One of the wildmen of cinema would have been 75 today.
What better way to celebrate than enjoying two of his finest performances?
Blue Velvet
The role that resurrected his career after a drug-fueled crash and burn.
David Lynch's perfect film, ferreting out the bizarre and unholy in the cracks of suburbia. It's hard to pull off the sort of role Hopper handles here so deftly. The menace he generates seems completely genuine, he sustains it throughout the film and Lynch provides the perfect setting. One of the great modern films and one of the great modern film performances.
Red Rock West
For a while it looked like John Dahl was going to be the next Big Thing. He followed up this note perfect neo-noir with The Last Seduction, which was tremendous, then vanished off my radar. Hopper is great here, as is Nick Cage, holding his tics and mannerisms in check for the most part. A neatly plotted, finely acted and well directed excursion into noir that plays like a mashup of James M Cain and Jim Thompson.
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