The first film David Lynch ever saw, when he was six years old, was a 1952 melodrama by the director Henry King called Wait Till the Sun Shines, Nellie. Shot in bright orange candlelight and deep nocturnal blues, it offers a prehistory for the kind of small American town that Lynch’s own films would later scrutinize. In the film, a barber sets up shop in the mid-1890s in a tiny Illinois settlement which we follow through half a century of growth and modernization. Disaster follows disaster: when his wife learns that he told her a series of lies to make her stay put in a dead-end town, she flees to Chicago only to die in a train crash; their son comes back from World War I so accustomed to killing that he joins the mob and meets a violent end of his own. The critic Gina Telaroli found it fitting that Lynch’s first trip to the cinema was for a film about these sorts of buried domestic sins. The movie itself seems to sense something ominous thrumming under its surface. ‘I wish that you’ll never be hurt, and I wish that you’ll never hurt anybody else’, the widowed barber tells his children on New Year’s Eve, 1900. ‘You’re going into a wonderful time – the twentieth century.’
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