Blue Velvet has a perfect cast – David Lynch has a brilliant ability to find just the right actors, from the leads to the extras. His film history knowledge pays off handsomely in this regard.
Isabella Rossellini's casting came as a shock to many, especially in Italy, where her director father, Roberto, is a cinema god. Her mother, Ingrid Bergman, was was a screen goddess without peers. Enter David Lynch – he flips that heritage with such deliberate perversion, it just had to work. But Isabella is too smart to allow herself be a mere gimmick – her performance is honest, emotionally vulnerable, and brave. She provides Blue Velvet with a direct link to cinema history, and takes it to the next level by clever subversion.
From her father, Bruce, Laura Dern inherited that gaunt intensity which she fully controls. Cast as an emblem of suburban teenage purity, she never lets her trauma come to the surface. But you can feel it brewing inside, repressed until a future outburst (which came in Lynch's Wild at Heart).
Dennis Hopper, well, now there's a baggage. From a teenage rebellion with James Dean, to riding easy with Peter Fonda on acid, directing a thing called The Last Movie, and fitting without a glitch into the Conradian jungle madness of Apocalypse Now, how could he not be a compelling Frank – the most memorable villain in modern cinema?
Then, there's Dean Stockwell. For some reason the man never gets his due in Velvet-related articles. As Ben, the criminal sidekick to Frank, Stockwell is the only cast member of Velvet capable not only of upstaging Hopper (a nearly impossible task), but also of making him cry. His flawless lip-synching to Orbison is one of the most memorable scenes ever committed to film.
Stockwell has been around. He was the son of The Tin Man's Powell and Loy, then had his hair dyed for The Boy with the Green Hair – all that by the tender age of eleven. He re-emerged as a young adult with Compulsion – another take on the Leopold and Loeb murder trial – where he made Leopold creepy, eerie, and intellectually superior. Stockwell was then 20. He did his share of TV, excelling in Twilight Zone and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, dabbled in biker films, more TV, and with Wenders' Paris, Texas and Lynch's Dune entered the third period of his career. Before Velvet, he starred in an amazing Nicaraguan film, Alsino and the Condor, thumbing his nose at the Reagan policies in South America.
Stockwell's Ben in Velvet is borne out of great cinematic history, much like Hopper's Frank, Isabella's Dorothy and the rest.
I love Blue Velvet. A Norman Rockwell painting as seen through a shattered looking glass. In my book, a perfect 10.
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