Nine episodes in, I have to wonder if one of the reasons the first Twin Peaks was so inspiring to so many people — many of whom would later become filmmakers or artists or work in the arts themselves — and why it has stayed so long in people’s minds and hearts is that it had more freedom to exist as an open-ended experience. When an episode ended you were able to think about it on your own terms and develop your own relationship to the material. Discussion was more focused, in person, and limited to the friends or family you watched with and maybe the co-workers or classmates you saw the next day. There was no flurry of hard-to-resist Rosetta Stone-esque recaps across the web telling you what each and every detail might signify, who this or that character might really be, and calling out a million (im)possible reference points. And there was definitely no one on Twitter telling you your opinion, your inspiration, was simply incorrect.
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The director Henry King has long been (wrongly) pigeon-holed as a nostalgist due to the many films he made during the golden age of Hollywood in the somewhat loose genre of Americana. He loved to spend time in the past in rural America, often piloting his own plane to the smaller places in the country to find the perfect location for his films. 1952’s Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie is more or less his last film in this vein. On the surface it’s simply another slice of blueberry Americana set in a small Illinois town at the turn of the century, the story framed by the future celebration of the town’s semi-centennial. But underneath it’s an incredibly dark film, both in plot but also aesthetically, with many of the scenes taking place under the night’s dark sky. The story revolves around the Halper family, specifically husband Ben and wife Nellie, and begins when they are newly married and he tricks her into living in said small town. She thought they were headed to Chicago. The American Dream moves forward as Ben establishes a successful barbershop business, buys a home (that Nellie must maintain), and the town begins to grow. All the while Nellie revolts against her new life, first internally and then externally. As her husband continues to look past her obvious suffering, the movie pushes ahead, until halfway through when Nellie can no longer take life in the small, folksy town, she doesn’t fit, and what that kind of life means for her specifically. She has an affair and plans to run away to Chicago on a train. Instead she finds a shocking and violent end in a train crash. The movie only gets darker as Ben Halper and the town try to come to terms with her death, as well as time passing.
Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie is the first movie David Lynch says he saw.
http://filmmakermagazine.com/102922-...ks-the-return/