Wishing a very Happy 91st Birthday to a living legend today. Still keeping himself busy, even now, the great Harry Dean Stanton has been in far too many movies to even begin getting into here. I mean he has 199 acting credits currently listed on IMDb, for Christ's sake. So today, we're gonna look at 2 films he's been in, which, aside from their similar titles, share some occasional overlaps and make for, in my opinion, quite an interesting double feature.
Lynch's first foray into TV (that I'm aware of, anyway), The Cowboy and The Frenchman was his contribution to a French produced series of short films called "The French as Seen By..." (other directors included Werner Herzog and Jean-Luc Godard) and, by this point in his career, was the most overtly comedic and wonderfully wacky thing he'd done. It marks the first appearance of a couple of folks he'd work with again later (HDS and Michael Horse) and, if you were to marathon his film and TV stuff chronologically, would work well as a breezy, fun and refreshing palette cleanser between the dark, emotional rollercoaster ride of Blue Velvet and the otherworldly musical phantasmagoria that is Industrial Symphony No. 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted.
