Robert Blake was worth watching for the guarded intensity he brought to troubled men. Crime stories suited him, but Lost Highway found a stranger use for an actor so adept at making us uneasy.
Fi1m perspective
Robert Blake's Mystery Man in Lost Highway (1997) gives us little reason to relax. We were unsettled by him because that guarded presence makes a supernatural figure feel disconcertingly plausible. David Lynch finds a sharp use for an actor who could draw attention without making his characters easy to know. The film's slow passages still test our patience, and Blake cannot make its difficult storytelling disappear. It remains worth the trouble, with Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette keeping us interested in the people.
Long before that, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) gives him the small, uncredited part of a boy selling lottery tickets. John Huston's gold-prospecting adventure is tense, funny and frank about greed; Humphrey Bogart and Walter Huston are its chief pleasures. We would recommend it warmly, but not as a substantial introduction to Blake. He was then a child performer, with Our Gang (1939–1944) behind him and the Red Ryder series also part of that early work.
Perry Smith in In Cold Blood (1967) was the adult breakthrough, and it is the clearest place to see why troubled men suited him. His guardedness gives that sort of character an unsettling credibility; we need not find a man agreeable to want to watch him. The leads in Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969) and Electra Glide in Blue (1973) extended that casting into fugitive and motorcycle-policeman roles. Baretta (1975–1978) then made the streetwise undercover detective his signature television part.
By the time he was working on Lost Highway, Blake said he did not want to play another policeman. The frustration makes sense after that sequence of roles, but Lynch found something else for him to do. The Mystery Man was his final screen role, and its supernatural menace gave his intensity a use beyond the familiar criminals and policemen. Try In Cold Blood first; leave room for Lynch if a difficult thriller is your idea of a good evening.
Biography
Robert Blake (born Michael James Gubitosi) was an American actor. Billed early in his career as Mickey Gubitosi and Bobby Blake, he began performing as a child singer and dancer and became known as a child actor in the Our Gang short film series from 1939 to 1944 and in entries of the Red Ryder film franchise.
As an adult, Blake appeared in films including The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), In Cold Blood (1967) as Perry Smith, Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here (1969), Electra Glide in Blue (1973), Money Train (1995) and Lost Highway (1997) as the Mystery Man. He starred as the title character in the television series Baretta (1975–1978), for which he received an Emmy award, and continued acting until Lost Highway.
Blake served in the US Army before returning to acting. His final screen role was in Lost Highway.
