SISTERS
Many people have bought into the idea that Brian DePalma is a comedic film-maker. New Yorker film critic extraordinaire Pauline Kael started this rumor in writing about--of all things--DePalma's film Carrie. While I agree that the man's motion pictures have their humorous touches, I can't help thinking that speaking of DePalma as a comedic movie-maker is like claiming Charlie Chaplin as a great tragedian. It might be technically correct, but it so misses the point that whoever says it loses a certain credibility, at least with people such as myself, unaccustomed to literal-ism in any form as we are. I'll grant the opposing side the humor in the first five minutes of Blow Out, the parody of Antonioni in Greetings, the fast motion tuxedo scene in Carrie, the murder clean-up segment in Sisters and even the title of Hi, Mom! But DePalma, like his influences, is not primarily any one kind of a film-maker at all, unless frequently brilliant is a new classification.
As the above concessionary examples indicate, Brian DePalma is capable of making audiences laugh, although he typically evokes this visceral response in the midst of some wicked camera work alongside a mess of other emotional complexities. Sisters, released in 1973 and generally considered his breakout film, exploits influences from Tod Browning to Alfred Hitchcock (and it is a long journey from Freaks to Rear Window) while announcing the new director as the master of the split-screen scene. The difficulty in doing the split-screen technique is in resolving the dissonance created in the viewer's mind once the viewer is reminded by what he sees on the screen that this is a motion picture. Flashy technical tricks such as revolving shots, long continuous follow-throughs, multiple-perspective imagery and that type of thing generally announces to the audience: Hey! This is a movie! Good luck suspending your disbelief! But the sophistication DePalma brings to Sisters--a sophistication which the passage of almost forty years has done nothing to diminish--instead declares that we are in the presence of a master and had best behave ourselves if we want to get out alive.
Even DePalma's superior use of visual techniques could be challenged as purely self-serving were it not that they add unspoken commentary to the story. Sisters, the story of Danielle and Dominique, severed Siamese twins, utilizes all of the aforementioned techniques, as well as a scene with English subtitles for a French-spoken sequence where the speaker(s) is off-camera and the dual role is segregated into regular font and italics.
The director's recurring themes are well established in this film. We have the presumed freakish nature of the asylum, the lack of personality in the early victim, multiple personalities in the villains, hard-boiled policemen, human neuroses, multi-dimensional voyerism, and, yes, satire. Sisters is so rife with satire that the film comes close to becoming a self-parody. Early on, we watch a scene where a man is in a room. A woman enters. She appears to be blind. Unaware that the man is in the room, she begins to disrobe. The camera reveals the set-up to be a TV game show where the contestants must predict the man's behavior, just as the theatrical viewing audience does throughout the film that is in process. This type of varicolored psychological work-out makes the large cinema screen a monster in and of itself, a hyperactive iguana that slams its images into us because we are taught from the opening instants that we cannot trust the things we see, just as Jennifer Salt cannot trust what she sees Margot Kidder do. (The rumor is that DePamla, who was a neighbor of roommates Kidder and Salt, gave the women a copy of the script as a Christmas present.)
None of this should be taken to suggest that the morality of the film will parallel that of the viewer. Indeed, there are touches of very vile attitudes in many of DePalma's films, and Sisters is no exception. What are we to make, after all, of the presentation of police as rational cynics, of women as sexualized victims, of people with mental problems as evolutionarily lower than the rest of humanity, of "freaks" being fit for the ridicule they receive? I have never known quite what to make of these things, probably because I have never thought of myself as fitting into any of those categories and chances are I have a lot of gall defending people who don't need me to speak up for them. But if the answer to my question is as simple as saying the director is trying to lull us into hating the victim, how then do we explain the scene near the end of Sisters of the photographers taking pictures of the twins? The scene is staged to the sympathy of the conjoined girls and to the revulsion of the circus-attendees, so whose side are we to be on? Is the film-maker presenting all the different points of view or is he himself simply noncommittal?
It is possible that DePalma never resolved these questions for himself or that he may have tired of asking them over and over. In later years he turned his formidable talents toward thrillers such as Scarface, The Untouchables, Carlito's Way, Redacted (all of which having much to recommend about them, each in its own way being something more than mere "entertainment"), as well as the soon-to-be-released Passion. He makes movies, they do well, and we move on. But I hope I may be forgiven for missing the conflicting moralities of his pre-Scarface work, when he took the sensibilities and budget of an American International picture and imbued those same movies with the awareness of a genuine auteur and the presence of a giant laughing iguana on speed.
THE FURY
Following the tremendous artistic, critical and commercial success of Carrie, the film director Brian DePalma adapted from the Stephen King novel of the same name, the world's greatest Hitchcock imitator released a movie with some of the same themes and some of the same cast members as his earlier gem of a movie. He called it The Fury. Based on the novel and adapted screenplay by John Farris, this movie might have been more interesting if it had been entitled The Furry, because at least then we horror aficionados could have anticipated a movie about deranged bunny rabbits. Of course, that would have stood a chance of actually being funny, which is a tad more than can be said for this disaster film, by which I make no references to Irwin Allen.
Starring Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving, The Fury begins strong enough, with a bunch of rich folks lounging on a Mediterranean beach about to be attacked by unfriendly Arabs in full bisht and chmagh. Kirk Douglas plays Peter, a super spy intelligence guy whose son, Robin, possesses a super telekinetic ability and psychometric powers. Robin, portrayed by Andrew Stevens, gets kidnapped by the nasty John Cassavetes-character, Ben Childers, and so Douglas must find a female with the same psi-powers as his son to help locate him before the evil government witch doctors destroy the world and all that jazz. If this sounds a bit like The Firestarter, you're on the right track but in the wrong train. This movie isn't even that good, if by good you mean supplying an even semi-plausible story-line or providing much in the way of believable acting, other than that done by Douglas.
The good news here is that DePalma does not disappoint when it comes to capturing genuine beauty and on this point I attempt no humor. Kirk Douglas is beautiful. You would have to go back to Spartacus to find him looking any better than this. Amy Irving, likewise, truly radiates a rather startling set of good looks, something I have to admit I had never noticed about her. Matter of fact, I'd often wondered what it was about her that had mesmerized so many people since I had always found her rather plain. In The Fury she does not have that hideous fuzzy hair she had in Carrie and elsewhere. Joyce Easton, who plays her mother, is likewise something of a knockout. Carrie Snodgress starts out looking quite terrible, but by the time we discover that Kirk Douglas loves her, she is looking fine indeed.
But the flattering photography is not merely limited to the humanoids in this film. The cities themselves--the filming was 99% in Chicago and 1% Caesarai, Israel--scream out their gorgeoisty, as do the internal architectural structures. Shopping malls begin a DePalma tradition with this film, becoming a recurring source of maze-like majesty.
And that brings us to the rather sad part of this "Experiment in terror and suspense." Deliberately or not--and the director is such a craftsman and perfectionist that I can't imagine he'd leave anything to chance--this movie also offers up an unfortunate string of simpleminded stereotypes far below the abilities of such an "auteur." For instance? Well, there's the early Arab attack on the happy people on the coast of the "Mid East," as the film calls it. Later in the film, Robin, the psi-power guy, throws a shit fit and causes an amusement park ride called the Paratrooper to come unhinged and fling a car of Arabs off the ride and into a restaurant lounge, clearly some serendipitous revenge. There's also an almost strict Freudian tendency in DePalma's films to lay the blame for almost all the bad stuff at the feet of the maternal parent. In Carrie, it was the mother who had brought the curse upon her daughter and likewise had driven the young girl half insane. In The Fury, the excessively bourgeois Mrs. Bellaver, with her severe haircut and unwillingness to make mention of a father for Irving's character Gillian, is so busy with her job that she can only pretend to care about what happens to her only child. Whatever one may think of DePalma's relative talents as a director, it must be admitted that by the late 1970s, he and quite a few other wild talents in the horror movie world were exploiting a backlash against strong, independent women, all of whom are either at risk of getting chopped up or are guilty of abandoning their progeny. We like and identify immediately with the wife-less Peter, yet pull back a bit from Dr. Ellen Lindstrom, Kristen the schoolyard bitch, and all the other females in the film except Hester, who we like and so can be fairly certain will die in a nasty way, which she does.
I have an unfortunate tendency to spew vituperative criticism of people whose work I actually admire. I have almost always enjoyed any DePalma film I've ever seen (this being one exception, Scarface being another, although for completely different reasons, and Snake Eyes being perhaps the very bottom of the barrel), Blow Out being my all-time personal favorite horror movie. Perhaps we come to expect more from people whose talents we revere.
Incidentally, one of the other hidden pleasures of The Fury--and there are more than a few, admittedly--is the viewing of certain small roles by recognizable actors such as Darryl Hannah and Gordon Jump. There's even an unsubstantiated rumor that James Belushi plays an uncredited beach bum here, although you need a lot of patience to find him.
Starring Kirk Douglas and Amy Irving, The Fury begins strong enough, with a bunch of rich folks lounging on a Mediterranean beach about to be attacked by unfriendly Arabs in full bisht and chmagh. Kirk Douglas plays Peter, a super spy intelligence guy whose son, Robin, possesses a super telekinetic ability and psychometric powers. Robin, portrayed by Andrew Stevens, gets kidnapped by the nasty John Cassavetes-character, Ben Childers, and so Douglas must find a female with the same psi-powers as his son to help locate him before the evil government witch doctors destroy the world and all that jazz. If this sounds a bit like The Firestarter, you're on the right track but in the wrong train. This movie isn't even that good, if by good you mean supplying an even semi-plausible story-line or providing much in the way of believable acting, other than that done by Douglas.
The good news here is that DePalma does not disappoint when it comes to capturing genuine beauty and on this point I attempt no humor. Kirk Douglas is beautiful. You would have to go back to Spartacus to find him looking any better than this. Amy Irving, likewise, truly radiates a rather startling set of good looks, something I have to admit I had never noticed about her. Matter of fact, I'd often wondered what it was about her that had mesmerized so many people since I had always found her rather plain. In The Fury she does not have that hideous fuzzy hair she had in Carrie and elsewhere. Joyce Easton, who plays her mother, is likewise something of a knockout. Carrie Snodgress starts out looking quite terrible, but by the time we discover that Kirk Douglas loves her, she is looking fine indeed.
But the flattering photography is not merely limited to the humanoids in this film. The cities themselves--the filming was 99% in Chicago and 1% Caesarai, Israel--scream out their gorgeoisty, as do the internal architectural structures. Shopping malls begin a DePalma tradition with this film, becoming a recurring source of maze-like majesty.
And that brings us to the rather sad part of this "Experiment in terror and suspense." Deliberately or not--and the director is such a craftsman and perfectionist that I can't imagine he'd leave anything to chance--this movie also offers up an unfortunate string of simpleminded stereotypes far below the abilities of such an "auteur." For instance? Well, there's the early Arab attack on the happy people on the coast of the "Mid East," as the film calls it. Later in the film, Robin, the psi-power guy, throws a shit fit and causes an amusement park ride called the Paratrooper to come unhinged and fling a car of Arabs off the ride and into a restaurant lounge, clearly some serendipitous revenge. There's also an almost strict Freudian tendency in DePalma's films to lay the blame for almost all the bad stuff at the feet of the maternal parent. In Carrie, it was the mother who had brought the curse upon her daughter and likewise had driven the young girl half insane. In The Fury, the excessively bourgeois Mrs. Bellaver, with her severe haircut and unwillingness to make mention of a father for Irving's character Gillian, is so busy with her job that she can only pretend to care about what happens to her only child. Whatever one may think of DePalma's relative talents as a director, it must be admitted that by the late 1970s, he and quite a few other wild talents in the horror movie world were exploiting a backlash against strong, independent women, all of whom are either at risk of getting chopped up or are guilty of abandoning their progeny. We like and identify immediately with the wife-less Peter, yet pull back a bit from Dr. Ellen Lindstrom, Kristen the schoolyard bitch, and all the other females in the film except Hester, who we like and so can be fairly certain will die in a nasty way, which she does.
I have an unfortunate tendency to spew vituperative criticism of people whose work I actually admire. I have almost always enjoyed any DePalma film I've ever seen (this being one exception, Scarface being another, although for completely different reasons, and Snake Eyes being perhaps the very bottom of the barrel), Blow Out being my all-time personal favorite horror movie. Perhaps we come to expect more from people whose talents we revere.
Incidentally, one of the other hidden pleasures of The Fury--and there are more than a few, admittedly--is the viewing of certain small roles by recognizable actors such as Darryl Hannah and Gordon Jump. There's even an unsubstantiated rumor that James Belushi plays an uncredited beach bum here, although you need a lot of patience to find him.
