The first movie David Lynch ever watched: “It’s not supposed to be a good film”
Do you remember the first movie you ever watched? I certainly can’t pinpoint the first movie that ever entered my consciousness, but I do know that my first experience of going to the cinema was when I was four to see 2005’s Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. I still love the beloved franchise now, 20 years later, so perhaps it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that your earliest cinematic memories always stay with you.
Many decades earlier over in Missoula, Montana, David Lynch was a six year old boy becoming increasingly fascinated by the world around him. It was 1952, and cinema was still very much in its classic era, studio-bound and limited by the censorship of the Hays Code. It was in this climate that the young Lynch would see his first ever movie, which, whether consciously or not, unlocked a creative urge inside of him that would come to define the rest of his life.
“The first film that I remember seeing is Wait Until the Sun Shines, Nellie,” he told Michael Henry in 1999, a movie directed by Henry King that proved rather successful at the box office upon its release. The historical drama featured David Wayne and Jean Peters as the newly wed couple Ben and Nellie Halper, but a series of tragedies strike, revealing the darkness that can be found in everyday life.
While Lynch likely didn’t remember much of the film, you can certainly draw a few parallels between the movie’s themes and those that the director came to occupy himself with during his time as one of cinema’s greatest storytellers. The theme of death breaking apart a family is one of the most obvious here – Lynch explored the shockwaves that spread through a community following the death of Laura Palmer in his iconic television series Twin Peaks. In Wait Until the Sun Shines, Nellie, Ben reflects on his wife’s death, reckoning with questions he might never know the answer to, much like many of the characters in Twin Peaks.
However, the movie’s hopeful ending reflects Lynch’s propensity for finding a silver lining, even if he was exploring the darkest facets of humanity. Lynch was preoccupied with dreams and their destruction, the fallacy of fantasy, and the myth of the American Dream, yet at his core, the filmmaker “genuinely loved people”, as his Twin Peaks producer Sabrina S Sutherland told Far Out.
For all of the darkness that Lynch imbued his work with, you can still find love and promise, not just in the way certain characters interact with one another, but in the way that the filmmaker gave his troubled characters respect and understanding.
In that same interview with Henry, Lynch revealed that he’d love to see Wait Until the Sun Shines, Nellie again, explaining, “It happens that the other night, it was broadcast on television, but I realised that too late, and I only saw the credits at the end. It’s not supposed to be a good film, but I remember certain scenes and I would really like to see it again.”
It’s unclear whether the filmmaker ever got to see the movie again, but if he did, perhaps he realised that there were more similarities between the film’s themes and his own interests than he could’ve possibly imagined.
