My pal Tony Dayoub is hosting a Brian DePalma blog-a-thon over at his terrific site Cinema Viewfinder. This is good news for film bloggers, such as myself, who aren’t getting to Toronto this year. Love him or hate him, DePalma’s always fun to write/argue about. I’m still not sure what my contribution will be. Concept/title-wise, I’m torn between “The Ten Mistakes of Body Double” and “The Pleasure Of Being Cuckolded: How Faithless Love Warped DePalma’s World View.” Those who have a preference, note it in comments, why doncha?
I’m torn between those two, as well. On one hand, “Body Double” is one of the few movies of his I DON’T like, so I’d love to see you discussing the failures of it. However, ““The Pleasure Of Being Cuckolded…” is such a bloody marvelous, lyrical title that I absolutely need to see where you take it…
So, as usual, I am of absolutely no help. If I had to pick it, I’d say go with the second because it’s a much broader topic.
The Pleasure Of Being Cuckolded, please.
Thanks for the plug, Glenn.
The Body Double one intrigues me because I’d love to read a takedown of one of my favorite De Palma films. And the “Cuckolded” one sounds like more of an in-depth examination, which would be equally fascinating.
I’m really excited to read either.
The BODY DOUBLE one. There are things about De Palma that I like, but that film isn’t one of them.
I’d vote for “Ten Mistakes,” as long as one of the ten is “Picked a Bill Maher doppelgänger to play the lead.” Talk about body doubles…
I vote for the Body Double one! For whatever reason, that’s my favorite De Palma film, and I would love to get your take on it.
Only ten?
I like Body Double a lot and wouldn’t mind a contrarian viewpoint–or is it even contrarian? That’s a love/hate movie. But fact is, there are a lot of dissections of its flaws already out there, though I am sure yours would be the one to beat.
But a title like “The Pleasures of Being Cuckolded”–that NEEDS to be written up. You can’t come up with a title that great and then leave it hanging. Plus maybe the post would involve some talk about Nancy Allen, who was so fantastically adorable in Dressed to Kill and then went pffffffft, it seems.
So Cuckolded it is.
I vote Cuckolded, simply because I haven’t had a chance to see Body Double yet. BAM is showing Blow Out in October, and I am unbelievably excited. It’s a movie I’ve literally been waiting years to see (because of my impractical fixation on seeing films for the first time in celluloid form).
They both sound great, is there any reason you can’t do both?
Vadim, I have the same fixation and it’s dangerous. I have a rather long list of movies I haven’t seen yet for that reason (coughBressoncoughcough).
And I like Mr. Cairns’ philosophic bent; with that attitude, I want him to go shoe shopping with me. At Barneys.
I think you mean “The Ten Things That Are Incredibly Freakin’ Awesome About BODY DOUBLE”, the first four of which are:
1. Frankie,
2. Goes,
3. To,
and 4. Hollywood.
But as a passionate De Palma partisan– I actually have twice as many De Palma DVDs in my collection than any other director– I’d be up for anything you or anyone else writes about him.
Well… almost anyone else. Armond White’s defense of Mission to Mars leaves a lot to be desired.
Oh, and Vadim: BLOW OUT is De Palma’s masterpiece. Thrilling, stylish, with strong performances all around– Travolta, Allen, and Lithgow playing specific people. (If Allen gets on your nerves in this one, she’s supposed to.) Not a bland archetype or everyman in the bunch. The specificity of De Palma’s characters/writing is one of the things that catapult him above and beyond Hitchcock and his fetish-blondes.
Yeah, I said it.
I’m all for a BODY DOUBLE takedown, if only because I love it so.
Tom, you can say it, but it won’t mean much until you actually watch some more Hitchcock. Because you’re really reacting to a critical cliché rather than anything that’s actually in the films. “Fetish-blondes” maybe do feature, but I’d say less than 10% of the time.
Thanks all, for the kind words and votes. Well then. The reason I would be inclined to do one or the other rather than both is simple: I have finite time, and resources. (Can you tell, by the way, that I’ve been reading a lot of Rex Stout lately?) Although now I’m tempted to tackle both. We’ll see. In any case, I“m going to tackle “Cuckold” first, and it will have a strong “Body Double” component. Just got done debating whether my screen caps of the delightful Barbara Crampton should be S or NSFW. I punked out and opted for safe.
@ Tom: I love ya, but like they say on “Maury,” “O no you di-ant!” I just happen to have watched “The Birds” and good God, De Palma’s never concocted a script that could lick a stain off of Evan Hunter and Hitch’s hem.…And I LIKE DePalma.
@Glenn: Okay, so I’m being a little impish, but my taste does err more towards De Palma than Hitch. I think both are great filmmakers, and both have their share of masterworks and their share of junk– but I will say that I enjoy De Palma’s junk a whole hell of a lot more. FEMME FATALE is easier for me to get through than, say, TOPAZ.
@D Cairns: I’ve actually seen a lot of Hitchcock, thank you very much, and the Master of Suspense did indeed make some great great films: SHADOW OF A DOUBT and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN are probably my two favourites, with FAMILY PLOT a close third. VERTIGO is excellent, as are REAR WINDOW, NORTH BY NORTHWEST, REBECCA, THE LADY VANISHES, THE 39 STEPS, THE LODGER, and FRENZY. PSYCHO is okay; I like William Castle’s HOMICIDAL better.
Story time: One of my brothers is, shall we say, not particularly cinematically inclined. He’s the sort that, if he walks into the room when CITIZEN KANE is on, will say something to the effect of, “What is this gay shit? This is the gayest shit I’ve ever seen. It’s like a pile of poop with mascara on it.” That’s my brother.
But some years back, I was watching DIAL M FOR MURDER, and he walks in, and makes his usual comments– it was so “old” and so “gay”– but after a while, he shut the hell up about it. And when the picture came to its close– you know the part, the husband is just about to get caught– he was absolutely riveted, both of us breathless in excitement, waiting to see what would happen or, more accurately, when.
That’s the power of good cinema, and of Hitchcock.
My point, which I may have obscured by the “fetish-blondes” crack, is that a lot of Hitch’s female characters are either idealized or at the very least archetypes, whereas De Palma’s women, for my money, are a great deal more specific. The only really specific (and thus, to my mind, interesting) women in Hitchcock’s films are Bel Geddes in VERTIGO, Harris in FAMILY PLOT, and Teresa Wright in SHADOW OF A DOUBT.
If I’m letting any kind of critical cliché colour my reactions, it’s the cliché that De Palma is a misogynistic rip-off of Hitchcock. De Palma gives his women personalities and thus he regards them as people; what’s misogynistic about that?
Tom, I don’t see either Hitchcock or De Palma as misogynists but if you poll female film-lovers I think you will find more Hitch than Brian fans. Hitchcock knew how to tap into female anxieties as well as male. De Palma creates strong women with personalities but is more blatant and aggressive about placing them in plots driven by dark, kinky sexual urges; that can be harder to get past.
Siren: Good point. Very good point. Damn. I should have you rebut all my arguments.
Another thing about De Palma’s work that attracts me to it is that same aggressiveness, that bluntness, that sense of transgression. Not just in terms of racy content, but also in terms of structure– cf. “Hi Mom!”– and form– cf. splits (screen & diopter).
And don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that transgressiveness makes De Palma better than Hitch– who could certainly be audacious structurally (PSYCHO) and formally(ROPE)– only that it’s a quality of De Palma’s work that I enjoy.
One problem with comparing these two artists– and I know full well that I’m the one who brought up the comparison, in these parts at least, and I should have known better– is that they really are quite different. Both might work in the thriller genre, and De Palma of course is the first to acknowledge the impact that Hitchcock made on his work, but to my mind both present idiosyncratic, personal visions that use both genre and medium in very different ways to do very different things. I just happen to dig what De Palma does more often and more consistently than what Hitchcock does.
Part of my, well, not exactly anti-Hitch but rather pro-De Palma at the expense of Hitch stance comes from having rankled at the Just-a-pale-imitator assessment I’ve heard from so many critics/pundits who can’t see what are, for me, major differences. (One thing that really made my blood boil was this book that presented one representative frame from 100 filmmakers to illustrate their distinctive visual style, and included the image from De Palma’s SCARFACE at the top of this post as an example of how cliched, unimaginative, and derivative he was. So, to summarize, some asshole gave a precious 1% of his space just to make a joke.)
But, having had some time to think about it (and being reminded by my wife that I promised to be more careful about stirring the pot online) “catapulting” De Palma beyond Hitchcock (or vice-versa, for that matter) is like saying Coppola is better than Scorsese (or vice-versa). Both bodies of work might be filled with romantic explosions of cinema, both might be heirs of the Archers, but in the end, they’re really doing very different things.
So, I apologize, I withdraw, and I won’t mention Hitch and De Palma again in the same sentence if no one else does. Let’s appreciate (or depreciate) each for their own work.
Oh, and Mitch Hedberg is better than Steven Wright.
My only experience with De Palma has been Scarface, bits of Carlito’s Way and The Untouchables, Snake Eyes (of which I remember very little beside the showy steadicam shot) and…uhm…The Black Dahlia. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt despite my abhorrence of pretty much every turgid frame of Dahlia.
So my impression of the guy’s work is limited – any ideas on where to start?
@Zach: Blow Out or Carrie are in my estimation very good places to dip your toe into the water. I’d definitely stay away from Casualties of War right off the bat– it’s great, with Michael J. Fox giving what is really a very fine performance (the best in his career), but it’s very, very heavy stuff, to say the least.
Dressed To Kill is great but is a bit sleazier and so could be off-putting initially but might be a good place to venture after Carrie and Blow Out. I remember Sisters as being kinda uninspired but still pretty good (hey, it’s on Criterion, so it must be… oh, wait, I forgot that Criterion released ARMAGEDDON. Never mind).
Stay away from Hi Mom!– I think it’s kind of casually brilliant, actually, and Bobby De Niro is great in it, but it’s not what you’d call representative of most of De Palma’s work.
And, you know, let’s be blunt, he’s made his share of bad films. Pretty much the last fifteen years or so have been off-years for the De Palminator, and so I’d stay away from those right off the bat. But, as I said before, most of his bad films are still watchable. FEMME FATALE might be pretty terrible (with the leads giving really putrid performances), but I can still watch and enjoy parts of it. (And no, I’m not talking about the five or six minute lesbian make-out heist scene. Though the twist it sets up is pretty brilliant bit of filmmaking misdirection.)
The only film that I found completely and totally unwatchable (haven’t seen the dreaded BLACK DAHLIA yet, and I’m not sure if I want to) was MISSION TO MARS. Twenty minutes in, it felt like I had been watching it for an hour. It’s just the slowest, dumbest, most boring film I’ve ever seen from a major director.
@Tom -
Thanks for the recommendations. I’ve been intrigued for some time by Blow Out and Body Double, and this post is a good excuse to finally see them…I had completely forgotten (somehow) about Carrie, which I did see and enjoyed.
On to the Netflix queue.
Black Dahlia will be Exhibit A in the trial of Josh Hartnett for Crimes against Good Taste.
Dan Coyle, obviously you haven’t seen 40 Days and 40 Nights.
@ Tom Russell – I’d forgotten all about ‘Mission To Mars’, what a strange, strange film that was. Almost enough to make me give up on DePalma completely. Thankfully some of the old DePalma was back in Femme Fatale. But it’s been a disappointing decade for him hasn’t it? Mission to Mars, Femme Fatale, The Black Dahlia and Redacted. He hasn’t made a truly great film since Carlito’s Way back in ’93.
Thanks for the clarification, Tom. I’ve been inclined to think that DePalma makes most sense if we put Hitch to one side. For one thing, Hitch disdained long POV sequences uninterrupted by reaction shots, whereas DePalma uses them all the time. So for all his talk of using Hitchcock’s grammar, DePalma is on his own particular mission.
I do find Hitchcock’s films crowded with specific characters, I wouldn’t like them otherwise. And I think a character can be idealized in terms of glamour and still be human and flawed and particular: both Tippi Hedren’s Hitchcock characters are extremely elegant, but both are, in entirely separate ways, rather high-maintenance, psychologically.
DePalma’s specific too, but partly because of differences in the periods the filmmakers work in, and the kind of stars they use, the form of specificity (that’s not so easy to say!) isn’t really comparable.
Here’s another fun game to play with your favorite film critic and/or blogger (and/or LEAST favorite film critic, come to think of it; this is an example of where I’d love to read Armond White’s opinion, purely for the entertainment value): what was Brian DePalma’s last good film?
My money’s on Raising Cain – simultaneously the most focused yet most unhinged of his many (sometimes, considerably) less accomplished obsess-o-fests over the past two decades. What a cast, too, from the ever-underrated Steven Bauer to maybe the greatest film performance yet from John Lithgow, who does seem to save his very best stuff for Mr. Brian.
Mr. Cairns: Good points all. I do have some trouble getting into the two Hedren movies/enjoying them, a quality that’s been further exacerbated by certain unpleasant anecdotes. But I might give them another shot due to your recommendation.
@Zach: I’d recommend staying away from BODY DOUBLE right away– my (comically-intended) hyperbole about its unimpeachable awesomeness aside, I do think it’s a good film but a very, very goofy one. And it’s hard to look at Craig Wasson without becoming physically ill. Not that he’s a bad-looking dude; he just oozes a weird kind of creepiness that’s both palpable and unpleasant. I’d recommend only coming to BODY DOUBLE after you’ve done BLOW OUT and DRESSED TO KILL to puts its goofiness and excesses into some sort of context.
As for where to start with Brian De Palma’s work, damn the torpedoes and waste no time seeing “Casualties Of War,” the most shattering and emotionally overwhelming of the Vietnam War pictures, with (as Tom Russell properly indicates) Michael J. Fox’s performance deserving a lot of the credit, especially for the all-time-great moment when he declares to his squad mates, “You don’t have to kill me, I told them – AND THEY DON’T CARE!”
If De Palma’s career really needs just one film to justify it, as many (wrongly) appear to think, that film is “Casualties Of War”. But it has many stellar companions: “Hi,Mom,” “Sisters,” “Dressed To Kill,” “Blow Out,” “Scarface” (richer than the Hawks “Scarface,” though that picture is also excellent), and “Carlito’s Way”, plus significant portions of several others.
Naturally, there are plenty of failures, too, and perhaps even some outright junk in the lineup. Still, how much, after all, does someone have to accomplish as a director in the insane-from-the-beginning American filmmaking system to avoid dismissal from even the ranks of the marginally talented, let alone anyone’s Pantheon?
Agree with Michael Dempsey: no reason for newbies not to start with Casualties of War, which to my mind is both his best film and the least crazytown of his great films; in other words, it’s not likely to alienate anyone the way that starting with Body Double or even Dressed to Kill might alienate a newcomer. It also stands on its own nicely; no De Palmian context is really necessary to appreciate it, rare for such a self-reflexive filmmaker.
I really want to see The Black Dahlia a second time. I was just on the cusp of being truly cine-literate when I saw it in theaters in ’06. Three years later, I’m semi-well-versed in both the films of De Palma and the books of James Ellroy, and I’ve read Matt Zoller Seitz’s impassioned defense of the film, so I really want to give it another go.
All films have their defenders:
I think Mission to Mars is one of De Palma’s best: a moving and thrilling sci-fi take on some of his favorite themes – the limits of technology vs. the limitless potential for human compassion. His stuff since then, though, I haven’t liked so much.
I remember Pauline K’s effusive praise of Casualties when it was released, which surprised me when I saw the tediously conventional, black-hat/white-hat war film marinated with dunderheaded brutality (perfectly enshrined in Sean Penn’s showboating performance) in theaters. The best thing I can say about Michael J. Fox’ performance in the film was the opportunity it provided Dana Carvey to deliver a cruelly accurate impersonation of it on SNL. I think there’s a reason Casualties doesn’t come up too much in discussions of great films of the period, itself not so great a period for American films.
Mr. Keepnews,
I disagree about it being black-hat/white-hat. John C. Reilly’s performance, for example, is at once chilling and sympathetic, and shows how a reasonably good person can willingly participate in evil.
And maybe Earthworm and Dempsey are right– I wasn’t thinking so much that Casualties might be off-putting, or even that De Palma needed justification so much as, well, if you want to get a feel for what is “De Palma-esque”, you might want to check out something like BLOW OUT first, as its more representative of the man’s style if not his substance.
Mr. Russell(!),
Re: the superb Mr. Reilly’s performance – such “good German” character transformation strikes me as pretty conventional at this point, and pretty standard when making black-hat/white-hat narrative dynamics register with an audience.
We mostly agree about Blow Out, though – it gathers all of DePalma’s idiosyncrasies, notably his cinephilia and urge to reference past films (a generation before Tarantino, and hardly ever discussed as a major precursor to QT’s cine-besotted sensibility) and crafts something gripping, scary and, by the conclusion, exquisitely sad and lonely. Not sure what you mean by implying its insubstantiality – it’s almost certainly DePalma’s best film, though I’d welcome arguments to the contrary.
Er, make that “it’s”, not “its”. Writing before I went out the door.
I didn’t mean to imply that BLOW OUT was insubstantial, but I see that I opened myself up to that reading, and I apologize. I merely meant that while CASUALTIES OF WAR– which I think is a very very good film, but your mileage may and does vary– is to my mind a great example of why De Palma matters and what he can accomplish, it’s not as good an example of what makes De Palma De Palma.
I understand where you’re coming from in calling Reilly a “good German”, but I disagree: it’s not as if the film lets him off the hook or excuses his actions. He’s less a good German and more a compromised German; he’s not “just following orders” but actively taking part in, and enjoying, the evil– all the while, however, being aware of what it is that he’s doing and that it’s wrong. His last shot makes this apparent and quite moving; John C. Reilly, even when playing bad people, is at his best a moral actor. His character in CASUALTIES OF WAR and his character in MAGNOLIA are not really all that different.
And not to undermine my own argument about the film’s moral complexity– the great thing about art, though, is that it supports a pluarity of interpetations, sometimes mutually-exclusive ones from the same audience member– but you act as if black-hat/white-hat morality is a bad thing. One thing one might take away from CASUALTIES is that there is such a thing as good and as evil, and even if you consider yourself good (cf. Reilly’s character), even if you have your reasons (cf. Penn’s), there are actions that unquestionably evil with no middle ground, no mitigating circumstances– the actions depicted in the film itself, of course, being a prime example.
Tom – Well, “good German” opened myself up to an implication that I was saying Reilly’s character was “just following orders”, which wasn’t what I was trying to convey, so we’re even. By “good German,” I simply meant the internal ethical rot that obtains in an ostensibly “good” character, whose unsteady moral compass permits him to then participate in (spoiler alerts, y’all!) gang rape, murder and their subsequent cover-up. I DO think “black-hat/white-hat morality” in fiction is a generally bad thing, and I further felt so much more could have been done with Fox’s character than to have him frown, stammer and finally clear the air for a pat conclusion with a shovel. We’re clearing agreeing to disagree here, so let me conclude by saying that, form where I sat, that shovel could have been put to other uses in Casualties.
BTW – what IS your favorite DePalma flick?
BLOW OUT, without question. SCARFACE, DRESSED TO KILL, CASUALTIES OF WAR, and THE UNTOUCHABLES are all close seconds– he really had a string of great movies in the eighties that was pretty much uninterrupted. (And, no, I don’t consider BODY DOUBLE to be an interruption, per se– or, if it is indeed a bad film, it’s bad in a uniquely De Palma-esque way.)
But come 1990 and BONFIRE…
fantastic discussion here–I think I’m with Tom in preferring De Palma’s female characters to Hitch’s (with Teresa Wright the towering exception to the rule… I also love Bel Geddes in Vertigo and Vera Miles in The Wrong Man… Shirley Maclaine and Mildred Natwicke in Trouble With Harry are pretty distinctive too–although certainly neither intends to be a “real person”… and I would argue that Kim Novak is SO fetishized in Vertigo that she comes back around the other side to emerge as one of the most compelling protagonists in any Hitchcock film… that “mystery-killing” shift to her POV memories is one of the greatest narratological tour-de-forces in cinema history)
in general though–the De Palma films that feature female leads (and not all of them do) generally go for the gusto in that department… I suppose it’s only fair that I disclose my strong preference for Nancy Allen over Ingrid Bergman, Tippi Hedren or Grace Kelly… you might want to erase anything I’ve said from your brains, after that admission
of course, it goes without saying that both are great filmmakers (and I think DC is correct in arguing that they are essentially very different), and I am always eager to watch either of them, but we are all interpolated into the history of cinema criticism, and have no choice but to dabble in comparisons of this type
my top five De Palmas:
BLOW OUT, FEMME FATALE, CASUALTIES OF WAR, DRESSED TO KILL, OBSESSION
but I love just about all of them
Dave
Wow – no comment on Nancy Allen’s superiority over some deservedly legendary actresses, though I suppose I am glad it was she, and not Grace Kelly, who starred in Robocop (and I am pretty tickled by the blog name “Anagramsci,” worthy of a prison notebook or three).
And permit me to put show some love for Body Double, once more showing DePalma nostril-deep in his, um, element. It’s one of the first films to deal credibly and unflinchingly with America’s ever-evolving/increasing relationship with pornography (unlike, e.g., Schrader’s pathetically risible Hardcore), and leverages Rear Window’s unapologetic voyeurism into a more formally satisfying conceit. Craig Wasson’s pursuit of Deborah Shelton, “climaxing” in the 360-pan kiss (A Man and A Woman, anyone?), is as memorable a sequence as any in DePalma’s oeuvre.
Finally, where does all the hate Craig Wasson generates come from? It certainly isn’t just exclusive to this blog, but Glenn, is he REALLY that bad of an actor? He strikes me as distinctive and perfectly cast in Body Double, Arthur Penn’s underrated Four Friends, Robert Kaylor’s hugely underrated/under-discussed Carny…and from there, I guess the casting directors must agree with you & others, lo these past 25 years. I do think some of the reaction comes from his not-exactly-leading-man looks, which I thought was one thing that made the golden age of the 60’s/70’s and the great character actors who came of age then (your Warren Oates, your H.D. Stanton, &c., &c.) stand out. I’m not trying to suggest Wasson is on those guys’ level as an actor, just as an un-pretty boy. Discuss…