Mulholland Drive **** (2001, Naomi Watts, Laura Harring, Justin Theroux, Robert Forster, Ann Miller, Dan Hedaya) – Classic Movie Review 1113

This crazy story of Tinsel Town’s flotsam and jetsam is an intriguing, gorgeous looking but utterly unfathomable 2001 surreal noir movie from the master of the macabre, writer-director David Lynch. He landed a Best Director Oscar nomination for it and Golden Globe nominations as Best Director and for Best Screenplay.

The American Film Institute surprisingly nominated it as their Movie of the Year, saying: ‘Mulholland Drive is a classic example of the poetry of personal cinema. The film takes the audience to an erotic world – a dreamlike Los Angeles landscape where things are not always what they seem, but where the images never lose their beauty and power.’ It is loved in France, too, where in 2010 the influential Les Cahiers du cinéma chose it as the Best Picture of the Decade.

Lynch’s regular collaborator Angelo Badalamenti’s fine, menacing score was nominated for a Bafta, and Mary Sweeney won a Bafta award for Best Editing, though that one is a mystery s the editing is so incomprehensible.

There’s a car crash, a woman runs off and stays at her aunt’s home in Tinseltown.  She’s a young actress (Naomi Watts) who arrives home to find a stranger (Laura [Elena] Harring) in her room suffering from amnesia. And then the two women seem to fall for each other in this weird, beautifully crafted but baffling movie puzzle.

The mystifying tedium is sometimes excruciating during the film’s 147 minutes, but you have to admire Lynch’s huge chutzpah and grand sense of style. Watts and Harring do well, and it’s great to have Ann Miller back on screen after a million years away and giving such a notable turn as Catherine ‘Coco’ Lenoix. Sadly it proved to be her final film. She died on January 22 2004, aged 80.

The lesbian sex scenes should attract quite a few admirers, and the movie looks a million dollars thanks to Jack Fisk’s fabulous production designs and Peter Deming’s gleaming cinematography.

But, though Lynch films in high style with gorgeously glossy visuals, it doesn’t seem like he has moved on from Twin Peaks, which was a decade ago. But, then again, why should he? Twin Peaks was a career peak.

Justin Theroux, Robert Forster, Dan Hedaya, the composer Angelo Badalmenti, Mark Pellegrino, Kate Forster, Brent Briscoe, Chad Everett, Lee Grant and Billy Ray Cyrus also star.

Idiotically, in August 2016, it was voted the best movie of the 21st century in a BBC Culture poll of 177 film critics from 36 countries.

Ann Miller (born Johnnie Lucille Collier) was a smash hit as the last actress to star in the Broadway production of Mame in 1969 and 1970, and an even bigger success in Sugar Babies in 1979, with Mickey Rooney, which she played for nine years, on Broadway and on tour, coming to London. She starred in the Paper Mill Playhouse, Millburn, New Jersey, production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies in 1998, in which she sang I’m Still Here.

Refusing to do movies for years because disliked nudity and sex, she finally relented and returned to films after nearly four decades (since 1956, apart from a cameo in Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood) with Mulholland Drive, which contains a lot of nudity and explicit sex. She was named Johnnie by her father, who was expecting a boy. She claimed her difficulty maintaining relationships with men was due to her being Queen Hathshepsut of Egypt in a past life and executing any men who displeased her.

She said: ‘At MGM I always played the second feminine lead. I was never the star in films. I was the brassy, good-hearted showgirl. I never really had my big moment on the screen. Broadway gave me the stardom that my soul kind of yearned for. I have worked like a dog all my life, honey. Dancing, as Fred Astaire said, is next to ditch-digging. You sweat and you slave and the audience doesn’t think you have a brain in your head.’

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 1113 derekwinnert.com