in The Wild Angels, The Trip, and Bloody Mama. Bruce still regrets that Roger stuck to formula, and “never really chose to direct a bigger budgeted movie with a great story.”  Instead, Roger’s directing career was “a continuation of the Sam Katzman drill. He became the master of it, but he’s better than what he did.”  

Reminiscing about his Hells Angels role for Corman, Bruce segued into a philosophical discussion of why he adores playing bad guy roles: “When I began acting, I realized that in American historical western culture, bad guys were more celebrated in one way or another than good guys or anybody else. And the bad guys had to be celebrated, because they had game. They had social skills. They were not just mf-ers. They could play cards. They could ride. They could obviously shoot. They could obviously womanize. They could gamble. They could do a multitude of things.”

Despite his appreciation for bad guys (he shot John Wayne in the back in The Cowboys), Bruce also has high regard for the man on the white horse. Such a man was his godfather, Adlai Stevenson, who twice was the Democratic nominee for president. Bruce once asked Stevenson (his father’s law partner and best friend) how he had changed as a candidate from 1952 to 1956.  Taking both his hands, Stevenson said, “Bruce, in 1952 I came in on what I thought was a fairly white horse.” Then Stevenson’s eyes filled with tears, as he continued, “In 1956, that horse was a lot greyer, and I realized I can’t do this anymore. . . . As long as you live, you can vote however you want, wherever you want, but don’t vote for that office unless you see somebody on a white horse.”  Bruce sums up this surprising conversation by noting, “I’ve never voted for president in my life. Can you blame me?”

My friend and fellow writer Diana Caldwell had her own Bruce Dern encounter not long ago. She was in a Brentwood stationery store, contemplating some fancy script covers, when a tall, guy with greying hair and a raspy voice engaged her in chat. Thirty minutes flew by as he emphasized how proud he was of his actress-daughter  Laura, and encouraged Diana to submit material to the writing staff of his show, Big Love. Diana insists it was no pick-up attempt: just a friendly chap who enjoyed connecting with others in the biz. At this year’s Telluride Festival, she barely missed the chance to say hello. Here’s hoping that, post-Oscars, Bruce Dern remains his approachable self.