Brian De Palma is a controversial director in the film geek community. He’s loathed by some for his convoluted stories, his extreme style and his habit of commenting on cinema as he makes it, and then loved for the exact same reasons. The Black Dahlia looks to be a De Palma masterpiece, a perfect match up of styles between James Elroy and De Palma. It’s like a dream mix of the peanut butter and chocolate variety, like if Sam Peckinpah made a Cormac McCarthy movie or if Richard Linklater made a Philip K. Dick film. Wait that last one actually happened.
In preparation for Dahlia here’s a look back through the bad and good of De Palma. The trouble with him is, it’s often hard to tell the difference between the two.
The Untouchables/Scarface
These are the ones everyone knows. So let’s just get them out of the way. The Untouchables is 80’s blockbuster filmmaking at it’s best. The thing plays like Star Wars with Tommy guns. It takes place in prohibition era Chicago. Elliot Ness is given a booby prize of a job when the FBI assigns him to take down Al Capone, and no one expects him to succeed much less survive. He struggles on anyway forming a team of incorruptible “Untouchables” who proceed to gun down nearly every hood in Chicago and then some in Canada. The cast is great, Kevin Costner’s priggishness later became annoying but it's just right here, for the boy scout straight Elliot Ness. Sean Connery is at his horny old bastard best, and Robert DeNiro goes Jack Nicholson in Batman over the top. The style is De Palma at his most audacious, from justly celebrated “Odessa Steps” sequence as one of the best action scenes ever made, to the swanky tracking shot in Capone’s hotel home which seems designed to show just how good the bad life can be. The Untouchables is also a treat for those who like their R’s HARD. The balls on this film are incredible, it’s not every film that will kill a seven year old girl in its opening scene.
In speaking of hard R’s, lets go to Scarface. Scarface is a hallmark film, in all its amoral chainsaw to the cranium, Yayo snorting, clown machine-gunning decadent glory. Al Pacino doesn't so much chew scenery as gorge on it as Cuban refugee Tony Montona. He adapts to capitalism with stunning efficiency and guns his way to the top of the American drug trade. De Palma keeps things wonderfully amoral throughout; there’s not so much as a single “shame shame” scene. We just watch Montona’s rise and spectacular fall and laugh with him all the way. It’s a final irony that it is not Montona’s evil that brings him down but the slim shreds of humanity that he has left (he doesn’t want to dynamite some children). Scarface’s dark tone and stunning style have kept it from aging a wick. It still crackles with the same intensity that it did when it was released. While it was originally considered a callow knockoff it is now clear that this a film that deserves comparison to and will last as long as the classic gangster films of Cagney, Bogart, and Robinson.
The Phantom Of The Paradise
From his best known to his most obscure. The Phantom Of The Paradise is a funky little rock opera that is sort of a prototype Rocky Horror Picture Show. It’s a scathing satire of the music industry. The film follows Winslow Leach a bizarre looking songwriter who has the misfortune of having Swan the most powerful man in the industry hear his masterwork, a rock opera based on Faust. Normally this would be a big break but Swan has sold his soul to Satan, and as a result has even fewer scruples then your average producer. When he decides he wants Winslow’s music but not Winslow he doesn’t mess around. He steals Winslow’s music, gets Winslow thrown in prison, has his teeth pulled out, steals Winslow’s girl, and then to rub salt in the wound assigns a repugnant glam singer name Beef to sing Winslow’s work. This is too much for poor Winslow to bear and he breaks out of prison and into Swan’s recording studio where he promptly has his head crushed by a record press. Driven insane Winslow becomes the Phantom of the Paradise and terrorizes Swan’s gala new nightclub vowing to continue his attacks until his beloved Phoenix performs his opera. Amazingly things manage to get worse for poor old Winslow but I’ll let you discover that. The film is filled with De Palma’s trademark style, (with his dueling split screens in all their glory), homages (which are particularly irreverent this time with nods to Touch Of Evil and Psycho which are filled with the same dignity as several clowns filing into a little car), and black humor. In all honesty the songs are kind of average, and the “dancing” (especially Jessica Harper as Phoenix’s epileptic convulsing) are far far below it. Still the film has many pleasures and shouldn’t be overlooked especially by my fellow disciples of Frank-N-Furter.
Sisters/ Blow Out
Of course De Palma will always be known for his thrillers, the entire list could have been composed of them. So I will simply point you towards his two best. Sisters starts off like a romantic comedy: a nice young man meets a nice young woman (none other then Lois Lane herself Margot Kidder) at a game show, they go to dinner and hit it off, then they spend the night together. There is the matter of the nice young woman’s creepy ex-husband who looks like he recently crawled out of pile of radioactive goo (played by none other then the Phantom himself William Finley), but they’ll overcome it, perhaps through the aid of dogs and their pathological desire to love them. But then in the morning the nice young man discovers that the nice young woman has a sister. And she’s not nice. Not nice at all. The film is a great thriller, building it’s tension to a near unbearable intensity before releasing it in the film’s stunning centerpiece: a ten minute split screen sequence that shows how a murder is simultaneously discovered and then covered up. It’s the camera equivalent of an Astaire/Roger’s dance; so graceful you can hardly believe what you're seeing, point and counterpoint clashing simultaneously and preceding in a manner that makes the implausible seem inevitable. The film continues strongly and then lands in a freak show (literally) and a spectacular darkly funny final shot, that puts a period on everything, or if you would prefer a middle finger.
Blow Out is De Palma at his most deadly serious. While there are odd moments of humor here and there, it’s very clear that this was a film that was very close to De Palma’s heart, and he stepped up his game accordingly. Blow Out follows John Travolta as Jack, a former police surveillance expert who now grinds out a living doing sound for crap slasher films. While recording sounds in a park he witnesses a car accident. As he tries to help he finds a woman alive in the car and a man already dead. As it turns out the man was well on his way to becoming the next President. The plot thickens when Travolta discovers a shot on his recording and realizes that he was a witness not to an accident but to an assassination. The film builds to a level of paranoid hysteria with John Lithgow (that’s right John Lithgow) as the scariest freakin assassin ever. The film’s climax manages to be horrible, beautiful and inevitable in equal parts. De Palma’s detractors have always accused him of imitating Hitchcock but just this once De Palma played at his level.
Hi Mom
One of the most subversive films ever made, Hi Mom is one of De Palma’s independent features and it stands as a giant throbbing middle finger to all decency. It’s as if the Sex Pistols made a movie. Robert DeNiro (Yes that Robert DeNiro) stars as Jon Rubin, a disgruntled Vietnam vet who returns home with the ambition to be a pornographer. This modest goal turns out to be too much for him, and he soon falls in with a group of black revolutionaries who want to show America what its like to “Be Black Baby” by dressing in whiteface and assaulting white people in a derelict building. PC this is not. The film is savage social satire and gut bustlingly funny. Fair warning, as if I have not made myself abundantly clear, this film is an X and that rating should be taken seriously. It will cause cardiac arrest in the timid.
Carrie/ The Fury
Carrie and The Fury were warm ups, practice rounds for De Palma’s dream project The Demolished Man. If these where the warm ups then it’s quiet possible that it’s lucky that The Demolished Man was never made, as it might have been the logical completion of human existence, causing our souls to leave our bodies in fiery crosses to form a giant fifteen year old Japanese girl.
Carrie remains one of the best adaptations of a novel I have ever seen. Actually more intense then King’s fine debut novel Carrie comes on nasty. There's the opening shower scene, which for awhile seems as though we have been teleported directly into the mind of a fourteen year old boy until it turns incredibly ugly. Then there’s the final high school apocalypse that predicted the Columbine mentality with stunning specify 20 years early. Carrie rockets on with pitch black humor and sickening violence. The film’s split-screen massacre at the end is the filmic equivalent of meat grinder, and it alone would make it a classic. But the film is best for being the perfect example of how De Palma mixes comedy and terror to make both exponentially more powerful. You laugh and you laugh and then you stop laughing as your smile freezes into a rictus.
The Fury is a far lesser known film. It follows Kirk Douglas as a government agent whose son is discovered to be a psychic. On the verge of retirement to help his son, his partner betrays him tries to kill Douglass, and succeeds in kidnapping his son. His partner is played by John Cassevettes, the grandpappy of the Indies who overplays with his sinister oily best. He attempts to turn the boy into a killing machine, and here’s the De Palma touch: he succeeds. Douglass in the meantime goes on the run eventually falling in with another young psychic who he uses to track his son. But is there anything left of his boy to find? De Palma keeps you guessing until the apocalyptic finale in which all hell breaks loose. There’s plenty of treats here including what could possibly De Palma’s most audacious scene, a ten minute sequence shot in slow motion that proceeds from triumph to tragedy with a shocking rapidness. If you love great cinema, the charge this scene will give you is indescribable. The film was somewhat overshadowed by that other master of cinematic style and depravity, David Cronenberg’s similar themed and quite awesome in it’s own right psychic war film Scanners. The Fury is the superior film though, intelligent, exciting, and with a last shot that’s to die for.
Casualties Of War
De Palma is often dismissed by critics simply because he works in disreputable genres. Look at the above list: Blockbusters, horror films, gangster films, anarchic comedies and rock operas all genres that so called “respectable” critics won’t touch with an eleven foot pole. However, Casualties Of War proves that critics hate De Palma simply because he’s De Palma. How else can you explain how that this amazing film was ignored? The anti-war film is almost always critical gold.
Without fear of hyperbole I can say that Casualties Of War is quite possibly the greatest anti-war film ever made (and yes before someone mentions it in the comments section I have seen Paths Of Glory). Still as vital today as it was twenty years ago Casualities Of War follows a tragic true story from the Vietnam War. A platoon of soldiers run by Sean Penn’s brutal Sgt. Meserve go out on patrol, raid a village, capture an innocent girl, force her on a death march, repeatedly rape her and then brutally execute her. Only one man, PFC Eriksson (Michael J. Forx) resists and when he makes it back to base to report, he’s faced with the horrifying realization that the military brass simply does not care.
The film is sickening in the precision with which it shows how impotent Eriksson’s moral values are in the face of his fellow soldier’s guns and later in the path of an uncaring bureaucracy. In an age of Abu Ghraib and state sanctioned torture the film has more meaning then ever. Penn is phenomenal as a man whose soul has rotted, and Fox is an able everyman, someone who like most of us considers himself good but has never had that concept tested in any significant way. The cast also features a veritable who’s who of character actors in early roles including Ving Rhames, John C. Reiley, and John Leguizomo. The girl’s death walk is one of the most harrowing scenes I have ever seen in the cinema. This film will destroy you.
It’s not fun at all to beat on your heroes but in the interest of Journalistic fairness I must. Avoid these. God oh God avoid these.
Bonfire Of The Vanities
Here’s a tip to would-be great directors: When attempting to solidify your reputation as a great filmmaker DO NOT… I repeat DO NOT rape one of the few works of 20th century literature that is almost unanimously considered a classic. The fact that the same man made this smug piece of crap and Hi Mom boggles the mind. (Truth in criticism: the opening time lapse shot of NYC is quite possibly the most beautiful I’ve ever seen the city look, and the opening unbroken ten minute steadi-cam shot is a delight.)
Snake Eyes
I once thought that De Palma could make a thriller out of anything. Snake Eyes proved me wrong. Stupid on a profound level.
Raising Cain
There is a De Palma film called Body Double. In Body Double there is a fully produced porno musical number set to Relax (Just Do It). It also contains the most phallic shot in the history of cinema, where in a man kills a prone female with a drill that is framed so that it comes down from his crotch. You will notice that Body Double is nowhere on this “worst” list. So. When I tell you that Raising Cain is completely ridiculous and over the top you will understand just what I mean. Tarintino once called this an experiment in how NOT to pay the audience off. Boy was he right.
Wiseguys
I really REALLY wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the meeting in which a roomful of adults assumedly with working brains decided that De Palma was the man to direct a Joe Piscopo/Danny DeVito comedy about wacky mobsters. Was there sorcery involved? Was there some sort of gypsy curse placed on De Palma’s ancestors that came to wreak vengeance on him ?
Mission To Mars
There are some people who will tell you that this is Brian De Palma’s best film. These are the same people who will tell you that Lou Reed’s best album is Metal Machine Music. The lesson? These people are retarded and you shouldn’t listen to their opinions anymore.
Obsession
Brian De Palma and Paul Schrader are two of the most caustic filmmaker’s working today. They collaborated to make the only boring film that either has ever made. Go figure.
