CACrown ArchivesThe cinema collection
EN/FR
Search
Menu
Research dossier · Arts & Letters

Wild at Heart (film)

1990 film by David Lynch

Manuscripts, fine bindings, an engraving plate and preserved performance ephemera
Arts and lettersInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 26, 2026
Entity authoritySource title only
Source-derived summary

Wild at Heart is a 1990 American Southern Gothic black comedy romantic crime film written and directed by David Lynch, based on the 1989 novel of the same name by Barry Gifford. Starring Nicolas Cage, Laura Dern, Willem Dafoe, Crispin Glover, Diane Ladd, Isabella Rossellini, and Harry Dean Stanton, the film follows Sailor Ripley (Cage) and Lula Fortune (Dern), a young couple who go on the run across the Southern United States from Lula's domineering mother (Ladd) and the criminals she hires to kill Sailor.

Editorial summary

“Wild at Heart (film)” enters the record as 1990 film by David Lynch. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Wild, Heart and film can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA productive route into publication, performance and collection histories when the underlying object or edition remains clearly identified. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1990, 1989—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Wild, Heart and film.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Wild at Heart (film)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Wild, Heart and film provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 26, 2026. The first chronological checks are 1990 and 1989.

Critical limits

Rights, attribution and provenance may remain disputed even when a general reference summary presents a stable account. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Separate the work, its editions or performances, and its later reception. Catalogue records, publication histories and object files often preserve different parts of that story.

Best used for
  • Identifying works and editions
  • Tracing reception history
  • Finding collection records
Verify next

The original object or edition, catalogue raisonné, performance record, rights file and holding institution.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Wild at Heart (film)”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Wild at Heart (film) primary sources, Wild at Heart (film) archive and Wild research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Wild at Heart (film)”?
  2. Which edition, object, performance or recording is being described?
  3. How did later circulation or interpretation alter the work’s reception?
Subject index

Search terms from this dossier

Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Wild at Heart (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.