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Before director David Lynch got too carried away with his so-called genius, before his television show Twin Peaks brought him into the home and consciousness of the casually pretentious, before he would slap any old weird images together and have people call it art, back in ’86 he made his best film...Blue Velvet. It had much of the surreal oddball touches we’ve come to expect from a "David Lynch film," but instead of relying on hammy artifices, it’s just simply a haunting, funny, and beautifully crafted film. Though it’s challenging and can be considered an "art film," it’s still one of Lynch’s most accessible films and works just as well as a straight suspense movie.

Before Blue Velvet helped push David Lynch further into the "auteur" big leagues, he had already had some major artistic success. His first feature film, the horror, sci-fi, surreal Eraserhead became an instant cult film for both its disturbing imagery as well as the humor in its strange pacing. He got an Oscar nomination for his next film, the beautiful and disturbing studio picture, The Elephant Man. He was miscast as blockbuster director for Dune; the adaptation of the popular sci-fi novel was a massive bomb, both financially and creatively. Though Blue Velvet was produced by the big-time producing Dino De Laurentiis Company and was even originally sold as a mainstream thriller, it was Lynch’s return to his roots with an original screenplay, not developed for him, but by him and his own weird mind. Lynch and the film were obviously embraced by Hollywood. With Blue Velvet he would score another Oscar nomination for directing, but it meant he would never go back to being a "director for hire."

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The son of the legendary animator Max Fleischer, film director Richard Fleischer had a long and often successful career, but he produced an extremely mixed bag of work. It included the good (small thrillers like The Boston Strangler and the noir train flick Narrow Margin, as well as Disney’s big-budget 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea); the bad (Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer and countless other mediocrities); and the ugly (the over-produced musical Doctor Dolittle and the famously bad, 1969's Che!). The courtroom murder drama Compulsion is one of his more interesting films, maybe his best. In 1924 the real life thrill-kill murder of a fourteen-year-old suburban Chicago boy by college prodigies Leopold and Loeb stunned the nation. Represented by the most famous lawyer of his day, Clarence Darrow, their trial becomes the first "trial of the century" (later Darrow would also defend John T. Scopes of the "Scopes Monkey Trial" fame). Before Compulsion their story had inspired the gimmicky Hitchcock film Rope and, later, a number of films and plays, including Swoon and Funny Games which were also able to explore the two killers' potential sexual nature a little more in depth.

The writer, Meyer Levin, had attended the University of Chicago at the same time as Leopold and Loeb. Compulsion, his "non-fiction novel" (years before Capote coined the phrase) renamed all the players and was seen through the eyes of a school reporter, Sid (Levin himself?) and his innocent girlfriend. As adapted for the screen by Richard Murphy (Panic In The Streets), Artie Strauss (Bradford Dillman) and Judd Steiner (Dean Stockwell) are a pair of well off college brats with brilliant minds. Artie is the more outgoing, while the even more genius Judd is an introvert. They plan and almost pull off the "perfect crime," the murder of a young neighbor. Unfortunately, Judd leaves his glasses at the crime scene and Sid (Martin Milner) finds them. As the young men think they are toying with the cops using Nietzsche's superman theory, they slowly spins more webs, getting themselves in deeper and deeper, until finally the cops crack them.

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