8 Lost Movie Scenes That Were Found Years Later
2. Blue Velvet - Alternate Introduction
David Lynch's Blue Velvet is dark, uncomfortable and full of interesting, unspoken subtexts. The story is essentially a noir film, with the detective in question being college student Jeffrey Beaumont who, one day, discovers a severed ear. This leads him into the strange underbelly in his idyllic town where he becomes involved with a woman named Dorothy and her abuser Frank.
But Jeffrey lucking upon the ear wasn’t how the film originally started and considering that Blue Velvet was basically cut in half before it was released to the public it’s not all that surprising to hear that. Still, it was assumed that all of this footage was gone forever until one studio-hand found it in a warehouse in Seattle 25 years after its release.
Packaged in the eventual Blu-ray release we get a spattering of scenes, but the most integral is the original opening that starkly begins with Jeffrey chancing upon a rape in the basement of his college. He watches for a few moments before finally interrupting.
Jeffrey’s journey throughout the movie into the seedy criminal underworld of his town feels framed as one of curiosity and voyeurism and thus this is an appropriately unnerving way to start. It gives a deeper sense of meaning to the later scene where Jeffrey watches Frank rape Dorothy from a nearby closet.
During the film, Jeffrey’s love interest Sandy asks him “if he’s a pervert or a detective”. This original opening certainly skews the line on that one.