Femme Fatale (2002)

Femme Fatale is a 2002 erotic thriller (with a very strong neo-noir vibe) written and directed by Brian De Palma. It was a box-office flop at the time although it now has a strong cult following and its reputation has grown considerably. It’s one of my favourite De Palma movies. It’s so very De Palma.

It may simply have mystified and exasperated some people. It takes some wild risks. Whether they pay off or not is something you will have to decide. It depends on your tolerance for thrillers that break the rules.

The most important aspect of this movie is the one that can’t even be hinted at. You do not want to read any spoilers for Femme Fatale. I am not going to offer hints at all. Naturally most online reviewers go ahead and spoil the movie anyway so you may want to avoid them before seeing the movie.

What I will say is that you do need to pay attention when watching this movie. There are things you should be noticing.

It begins with a daring jewel heist during the Cannes Film Festival. The jewels are in the form of a snake brassiere worn by a supermodel. Sexy Laure (Rebecca Romijn) steals the jewels while having sex with the supermodel in the ladies’ room. The heist is a spectacular extended visual set-piece with very little dialogue. When it comes to sheer mastery of technique De Palma has never done anything better. Then we get a chase of sorts, or maybe it’s a stalking, and it’s done as another impressive visual set-piece.

Laure figures she’d be wise to get out of France. Start a new life somewhere. Which she does. That’s going fine until down-at-heel paparazzo Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) snaps her picture. Laure cannot afford to have any photographs of herself. Much too dangerous.

Then the twists start to kick in. Nicolas thinks he’s the knight in shining armour rescuing a damsel in distress. It takes him quite a while to realise that Laure is not a damsel in distress. She’s a psycho bitch. She’s a femme fatale on steroids.

Nicolas is in the spider’s web now. More plot twists follow, before the really big plot twist.

When the so-called New American Cinema burst onto the scene round 1967 it saw itself, like the French Nouvelle Vague, the British New Wave and the New German Cinema, as a revolutionary movement that would sweep away the past and create something totally new. Tradition was something that needed to be scrapped. It was all very adolescent.

Brian De Palma made his first feature film in 1968 but I think it’s clear that that was never his attitude. De Palma saw himself as part of a living tradition of filmmaking. He didn’t want to scrap that tradition. He wanted to be part of it.

Of course his admiration for Hitchcock was part of this. But he didn’t see Hitchcock’s body of work as a resource to be plundered. He had seen Hitchcock’s movies. He understood them. He understood Hitchcock’s methods. He has absorbed them. He then set out to make Brian De Palma movies, making use of the lessons he had learnt from Hitchcock and other masters of the past. Sure, he liked to include Hitchcock homages but they were clever and witty and his movies were always Brian De Palma movies.

He lays his cards on the table right at the start of Femme Fatale. We see a woman watching Double Indemnity on TV. We know that we’re about to see a movie that draws on the filmmaking tradition that produced movies like Double Indemnity.

There’s lots of voyeurism in this movie. With a hero who is a photographer and a photograph as a key plot element that’s to be expected and voyeurism is a theme that De Palma knew how to handle. At times in this movie there are multiple voyeurs. Lots of people are watching Laure.

You want wild crazy camera angles? You got ’em. And lots of very cool overhead shots. You want split screens? You got them too. And naturally split diopter shots. De Palma could get away with things like this. This is a De Palma film so naturally it is very much an exercise in style and it really does have insane amounts of style.

Laure (Rebecca Romijn) is very sexy and very wicked. De Palma doesn’t stint on the eroticism.

Antonio Banderas is very good and very sympathetic, playing a nice guy who is just getting more and more out of his depth.

As for the element I can’t talk about, whether it works or not is up to the viewer to decide. It’s something that has been done before but then De Palma adds some extra twists.

This is one of those movies that is worth rewatching. The second time around you’ll be seeing everything in a radically different way and you’ll be able to appreciate the way De Palma never actually cheats.

Femme Fatale is definitely a neo-noir but it’s a lot more than that. Very highly recommended.

Femme Fatale looks great on Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray extras are, surprisingly, very worthwhile but do not under any circumstances watch the featurettes before you watch the movie. They contain a whole bunch of spoilers.

Carrie (1976)

I saw Brian De Palma’s Carrie many years ago and hated it. I saw it again a few years later and still hated it. But here I am watching it again.

There’s no doubt that much of my dislike for the film stems from my intense dislike of Stephen King’s books. The one Stephen King adaptation I truly love is The Shining and that’s because it’s much more Kubrick than King. As far as I’m concerned the less of Stephen King there is in a Stephen King adaptation the better.

The first thing that strikes the viewer about this movie is the overwhelming all-pervasive femaleness. That tone is set right at the start with the infamous shower scene. While some feminist critics got sniffy about the copious quantities of female frontal nudity that abundant unselfconscious casual nudity serves to establish the overwhelming atmosphere of femaleness. This is the world of women. It is a world entirely separate from the world of men. The girls’ locker room is like a pagan temple reserved entirely for priestesses and female acolytes. Or a meeting of a coven of witches, with the witches all sky-clad. The casual relaxed nudity serves to emphasise the exclusion of men from this world.

This world of women has its own rules and its own rituals. It has its own stages of initiation. Carrie White (Sissy Spacek) is about to experience one of those rites-of-passage.

Carrie’s first period has just started. She is terrified. Her mother had not told her abut such things. Carrie is mercilessly mocked by the other girls. This is a normal female rite-of-passage and the fact that Carrie was not prepared for it marks her as an outsider. Acceptance in this world of women depends on having a proper knowledge of the various rituals. This women’s world is a world of rules and codes of behaviour enforced by other women.

Carrie is ruthlessly persecuted by the school’s Mean Girls. One of the girls, Sue (Amy Irving), who isn’t really a Mean Girl, comes up with a plan. She will persuade her boyfriend Tommy Ross (William Katt) to take Carrie to the Prom. As it happens Tommy is a major heartthrob. Sue’s motives are, surprisingly, well-intentioned. She and Tommy really are trying to help Carrie to come out of her shell. Their plan would have worked but for the evil machinations of Chief Mean Girl and Uber-Bitch Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen) and her sleazy boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta). The Prom ends up not just in disaster but a bloodbath.

Carrie has a gift. Telekinesis. At first her gift is inly moderately destructive but the more upset Carrie becomes the more destructive her power becomes.

There are so many interesting and surprising aspects to this movie. This is entirely a woman-centric movie but it’s not a feminist movie - it has no ideological axe to grind. Carrie’s problems are not caused by the patriarchy. There is no sign of a patriarchy in this movie. Carrie’s problems are caused by the Matriarchy - the world of women in which women enforce the rules on other women. Men play no part whatsoever in this world.

There are only three male characters and only one is significant. That’s Tommy Ross, and he’s a really nice guy. Billy Nolan is a swine. The high school principal is well-meaning but ludicrously out of his depth dealing with Carrie’s very female problems. Tommy Ross represents healthy masculinity. He has so much self-confident masculinity that he has no problems being sensitive and gentle toward women. At no point does Tommy need to do anything to assert his masculinity. It’s just there.

We are half-expecting the plan cooked up by Sue and Tommy to turn out to be a cruel joke on Carrie but it isn’t. Tommy really is trying to help Carrie. She’s at the point in her life when a girl needs to negotiate several rites-of-passage - her first kiss, her first dance, being told by a man for the first time that she’s pretty. Tommy really is trying to guide her gently through these steps. And he has no intention of sleeping with her. He knows she’s not ready for that step. He is not manipulating her. Carrie isn’t stupid. She knows Tommy is not in love with her and that he doesn’t want her to be his regular girlfriend. Tommy knows that Carrie is not stupid. He knows that she knows these things. He is just offering her an evening that will be a beautiful memory for her, and a stage on her way to becoming a grown-up woman.

And it all works. So that when disaster strikes the tragedy takes on an epic quality. Carrie had made it through. Almost.

The relationship between Carrie and her mother is something I have mixed feelings about. The idea of her mother’s fundamentalist Christianity blighting her daughter’s life is trite and heavy-handed and seems out of place in a movie that otherwise avoids the obvious.

It is significant that despite frantic efforts Carrie’s mother Margaret has failed to suppress Carrie’s sexuality and her awareness of her own womanhood. When we see Carrie in the shower in the opening she is experiencing a very innocent sensual enjoyment of her womanness. Carrie is not afraid of the femaleness of her body. She enjoys, in an entirely non-sexual way, caressing her breasts and thighs.

In a later scene her mother expresses her horror of women’s breasts. To Margaret they are symbols of sin. But Carrie is proud of her breasts. She is a woman. Women have breasts. Carrie likes having a woman’s body.

It’s interesting that Carrie is not destroyed by her mother. By the time of the Prom Carrie has already triumphed. She has put on her glamorous prom dress, she has gone to the Prom with the hottest boy in school, she has allowed him to kiss her, she has danced, she has been romanced (in an innocent but enjoyable way), she has learnt to be confident about being a woman, she is ready to enter the grown-up female world. She has won the battle, and the war.

It is not her mother who destroys her, but a teenaged girl. Mean Girls are more formidable enemies than mothers. Carrie’s mother is not the villainess here. The villainess is Mean Girl Chris Hargenson. Nothing is more terrifying than a teenaged girl setting out to destroy another teenaged girl.

I liked Carrie much much more this time. There’s so much to admire in De Palma’s technique. I love the way everything is shot in a way that emphasises that we have entered a world of femaleness. I love the way this movie so often defies out expectations.

I liked Sissy Spacek and I liked Amy Irving as Sue. Nancy Allen is deliciously evil as Chris. I still don’t like Piper Laurie’s caricature of a performance.

This is still not my favourite De Palma movie but it is a remarkable movie that is much much more than the trashy gorefest it seems to be on the surface. Highly recommended.

Carrie is one of the handful of movies that explore the nightmare world of teenaged girls. The other truly great movie of this type, although it approaches the subject very differently, is of course Heathers (1989).

Mission to Mars (2000)

Mission to Mars is Brian De Palma’s 2000 science fiction epic and it’s a very very obvious homage to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The first thing that needs to be said is that De Palma was brought into the project late in the game when the previous director quit. The screenplay had already been finalised. The sensible thing to do would have been to drop the script into the wastepaper basket and start again but De Palma did not have that option. He was stuck with the script (which includes some horrifically awful dialogue). And the cast. De Palma was given an increase in the budget and perhaps that’s what tempted him. It’s a temptation he should have resisted.

The first manned mission to Mars in 2020 ends in disaster. Nobody knows what happened exact that whatever it was was strange and inexplicable. There is a possibility that one crew member survived.

NASA launches a rescue mission and it’s a fiasco. The survivors of the rescue mission do manage to reach Mars. They find the survivor of the first mission and he has a weird story to tell. Something about a force emerging from a mountaintop. He thinks he has found at least the beginnings of an explanation.

And then we find out what it was all about. It’s all deep profound cosmic stuff.

There are countless shots and images that are either direct homages to 2001 or are at least heavily inspired by Kubrick’s movie. Unfortunately Mission to Mars just doesn’t recapture the visual magic and inspiration of Kubrick’s movie. And, even though it was made more than 30 years later, the special effects are just not up to the standards of the Kubrick film.

Kubrick’s spaceship was cooler. Both Kubrick’s and De Palma’s spaceships are partially rotating to achieve artificial gravity. Both movies include scenes demonstrating the disorienting feel of astronauts living inside a rotating cylinder. Pe Palma manages these scenes quite well. Both movies include the kind of gigantic rotating space station that we were promised we would get in the future but the space station scenes in 2001 have a lot more style and wit.

In both movies the interplanetary spaceship runs into major problems. In 2001 the problems occur when the spacecraft’s onboard artificial intelligence, HAL, goes rogue. Very cleverly we never get a precise explanation of why he goes rogue. We are left to speculate. Was it just a random failure or does it have a much deeper significance? In Mission to Mars the spaceship runs into a meteor storm, just like in every 1950s sci-fi B-movie. This is not exactly inspired writing.

In both movies there’s an attempt to save an astronaut drifting helplessly in space, but in Mission to Mars it’s more sentimental and more corny and more conventionally heroic.

Mission to Mars also has an equivalent of the famous monolith from 2001.

There are elements homaged from various other science fiction movies as well. In fact there is nothing at all in this movie that could be called original.

Somehow, despite a vast CGI budget, Mission to Mars manages to be visually uninteresting. The better scenes are way too reminiscent of better scenes in better movies.

Both movies end up getting into philosophical and scientific speculation about our origins and our destiny. Kubrick’s movie ends on a mysterious enigmatic note. De Palma’s movie spells everything out, and it’s not worth spelling out. 2001 is a movie you can watch over and over again. It’s a movie you want to think about. Trust me, once you’ve seen Mission to Mars you will never want to rewatch it. You will never want to think about it. You will just want to forget it.

Given the awful script and cringe-inducing dialogue it’s difficult to judge the acting. The characters are mere clichés. I guess the cast members were doing their best.

The ending of Mission to Mars is unbelievably bad. It’s embarrassing and trite.

We all make mistakes. This movie was a very big mistake for De Palma. Perhaps science fiction was just not his forte.

I’m a De Palma fan but it’s difficult to recommend Mission to Mars.

I watched the German Blu-Ray which looks very nice.

It’s interesting to compare this film to John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars made about the same time. Both movies are generally regarded as misfires by major directors. Ghosts of Mars has some real problems but I think it’s the better film.

Blow Out (1981)

Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) was one of the iconic movies of the 60s. There are lots of things going on in Antonioni’s movie, including a fascinating evocation of Swinging London, but the central plot idea was one that has been much copied. A photographer captures something accidentally in one of his photos, something that may be evidence of a serious crime. In 1974 Francis Ford Coppola took that idea as the centrepiece of his movie The Conversation, but with the evidence being in the form of a sound recording rather than an image. The Conversation is not a bad movie but it’s much inferior to Antonioni’s masterpiece. In 1981 Brian De Palma shot Blow Out which was in effect a remake of The Conversation.

Obviously being a De Palma movie it’s stylistically a lot more interesting than Coppola’s film.

In The Conversation a surveillance guy captures a conversation on tape and becomes obsessed with the idea that it’s related to murder. In Blow Out the central character is a movie sound effects guy.

De Palma is of course well known for being massively (and very fruitfully) influenced by Hitchcock and this subject matter offers obvious possibilities for an exploration of a topic that was always dear to Hitchcock’s heart, namely voyeurism. Making the protagonist a guy involved in the movie business also offers opportunities for exploring the nature of cinema and the relationship between movies and reality (themes De Palma would explore again in his superb Body Double).

Jack Terry (John Travolta) does sound effects for low-budget slasher movies. He’s currently working on Co-Ed Frenzy. He does what he does very frequently in his line of work, he goes for a walk taking his tape recorder with him. He’s recording the sounds of a peaceful riverside. Then he hears a loud noise and then he sees a car plunge through the guard rails of a bridge into the river. The car starts to sink immediately. Jack jumps in, hoping to rescue the occupants. He cannot save the driver but he does manage to save the girl who was a passenger in the car.

He’s naturally feeling fairly pleased with himself. He’s an ordinary guy and ordinary guys very rarely get to do something heroic. He goes to the hospital to make sure the girl will be OK. The girl, Sally (Nancy Allen), was remarkably lucky. She just has a few bruises and is a bit shaken up. Being human Jack naturally tells her that in order to repay him she should have a drink with him sometime. And Sally, being human, agrees to do so.

At the hospital Jack discovers that the driver of the car, the one he wasn’t able to save, was Governor McRyan, a presidential candidate who was quite likely to be the country’s next president. And the dead candidate’s aide tells Jack to forget that there was ever a girl in the car. Jack doesn’t like this but the aide spins him a tale about sparing the feelings of McRyan’s family and he grudgingly agrees. Then he listens to the tape again, the tape he was recording at the time. That sound just before the car plunged off the bridge sounds rather like a gunshot.

From this point on the plot develops as you would expect. Jack’s paranoia steadily increases and his paranoia is justified. What he has discovered will put him in danger, and put Sally in danger. It’s a political paranoia suspense film.

There’s obviously been a conspiracy, but it may have been a conspiracy gone wrong. There’s a sinister guy called Burke (John Lithgow) who is involved but it’s not quite clear what his agenda is. Also involved is a very sleazy photographer named Manny Karp (Dennis Franz).

The plot is actually quite predictable and not very interesting. What impresses about this movie is De Palma’s breathtaking mastery of technique. He uses just about every film-making trick you can think of - split screens, extreme high-angle shots, split diopter shots, Steadicam shots. That can make a movie seem gimmick-laden but that’s the case here. De Palma uses these techniques for a reason, he uses them when they will actually enhance a scene. The movie is like a master class in film-making.

It builds to a very imaginative extended action climax.

The acting is a problem. John Travolta makes a very unsympathetic hero. Maybe De Palma wanted an unlikeable here, or maybe Travolta is just unlikeable. John Lithgow and Dennis Franz are despicable but in a not very interesting way. Nancy Allen (who was married to De Palma at the time) is the only member of the cast who provides any real interest.

There’s a great deal to admire in this movie but like most of the political paranoia movies of its era it’s all a bit too obvious. And it’s just not emotionally engaging.

Despite its problems it’s worth seeing just to see De Palma demonstrating his technical virtuosity, and the ending does provide plenty of thrills.

Blow Out is recommended, but with a few caveats.

Brian de Palma’s Murder à la Mod (1968)

Made in 1967, Murder à la Mod was not Brian de Palma’s first film but it was his first feature film to get a theatrical release (albeit on a very limited scale). This movie then more or less disappeared from view until the folks at Something Weird Video resurrected it on a double-feature DVD. It’s not a very good movie by any means but de Palma fans will find it to be of some interest.

An arty avant-garde movie-maker named Chris (Jared Martin) has been manipulated into making sexploitation movies. Since he’s a Serious Young Film-Maker he finds this to be terribly degrading. He needs $10,000 to get out of his contract but he has no money at all. His girlfriend Karen (Margo Norton) is willing to appear in his movie in order to help him out.

Also involved in the movie is a strange guy named Otto (William Finley, who would go on to appear in many of de Palma’s later movies), and a sleazy producer.

There’s a murder and there’s also a sub-plot involving Karen’s rich friend Tracy (Andra Akers).

This is in many ways classic de Palma stuff with endless homages to other directors like Kubrick and Hitchcock. The homages are so blatant that if anybody else did them they’d be considered outright thefts but somehow de Palma could always get way with such things.

This is very much film student stuff with de Palma using every avant-garde trick in the book - non-linear narrative, jump cuts, handheld camera shots, you name it.  Despite this it could have been great fun but in true film student style it’s outrageously overdone. The biggest problem though is the excessively jokey tone. Making a murder thriller that is also a comedy requires great lightness of touch but at this stage of his career de Palma lack the experience to carry it off.

It’s also much too 1960s, and not in a good way. It has a kind of acid trip psychedelic vibe. Combining silly hippie psychedelic claptrap with murder could have been amusing but the comedy here has all the subtlety of a train wreck.

That’s not to say it’s a complete loss. The graveyard scene is a very impressive visual set-piece that gets the surreal tone right, something the director was obviously striving for in the rest of the movie. In fact there are quite a few excellent visual moments.

The voiceovers could have been effective but they’re done in too relentlessly comic style so that they fail to be disturbing, and they need to be disturbing for the movie to work.

The acting is film student standard, in other words excruciatingly bad.

The movie was filmed in black-and-white and the location shooting in New York has a nice time capsule feel.

The most frustrating thing about the movie is that it almost works. The comedy didn’t need to be eliminated. The director was aiming for a surreal comedy thriller and if that’s what he wanted to do it’s a perfectly valid choice. The comedy did need to be toned down a little.

For all its faults it’s clearly a Brian de Palma movie. Nobody else in 1967 would have made a movie quite like this. The cinematic self-reflexiveness, the disturbingly perverse quality of the erotic element, the combination of models and ice-picks, the touches of black comedy, the voyeurism, all these things are distinctively de Palma and they’re done in distinctively de Palma style.

Something Weird have managed to find a surprisingly good print of this cinematic obscurity. It actually looks quite superb. Murder à la Mod is paired with an even more obscure 1963 thriller called The Moving Finger (which I haven’t yet had a chance to watch) on the two-movie DVD.

Murder à la Mod tries too hard, throws too many ideas into the mix and is too undisciplined but it’s an interesting glimpse of de Palma’s style and technique in embryonic form. If you’re a fan of his work you’ll certainly want to see this one.

Sisters (1973)

Sisters is an early Brian de Palma effort, released in 1973, but the characteristic de Palma obsessions are already well in place. This is classic de Palma black comedy.

We open with an odd scene of a black man watching a young blind woman undressing but in fact it’s part of a reality TV show called Peeping Toms. After the show the black man and the blind girl head off to a night-club called The African Room (his payment for his appearance in the show was dinner for two at this club). She’s a French-Canadian named Danielle. They go back to her place and make love but the lights are off and he doesn’t see what the audience sees - a huge scar on her side. There’s also the slightly disturbing fact that Danielle’ ex-husband likes to park outside her apartment and watch her, constantly.

Early next morning he hears her arguing with someone. She tells him it’s her twin sister and that it’s their birthday. Being a nice guy he decides to buy them a cake but when he shows Danielle the cake her reaction is not quite what he expected - she reaches for a very large carving knife only it’s not the cake she’s going to cut.

The knifing is witnessed by an spiring journalist neighbour, Grace Collier. Grace calls the cops but she’s in their bad books after writing several articles about police racism and brutality so they’re inclined to regard her story with scepticism. The absence of any obvious evidence in Danielle’s apartment appears to confirm their suspicion that Grace is making up stories. But once again the audience knows a lot more than the protagonists, a typical Hitchcock technique that de Palma uses with great skill.

We soon discover that Danielle is indeed a twin, a siamese twin. But what’s the story with her sister Dominique? We are told the answer to that question in ingenious ways. It turns out that these siamese twins were Canada’s first and Grace views a TV documentary about them. Later we will find out more in a series of hallucinatory flashbacks. Grace enlists the help of a rather amateurish private eye. They’re particularly interested in Danielle’s ex-husband who may not be what he seems to be.

While it’s essentially a black comedy, and a very good one, de Palma is able to explore his various cinematic obsessions in considerable depth. Everyone seems to be watching someone else, and we the audience are not only the biggest voyeurs we’re also the most privileged ones since we get to see everything. And while the characters are being voyeurs they’re more often than not misled about what they’re actually seeing. Identity is misleading as well.

Of course there are numerous Hitchcock references but the accusation frequently made of de Palma that he merely recycles Hitchcock is very wide of the mark. He uses Hitchcockian techniques for his own ends. He’s not an imitator, he’s an artist building on the work of another artist.

Margot Kidder is very good as the mysterious twins. The other actors are at least adequate.

Bernard Herrmann’s score is as effective as any he did for Hitchcock himself.

A particular highlight is de Palma’s use of split-screen techniques. This can so easily come off as gimmicky but de Palma shows how it should be done. It’s probably the best use I’ve ever seen of this technique.

The Region 2 DVD from Pathe is reasonably good.

This is vintage de Palma. It hasn't displaced Body Double as my favourite de Palma film but it’s certainly up there in the top three or four.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

Yes, more Brian de Palma. This time it’s Dressed to Kill, from 1980. Another de Palma movie that seems to have enraged almost everybody, and again it’s a movie I see as being essentially a black comedy.

It’s another Brian does Hitchcock movie, but for these who haven’t seen it I can’t say which which Hitchcock movie it’s inspired by because to do so would give away much of the plot. Although I suspect de Palma expected us to see the surprise twist ending coming a mile away, and that seeing it coming was intended as part of the fun.

This movie starts with Kate (Angie Dickinson) pleasuring herself in the shower while watching her husband shave and then getting attacked by a stranger, but in fact this is just a fantasy she’s having while she and her husband are having their usual very unsatisfactory (for her) sex. Right away de Palma established that he’s playing games with us. Kate then has her usual session with her psychiatrist Dr Elliott (Michael Caine), and she makes an unsuccessful attempt to seduce him. By now she’s feeling pretty negative about herself, but a chance encounter in the museum that afternoon leads to some very steamy and confidence-restoring sex.

The museum pick-up is the most celebrated scene in the movie, 22 minutes of dialogue-free pure visual film-making brilliance that is enough on its own to justify seeing this movie. It’s very Hitchcockian, but this is no mere homage, this is de Palma showing us he can do Hitchcock just as well as Hitchcock could, and it’s sufficiently well done to justify the extraordinary conceit required to make such an attempt. If de Palma sometimes puts style ahead of substance then as long as the style is as good as this I’m not complaining.

Kate’s little sexual adventure has unexpected consequences, and to reveal any more concrete plot details would entail too great a risk of spoilers. Suffice to say that the story ends up with a teenage boy technical wizard and a high-class hooker (played by Nancy Allen) playing amateur detective.

Michael Caine was perhaps an odd casting choice as the psychiatrist, for reasons I can’t go into, but he does a reasonable job. Angie Dickinson (an underrated actress who deserved to be offered more good roles) is extremely good, and Nancy Allen is excellent as the hooker with not quite a heart of gold but with plenty of substance to her character. The movie was much criticised by some feminist critics but I think Nancy Allen’s strong, smart, complex, resourceful and courageous hooker is one of the more interesting female characters you’ll find in 1970s American movies. And Dennis Franz plays a tough New York cop. Yes I know Dennis Franz always plays a tough New York cop, but he has nobody to blame but himself - he just does it so well.

Being a de Palma movie there is of course a certain amount (OK, quite a bit) of sleaze and voyeurism, but again I’d say that if you can do sleaze and voyeurism with this much style then let’s have more sleaze and voyeurism.

Dressed to Kill shows a breath-taking mastery of technique and it’s highly entertaining as long as you don’t make the mistake of treating it as a serious thriller. I don’t think it’s as good as Body Double but it’s still a terrific movie.

Body Double (1984)

My Brian de Palma obsession is growing by leaps and bounds. I think I liked Body Double even more than Phantom of the Paradise.

Of course de Palma is just one of the countless film-makers who have done Hitchcock-style thrillers. What most of these people miss is Hitchcock’s love of black comedy, and his delight in playing games with the audience. In this respect Body Double arguably captures the authentic flavour of Hitchcock’s movie-making more successfully than almost any other attempt at a Hitchcock-style thriller, even though it’s not actually a Hitchcock-style thriller at all. It’s not even really a thriller. It’s a movie about Hitchcock-style thrillers. Yes folks, we’re in meta-movie territory here, but don’t despair because Brian de Palma is at the helm and this is actually going to be fun.

I’ll try to make this plot synopsis as vague and spoiler-free as possible but I really don’t think spoilers matter much in this case because I strongly suspect de Palma wants us to know what’s going to happen.

Jake Scully is a struggling actor who suffers from claustrophobia, which causes him to freeze up on house-sitting job, in a magnificent and spectacular home that looks like a flying saucer perched on top of a tower. Apart from the luxurious fittings there’s an added bonus. The house boasts a powerful telescope, and it’s trained on the windows of the apartment house across the valley. And every evening, at the same hour, the woman in one of those apartments provides some free entertainment as she undresse the set of the low-budget vampire movie he’s working on. He’s sent home to take a rest, and on arriving home he finds his girlfriend in bed with another man. Since it’s her house he can’t kick her out, so he’s on the streets. Then he has what seems to be a stroke of luck. Another actor offers him as and masturbates in front of a window. Jake may not have been aware of his voyeuristic tendencies before, but he’s certainly aware of them now.

After a couple of days the free show takes a disturbing turn. The woman is being menaced by a man. Jake decides to play the hero and starts to follow the woman around. At least he rationalises it to himself as playing the hero, but he obviously doesn’t mind following this very attractive woman around. After her purse is snatched and he pursues the thief he has the opportunity of meeting her, and it’s love at first sight. But that night he still can’t resist watching her regular performance, but this time she really is in extreme danger and Jake must play the hero for real, but will he be in time?

After this the movie abandons Rear Window territory for Vertigo territory. Jake has been watching porn movies (so his voyeurism is alive and well) and a performance he’s just seen from porn star Holly Body has triggered some vivid memories. He must meet her. And the obvious way to meet her is by auditioning for a role in one of her movies. He gets the part, and he gets to do a scene with her, and the scene involves getting to know her very intimately indeed, to the evident considerable enjoyment of both parties. Now that they’ve been introduced, so to speak, he asks her out on a date and pretends to be a big-time producer, because there’s a vitally important question he has to ask her and he has to win her trust.

The director signals his intentions right from the start, with a movie-within-a-movie sequence. He then goes to ostentatious lengths to make sure we realise the plot is a combination of Rear Window and Vertigo. It is necessary to make absolutely sure we know this, because if for even one minute we forget that we’re watching a movie and actually start to believe in the events or the characters the whole edifice will collapse. The most surprising thing is the number of reviewers over the years who have missed this and have taken the film to task for the predictability of the plot. The plot is supposed to be predictable. We’re supposed to know exactly what is going to happen, because we’ve seen Rear Window and Vertigo. This is not a suspense film. A suspense film requires a suspension of disbelief, it requires us to believe in it enough that we really do fear for the safety of the characters, that we really do believe they’re in danger. And that’s the last thing de Palma wants us to do. It’s all an elaborate joke, and he wants us to be in on it.

Early on there’s a scene in a car which I’m convinced was done in that obviously fake rear-projection technique that is so familiar from Hitchcock’s own movies. The choice of Craig Wasson for the role of Jake is another indication we’re not meant to be taking this seriously. He can’t act at all, but then he is playing the part of a failed actor so it’s rather appropriate, and his bad acting functions quite effectively. Gregg Henry as his actor buddy is very hammy, and again I’m assuming this was intended. And then there’s the casting of Melanie Griffith as porn star Holly Body. I don’t think anyone has ever accused her of being able to act, but she’s actually delightfully funny. Her line delivery is bizarre as always, but then so is her dialogue, and it works. It’s a thoroughly enjoyable performance. And of course she’s Tippi Hedren’s daughter, which acts as another reminder that we’re watching a movie. And the title of the movie is itself a spoiler.

Not only is de Palma enjoying himself playing Hitchcock games with us, he’s also having fun with some remarkably risque dialogue (which is presumably what earned it an R18+ rating in Australia, the equivalent of a US NC-17 rating). Melanie Griffith has fun talking very dirty, which she manages to make extremely funny. Apparently the British censors cut much of her dialogue, which is tragic. The sex and nudity content isn’t all that high, but would have been much higher if de Palma had been able to convince the studio to go with his original idea of casting an actual porn star as Holly Body, and including unsimulated sex. Which would have enraged his detractors even more, which no doubt would have amused de Palma even more.

This whole movie is a total hoot from start to finish, and I enjoyed every moment of it. It reminds me a little of Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct in the sense that it’s also a movie that has been spectacularly misunderstood, and in both cases the director’s use of the sexual content has also been misunderstood. And I suspect that in both cases the directors have deliberately courted that misunderstanding in a deliberate attempt to provoke an extreme reaction. Body Double is a movie for movie-lovers to treasure.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Brian de Palma’s 1974 musical extravaganza Phantom of the Paradise is a movie that combines completely over-the-top campness with surprising intelligence, and outrageous excess with equalling surprising subtlety. It also proves that it’s possible to include homages to other people’s movies that actually serve a purpose, rather than being mere rip-offs.

And Phantom of the Paradise, a clever blending of the basic plots of Faust and Phantom of the Opera, homages just about everything, from The Cabinet of Dr Caligari to Dr Mabuse, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to Frankenstein, and includes the best ever (and the most diabolically amusing) Psycho homage.

Swan (Paul Williams) is a musical entrepeneur/promoter/producer/manager/all-round music business mogul owing more than a little to Phil Spector. Winslow Leach is a struggling singer/songwriter who attracts Swan’s attention. Winslow has written an ambitious rock cantata based on the Faust legend which he intends to perform himself, but Swan has other ideas. He steals Winslow’s music, and announces that Faust will be premiered at his new club, The Paradise. Winslow’s attempts to reclaim his work gain him nothing but a series of beatings and a spell in prison after Swan frames him for drug dealing. Increasingly unbalanced, Winslow breaks into the corporate headquarters of Swan’ company, Death Records, but is horribly injured and disfigured after his head is crushed by a record press.

His face hidden by an elaborate mask, Winslow takes up residence in Swan’s club, and has now become the Phantom of the Paradise. In a misguided attempt to regain control of his work and to have the cantata performed by a promising young female singer Phoenix with whom he is infatuated he has signed a contract with Swan, not realising that he has (literally) sold his soul. It turns out he’s not the only one who has made this deal.

Swan has decided that Phoenix is too perfect and hires an extravagant glam rock singer improbably named Beef to sing the lead role. This provokes the Phantom to action, and after Beef is disposed of it is Phoenix who takes the starring role after all. She is completely seduced by the adulation of the crowd.

The movie starts in outrageous style and becomes progressively more outrageous, but de Palma retains a sure grip on his material. This is excess, but it’s excess that is exquisitely controlled. Paul Williams is eerie and creepy and exudes evilness, William Finley is great as Winslow/the Phantom, and Jessica Harper is unexpectedly fabulous as Phoenix, nicely combining naïvete, integrity, greed and out-of-control ambition. Gerrit Graham is wonderfully bizarre as Beef.

This is the movie that The Rocky Horror Picture Show aspired to be, but while that movie consistently missed the mark (mesmerised by its own cleverness) this one hits the target every time. Phantom of the Paradise has even more cleverness, but it cleverness with purpose. Brian de Palma uses every visual trick in the book, and all of them work to perfection.

Mention must also be made of the superb soundtrack provided by Paul Williams. It’s a perfect melding of soundtrack and visual imagery.

I love this movie so much. I think I’ve just become a drooling Brian de Palma fanboy.