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+--- Thread: Barry Gifford's "Wild at Heart" (/thread-23357.html)
Barry Gifford's "Wild at Heart" - fredtoast - 03-19-2020
I have always been a big fan of the 1990 David Lynch movie "Wild at Heart". It is the story of two young lovers, Sailor and Lulu, running away from Lulu's mamma, gangsters, and Sailor's parole officer. It has an all-star cast (Willem Defoe, Diana Ladd, Laura Dern, Nicolas Cage, Harry Dean Stanton, Isabella Rossallini). It is wild, and crazy, an brilliant. It won the Palme d'Or Award at the Cannes Film Festival and Ladd got an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. But Lynch made the characters so bizarre that they are almost cartoonish.
I just recently discovered that it was based on a book by Barry Gifford. In fact there is a series of 7 books written over 15 years that tell the life story of Sailor and Lulu over 60 years. I just finished reading them and they are great. His style is like film noir set in the culture of the deep south. The series is a story of pure, true love in a life full of violence. The dialogue is brilliant, the characters are extreme (but much more realistic than in the movie), and the stories are suspenseful cliff-hangers.
You can get all 7 books in one collection that is less than 700 pages. They are mostly dialogue and are fast easy reads. I highly recommend them.
Gifford also wrote the 1997 David Lynch movie "Lost Highway" and the 2002 movie "City of Ghosts" starring Matt Dillon and James Caan.