BY FRANK LOVECE

Bnnil[[
When Brian De Palma yells "Cut!" he really means it. Also "Drill Through!" "Chainsaw!" and "Mutilate!" In 20 years of directing slick, sick thrillers and the occasional (intentional) comedy, De Palma has killed more people in more imaginative ways than even Al Capone, who used a baseball bat in a scene

With the success of 'The Untouchables,' the director critics Ioae to hate finally disarms his foes,
from Hitchcock, his lurid violence and his apparent misogyny. As esteemed critic Andrew Sarris observed, "De Palma
seems most comfortable in that magical realm where the first nice girlan adolescent boy meets turns out to be a sweet

hooker who is not averse to getting down

the director recreated for The Un-

to her garter belt and beyond. " More

touchables. Like Capone, De Palma is a renegade whom the public loves and the critics can't touch. "Brian De Palma goes too far, " wrote Vincent Canby in The New York Times. "Each of his films is guaranteed to offend some of the people all of the time, including his admirers. " Thanks to bloody pop thrillers (Carrie and Dressed to Kill) and style-high flops (Bodl Double and Blow Out), De Palma's detractors include such strange bedfellows as feminists and cineastes. Yet he keeps grinding out glossy audience-pleasers. The tragedy in this congenial arrangement is that this immensely talented technician's films contain virtually no substance. They are billboards, Christmas lights, fireworks. His personal vision is style, nothing else. "Did you know Hitchcock was labeled a shallow entertainer?"De Palma askes in response to that criticism. "lt's true; read the contempor-

crack craftsman than a cinematic visionary, De Palma constructs films with the same methodology that won him science project awards as a teenager-bit by bit, using other people's materials in new ways. Hitchcock's Vertigo became Obsession; Coppola's The Conuersation and Antonioni's BIow-Uf became BIow Out. He even borrowed from Carrie to make The

Fury.Lately he's gone high-class, redoing the classic Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin for an Untouchablss shootout.

At roughly $25 million, The Untouchables-starring Robert De Niro and

Sean Connery-is De Palma's second most expensive film. (Scarface cost a few million more.) Most of his prior work was more modestly budgeted, with correspondingly low to medium profits. Yet De Palma's name in a movie ad always rings a bell-or sets off an alarm. "You create art, " De Palma says wearily, "because you have certain ideas and images in your head,
and the only way

to get them out of your

(.'
J

aneous reviews. His movies

were considered lightweight m)'stery films. " What a coinci- \

dence-that's what critics have often
said about De Palma. De Palma infuriates people. Recognizing his undeniable talent, film scholars have given him grudging credit for "a bold visual

consciousness is to put them on paper or canvas or fiIm. " If he hadn't become a director would he have wound up a wacko?

"Probably, " he replies with a dark chuckle. It's his only laugh in our entire

st1'le" rvhile attacking his frequent swipes

conversation. De Palma is not what you would call gregarious. He is one of those commanding presences who can raise his voice without

U x u z I F z o <
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VIDEO JUNE

1988

rffi;\
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A
Showdowns: A trio of De Palma
hits,

featuring Sean Connery and Kevin Costner in 'The Untouchables' (above), Al Pacino in 'Scarface' (left) and Craig Wasson and Melanie Griffith in 'Body Double.'

I i i I

upping the volume. Some have described the beansh 47-year-old..as "9ury Cooperish, " but dressed in tailored safari jacket

and ready-to-wear cynicism, f)e Palma seems more like Clint Eastwood. Go
ahead. Ask him a question. Make his day,. "l haven't a clue, " he fires back when

g = has. "Why do you like chocolate ice cream? 3l Why are you attracted to one kind of grrl

asked why he likes making the movies he

$i and not another?" Considering that he's filmed surrogate versions of himself as a Ii gf t"";;;; ,.ir"rr as movies starring (then)

{l
=l

wife Nancy Allen, De Palma's answer

seems disingenuous.

Amateur psychologists can trace the dispassionate, almost clinical bloodletting in De Palma's films to the director's youth in Philadelphia. Born to an orthopedic surgeon and an opera singer who performed, says De Palma, "only in her head, " he was the approval-seeking youngest child raised in the shadow of two gifted brothers. As a high school science freak, he worked in a hospital lab and watched his father perform surgery. "Blood doesn't really affect me, " he claims. He went to Columbia University with the idea of becoming an electrical engineer. Once there, "my eyes lwere] opened to

other things in the world. I had ideas-story ideas, film ideas, pictures in my head. I

hocked all my science equipment and bought a camera. " He joined the Columbia

Players thr'ater group, but freshmen

weren't allowed to direct, so De Palma became a cameraman. In the early '60s it era and was shooting cinema verite. "lt was wild. Anything was possible. People weren't so willing to follow a set course. You wanted to make movies, you got a camera and did it. Basically wc were putting together films of our lives. " He switched his major to theater arts
JUNE

seemed everybody had a secondhand cam-

1988 VIDEO

59

BRIAII|

[I PATIU|A

and completed three short frlms 660124, The Story of an IBM Card, Icarus and the silent Woton's Wake, which earned kudos from film critic Pauline Kael and tied for the Rosenthal Foundation Award for best film by an American under the age of 25. When he graduated in 1962 he had a movie-studio writing fellowship to Sarah Lawrence. By De Palma's own reckoning, gradu-

Ganied Away:
Sissy Spacek (left) at the prom in 'Carrie' and Angie Dickinson lacing her attacker rn 'Dressed to Kill.'

ate school was the only time he had to

struggle financially. "I had enough money

from my fellowship and the prizes to get

me through; I did some still photography as well. " And though he saw himself as a sati-

Palma's next

work-f/L Mom! with

rist of capitalist society, he had the business end of moviemaking down cold. With the help of a teacher and an affluent classmate, De Palma was able to finance his first feature, The Wedding Parly, starring Jill

Clayburgh and Robert De Niro in their movie debuts. De Palrna first encountered De Niro "in
a loft, auditioning for The Wedding Party. He was very mild, shy, self-effacing. He did a monologue from a play he was in, Waitingfor Lefty, plus some stuff from acting class. Bobby was a very good actor, just overwhelming. You knew it."

powerftrl mock-documentary segment and a brilliant De Niro performance-were impressive enough to make Hollywood call. In the wake of Easy Rider, studios saw a magical youth market to be tapped. De Palrna like many other young directors, got a one-way ticket to Producerville. Unfortunately, the train stopped first at Get to Know Your Rabbit, an awful1972

Tom Smothers vehicle about a market analyst who drops out to become a tap-dancing magician. De Palma was fired after disagreements with Smothers and the film was edited without brm. Rabbif hopped onto a shelf for awhile before a short, uneventful release. "I had to start all over again, " De Palma recalls. He swears he wasn't wor-

ried. "I've never thought that way.

0bsession
1976. Cliff Robertson, John Lithgow, Genevieve

You

don't get scared; you just keep going. The Scarlace 1983. Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Mary
Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Michelle Pfeiffer,Robert Loggra; dir. De Palma; wr. Oliver Stone. U0m. (R) ss LV also. MCA.

$ntclED
UIOEOORIPIIY

The Wedding

Paily
1963.

rel.

1969.

B&W. Jill Clayburgh

Charles Pfluger,

Even with such talented stars, The

Wedding Party sat unseen until 1969. In the meantime, De Palma shot documentaries for the U.S. Treasury Dept. and oth-

Robert De Niro, William Finley; dir. De Palma. 92m.

VidAmerica.

Bujold; dir. De Palma; 98m. (PG) Hi LV also.

RCA/Columbia.

ers, and gained attention with two lowbudget features: Murder o la Mod (1968) and Greetings. a black comedy about Viet-

The Fury
f978. John Cassavetes, Andrew Stevens, Kirk Douglas; dir. De Palma.
117m.

Sisterc
1973. Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt,

Body Double
19&[. Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry,
Deborah Shelton;

nam War draft jitters that won a Berlin Film Festival award-and turned a respectable

William Finley,
I

profit.

Even at this rudimentary

Palma's technical proclivities are evident.

I stage, O. I
I

Charles Durning; co-wr./dir. DePalma 93m. (R) Warner.

(R) CBS/Fox.

These early works lbound with showr techniques meant to remind viewers that they are, after all, watching a movie. In
Greetings (which also features a boyish De

t,

f/

Phantom ol the Paradise

1974. Paul Williams, Jessica Harper,

Home Movies 1979. Keith Gordon, Nancy Allen, Kirk Douglas, Gerrit Graham; dir. De Palma.
90m. (PG) Vestron.

dir. De Palma.
110m. (R) cc St LV also. RCA/Columbia.

Wise Guys
1986. Danny DeVito, Joe Piscopo, Harvey Keitel, Lou Albano; dir. De Palma. 91m. (R) Hi cc. CBS/Fox.

William Finley,

Dressed to Kill
1980. Michael Caine, Nancy Allen, fuigie

Niro), the loopy, picaresque tale of three chums trying to beat the draft is intercut I i with a subplot about voyeurism as artand, by extension, movies as voyeurism.

Genit Graham;
wr./dir.
De Palma. 91m. (Pc) Hi St. Key.

His following film, DionYsus in '69, achieves the same effect bY using a split screen throughout. One side ts a performance of
Euripides' Greek drama The Bacchap; theother, anaudience react-

Carrie
1976. Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Nancy

Dickinson, Keith Gordon; wr./dir. De Palma. 105m. (NR)

'The Untouchables
1987. Kevin Costner, Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Robert De

LV also. Warner. Blow Out

198f. John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John

ing to

it. The movie

viewer

must continuously choose which side to watch. Dionysus and De

Glifl Robertson in '0bsession.'

Allen, William Katt, John Travolta; dir. De Palma; wr. Lawrence Cohen. 98m. (R) LV also.
CBS/Fox.

Niro, Sean Connery;

Lithgow, Dennis
Franz; wr./dir. De Pdma. 108m. (R) LV also. Warner.

wr. David Mamet;

dir. De Palma. 119m. (R) Hi St cc LV also. Paramount.

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J 6 o Y
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VIDEO JUNE

1988

thing film directors have to do is overcome their tailures. You have plenty before you have a success." If one measure of success is the ability to get steady work, De Palma was already golden. In the midst of other projects, he developed a horror script called Sisters for American International Pictures. Made on the cheap in 1973, this sharply crafted melange of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Rope andPsycho turned a small profit and helped keep De Palma in business. His next out-

has well-thought-out, carefully choreographed camera movements, then they call you that. It doesn't mean anything. " De Palma struggled for years to make a

stint at Sarah Lawrence, the college that

serious, substantial film about murdered

labor-leader Jock Yablonski, but he

couldn't interest backers or a studio. (Yab-

lonski's story was eventually filmed for HBO by another director.) During the
same period, he shot
a bad

horror flick, The

Fury (1978), and-in a generous teaching

break-a minor, semi-autobiographical exercise called Home Mouies (1979), made with students. That same year, he married former model Nancy Allen, whom he'd met on the set of Carrie. Dressed to Kill (1980), De Palma's next film, became his signature work. Ironically, it's the one that cannibalizes Hitchcock the most, especially in its reprise of.Vertigo's museum scenes. Quite unlike a Hitchgave him.his

ng, The Phantom of the Paradise (1974), was independently produced. But one of the big studios bought and buried it. De Palma had discovered genre filmmaking. Let his friend Martin Scorsese direct dramas of widowed mothers and alienated modern

men-De

Palrna would be the

big fish in the little pond of stylish horror/suspense films. Shytng away from the studios, funding for his next two films came from that classic American source: the tax

shelter. Obsession (1976)-a reworking of

Vertigo, in which a man falls in love with the

apparent reincarnation of his murdered

wife-was funded by

small investors looking to lose money. fuguably his best film,

Obsession showcases his style-as-substance technique at its most blatant. Taking one more cue from Vertigo, the film ends with the camera circling completely around CliffRobertson and Genevieve Bujold not just once but another half-circle. This 540-degree pan warranted a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records. The germ of.Obsessionbegan in a res-

taurant after De Palma and fledgling screenwriter Paul Schrader had just
seenVertigo at the L.A. Museum. "People hadn't seen Vertigo in a long time," De
Palma recalls. "It wasn't re-released like it was a few years ago, or on video or anything like that. We started talking about the central idea [reincarnation of a lover] and

thought it'd be fun to take it and run with

it. " De Palma knew there was
a

void where

the aging Hitchcock's movies used to be,

and Obsess ion proveda moderate success.

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So did Carrie (1976), the film that brought Sissy Spacek (and novelist Stephen King) to prominence. Critics began talking about "a Brian De Palma" film. His movies were throwaway thrillers but had a
solid, deviously brilliant hand behind them.

Despite its trappings, De Palma's work demanded to be taken seriously. The incest in Obsession and the sexual fury of Canicwere truly disturbing, yet De Palma
used them for shock effect without following through to make a point.

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these elements were bothersome to many critics, who began calling De Palma a dazzling but empty-hearted visual stylist. He rejects the label. "If a movie's shot with the qlmera in unusual places, " he shrugs, "if it

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cock movie, however, Dressed to

Kill

served up far more graphic violence than the old master had ever countenanced. He failed to repeat that breakthrough success wtth BIow Out (198L), an underwhehning Nancy Allen-John Travolta thrillerlromance about an imperiled recording engineer-again, v.oyeurism as art. De Palma then accepted a studio project that

sic, done up as a star vehicle for Al Pacino from a script by Oliver Stone. (lronically, Lumet had replaced De Palma several years earlier on Prince of the City.) The trio of flamboyant talents did not mesh smootily, and the brutal tale of a Cuban refugee who claws his way to the top less metaphorically than in most American success stories suffers from a lack of overriding vision. Caricaturish and way too long, it did add one memorable, if repug-

nant, moment to the lexicon of cinema: nobody who saw Scarface will ever forget

the chainsaw

scene.

"You only use violent things at certain dramatic moments," De Palrna says in defense of his bloody pyrotechnics. "When they're effective, you put them in; when they're not effective, you don't. If you do
too many, they become less effective. " His sense of what is too many is debatable: in

Sidney Lumet had dropped-Scarface

(1983), aremake of the 1932 gangsterclas-

Body Double (1984), a botched Craig Wasson-Melanie Griffith thriller about a

framed voyeur, a woman is brutally killed by a huge power drill. The scene ends with the long bit whirling tirrough the ceiling of the apartment below, dripping blood. De Palrna defends the scene for its originality,

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customed to the lurid viscera of splatter epics like Driller Killer De Palma began toning it down. But if the abysmal Danny DeVito-Joe Piscopo comedy Wise
Gu.ys (1986)

doesn't have graphic violence, that is about all the good that can be said of it. In this unfamiliar genre, De Palma uses clumsy, grade-school stuff like people scurrying in fast motion and attempts to

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milk jokes that weren't funny in the first place. The film was savaged and met a justified quick death, but De Pakna blames its failure on MGM. "I made a movie for a
company that changed its administration four times while I was involved with it. The

people who inherited Wise Gzys didn't

want to make it, they didn't particularly like it and consequently they dumped it. But, "

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Well, maybe. Clearly, however, it is a step away from De Palma's usual stylistic work-

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camera moves, Hitchcockian swipes, a sense of artificiality and mythologizing, the director doesn't frame the picture in a psychosexual context. No one is made to repent for sexual guilt, and women aren't made to suffer for some imagined sin.
(There are, in fact, almost no women in the story: just Eliot Ness' wife and several prostitutes.) In this project, De Palma is telling someone else's story. He tells it well, but it's not his own-he didn't write the script, put the package together, finance it, originate it orproduce it. Which is just as well for a man so bereft of viewpoint. De Palma now seems willing to put his extraordinary talent in the hands of outside producers and writers. "I've worked hard. I've made a lot of movies. It's time I en-

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