Scarface (1983)

USA, 170 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Oliver Stone, Howard Hawks, Ben Hecht, Armitage Trail

Photography: John A. Alonzo

Music: Giorgio Moroder

Editors: Gerald B. Greenberg, David Ray

Cast: Al Pacino, Steven Bauer, Michelle Pfeiffer, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Robert Loggia, Paul Shenar, Harris Yulin, F. Murray Abraham, Miriam Colon, Richard Belzer, Dennis Holahan, Michael Alldredge, Mark Margolis

I was surprised, perhaps 25 years ago, when I noticed that director Brian De Palma’s 1983 homage to Hollywood gangster cinema had a lot of fans. Scarface appeared to be significant for bro wannabe gangsters, no surprise—but also cineastes of various stripes. Glenn Kenny just published a book about it, for example. For a long time I wondered how they could all be so wrong. My first impression was not a good one. My takeaways (and pretty much all I focused on) were a gruesome early scene involving a chainsaw in a motel shower, and then the last hour of a picture that runs nearly three, where the operatics and scenery-chewing reach various spectacular yet ludicrous climaxes. Yes, this includes Tony Montana (Al Pacino) sitting in his monogrammed chair at his desk piled with a mound of cocaine, into which he periodically bobs his head and comes up with a frosty powdery nose-tip. The emptiness of gangster life, as always, is appalling. But making it so buffoonish is something else again. Hoo-yah!

It took me this long to get back to Scarface, such was my recoiling reaction, even given that I might be a little more indulgent of De Palma’s prolific work than some others I know. But a lot of serious people continue to have a lot of serious things to say about Scarface, so I made a point of looking again. And yeah, it’s not bad—certainly stands up to gangster pictures of the ‘70s and ‘80s as well as the originals from the ‘30s. Not that, full disclosure, I really like gangster pictures as such that much—it seems to be kind of an overachieving genre. But Scarface fits, it belongs—it’s the story of a rise and fall, with the usual self-serving moral qualms. The chainsaw scene now seems more like the kind of wanton ultraviolence we are more used to as entertainment. I’m not saying that’s a good thing, and I am saying it’s still hard to watch, but the scene does what it’s supposed to do in this movie, in terms of plot and character development. And the last hour—well, we’ll get to the last hour.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

USA, 91 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Brian De Palma, Louisa Rose

Photography: Larry Pizer

Music: Paul Williams

Editor: Paul Hirsch

Cast: Paul Williams, William Finley, Jessica Harper, George Memmoli, Gerrit Graham, Rod Serling

Phantom of the Paradise is one of director and cowriter Brian De Palma’s wacky experiments from the ‘70s. It wallows in that era’s sense of decadence, with a voiceover intro by Rod Serling and a sloppy munge of classic horror or horror-adjacent narratives like Goethe’s Faust (about the German historical and literary figure, not the German band), Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado,” and, most obviously, the Gaston Leroux novel and subsequent Universal movie The Phantom of the Opera. Fair enough—obvious enough. All you have to do is look at Phantom of the Paradise to see those things. But the last time I watched it I ended up spending a lot of time trying to think of the term for this type of picture, because I think it’s one of the better examples. Is it really “rock musical” (as per Wikipedia)? I was even willing to go with “rock opera.” Candidates for comparison I thought of included Flesh for Frankenstein aka Andy Warhol’s Frankenstein, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Performance, The Rocky Horror Show, The Man Who Fell to Earth, Grace of My Heart, and Velvet Goldmine, and Wikipedia had a few more good ideas as well (Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, The Wiz, Pink Floyd – The Wall, Ken Russell’s Tommy, so on so forth).

Whatever you call it, De Palma’s picture flopped on release in 1974 but became a cult classic over time as midnight movies and VHS tech became more common, which is approximately where I came in. A friend passed it along to me in the early ‘80s and I flipped for it. The plot goes all over the place but holds together, and holds up too, and I get a kick out of all the rock signifiers. Swan (Paul Williams) is a certain type of brutally ambitious producer, impresario (owner of the Paradise theater), record label honcho (“Death Records”), and general rock ‘n’ roll savant. He is reminiscent at once of Phil Spector, Rodney Bingenheimer, and Arte Johnson. The Juicy Fruits and their various incarnations are Swan’s breakthrough project. The quasi-tragic Winslow Leach (William Finley) comes across like an era-specific Elton John / Billy Joel / Todd Rundgren kind of piano-banging songwriter. Although Leach is literally “the phantom of the Paradise” the star of the picture is more like Swan, which raises the very interesting problem of Paul Williams.

Carrie (1976)

USA, 98 minutes

Director: Brian De Palma

Writers: Stephen King, Lawrence D. Cohen

Photography: Mario Tosi, Isidore Mankofsky

Music: Pino Donaggio

Editor: Paul Hirsch

Cast: Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, William Katt, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, John Travolta, Betty Buckley, P.J. Soles

Carrie the novel was Stephen King’s first published book and Carrie the movie was his first film adaptation. Unlike The Shining, he was quite happy with it even though director Brian De Palma and screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen changed the ending. King’s fingerprints are more evident here than in Kubrick’s Shining, which might be part of his reaction, as he was getting such a big boost at that point in his career. In many ways Carrie launched King into the mainstream. The movie was a big hit, earning back its original investment nearly 20 times and snaring a couple of Oscar nominations, one for Sissy Spacek as Best Actress in the title role and another for Piper Laurie as Best Supporting Actress playing Carrie’s mother. To this day Carrie is regularly ranked high on lists of greatest horror movies made.

It still has a lot of its punch. Laurie as a demented Christian evangelical trying to protect her daughter Carrie from the sins of the world is extraordinarily unpleasant. She misquotes the Bible to make her insane points. She calls breasts “dirty pillows.” She locks Carrie up in a closet to pray. She didn’t bother to explain the menstrual cycle or periods to Carrie. “You’re a woman now,” she only says coldly, after the alarms and humiliations Carrie suffers from her first period. It was interesting to find out that Laurie reportedly never took the picture seriously during the shoot. She thought it had to be a black comedy and made a personal project of chewing the scenery. It shows, but that isn’t to say her performance doesn’t work. She’s one of the best parts of the picture but she could barely hold back her laughter at her own antics. Another disquieting element is the amount of hitting and slapping, which I take more as artifact of 20th-century quasi-slapstick style than anything. But it frankly shocks me (as does the same in Saturday Night Fever, another picture with John Travolta). It might be more evidence of how uneasy Carrie was making me as I watched. But people are hauling off and slapping one another around here a lot—teachers and students and parents and kids as well as kids on kids.

Dressed to Kill (1980)

USA, 104 minutes

Director/writer: Brian De Palma

Photography: Ralf D. Bode

Music: Pino Donaggio

Editor: Gerald B. Greenberg

Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz, David Margulies

Director and writer Brian De Palma’s trashy, seductive ode to Alfred Hitchcock movies is full of twists and turns—however ludicrously unlikely they may be—so I will necessarily be letting slip some spoilers. The Hitchcock movies overtly saluted here include Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window, the latter two of which had been out of circulation for decades when Dressed to Kill was made. Clearly, De Palma had the resources to study them. The most obvious homage, and perhaps the best sequence in the whole picture, takes place in an art museum and compresses an amazing amount of Vertigo into it.

Angie Dickinson, like Janet Leigh in Psycho, disappears from the picture not even an hour in, the result of murder by a mysterious slasher. Here’s where Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack goes “weet - weet - weet” in Psycho, but De Palma has turned instead to Italian film composer Pino Donaggio (Don’t Look Now as well as many other De Palma pictures), who generally brings more ripe, luscious, and swooning pathos. Dickinson plays Kate Miller, a middle-aged and sexually frustrated rich housewife in psychoanalysis with Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine). Here we collide with the most unbelievable developments in the thriller as well as its most unpleasantly dated, transphobic aspect. Fair warning: The telling of it reveals all.

Body Double (1984)

USA, 114 minutes
Director: Brian De Palma
Writers: Robert J. Avrech, Brian De Palma
Photography: Stephen H. Burum
Music: Pino Donaggio
Editors: Gerald B. Greenberg, Bill Pankow
Cast: Craig Wasson, Gregg Henry, Deborah Shelton, Melanie Griffith, Guy Boyd, Dennis Franz

Body Double has so many of the trademark preoccupations of director and cowriter Brian De Palma—liquid camera movement, swooning music, Playboy-style erotics, the ecosystem of cheesy low-budget moviemaking, and more than anything a fixation on Alfred Hitchcock movies—that it almost seems like it could be reverse-engineered out of them. In many ways it was, by De Palma himself. Yet, as a certain type of "watch what happens" picture, it stays interesting even when it's not making any sense, which is most of the time. Does that mean making sense is overrated? As a partisan of coherent narrative, I don't think so. I saw Body Double when it was new, though not since, and coming back was impressed all over with those preoccupations. All these years later it's still no problem watching Body Double through, though it still rarely adds up.

It's Los Angeles. A struggling young actor, Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), has just caught his girlfriend having sex with another man in their bed. Now he is at loose ends, angry, humiliated, and heartbroken, staying with friends, trying not to drink too much, and looking for work, anything, to take his mind off it. One thing leads to another and soon he finds himself with a nice housesitting gig by way of a friend of a friend, Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry). The place is an amazing artifact of wealth, a saucer-shaped glass structure, like the cap of the Seattle Space Needle, propped against the side of a hill high above Los Angeles, with a view of everything. That includes a beautiful woman, seen through a spyglass telescope, who performs a striptease masturbation scene every night, "like clockwork," according to Sam, who makes sure to point that out to Jake before leaving.

Carlito's Way (1993)

USA, 144 minutes
Director: Brian De Palma
Writers: Edwin Torres, David Koepp
Photography: Stephen H. Burum
Music: Patrick Doyle, Brian De Palma Pop Hit Mix
Editors: Kristina Boden, Bill Pankow
Cast: Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Penelope Ann Miller, John Leguizamo, Ingrid Rogers, Luis Guzman, James Rebhorn, Viggo Mortenson, Paul Mazursky, John Ortiz, Joseph Siravo

Yeah, I thought too late, I probably should have taken another look at director Brian De Palma's Scarface while I was at it, which I have somehow not been able to do since seeing it new. I know its reputation has seen considerable rehabilitation since then. And between putting Al Pacino front and center, coming in long, and working self-consciously within the gangster movie frame, they have a lot in common. If it's ridiculous for Pacino to bury his Marielito head in a pile of cocaine on a desktop in Scarface it's probably equally ridiculous to make him a Puerto Rican gangbanger trying to go straight in Carlito's Way.

But here we are. I've grown fond of Carlito's Way since first seeing it some 10 years ago. It's an exemplary instance of De Palma's ability to craft operatic narrative that is genuinely affecting. It's romantic, absorbing, moving, and often beautiful, even if it is all in the service of overfamiliar clichés. At least Scarface was pushing hard on its limitations, amirite? I'll have to make a point to get to it. We probably shouldn't leave Goodfellas out of this discussion either, as Carlito's Way also adapts some of that movie's surging pseudo-documentary verve. Carlito Brigante (Pacino) narrates in voiceover and the story unfolds with a lot of episodic energy, taking its time to explain certain points fully. It also has a predilection for matching intense scenes with rock songs: "Oye Como Va" by Santana, "You Should Be Dancing" by the Bee Gees, "Lady Marmalade" by Labelle. But the sense of classic tragedy, of noble life and fatal flaws and destiny—that's all De Palma.

Blow Out (1981)

USA, 107 minutes
Director: Brian De Palma
Writers: Brian De Palma, Bill Mesce Jr.
Photography: Vilmos Zsigmond
Music: Pino Donaggio
Editor: Paul Hirsch
Cast: John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow, Dennis Franz, Peter Boyden, Curt May, Deborah Everton

Brian De Palma is not shy about naming the root sources of this great paranoid political thriller in the interview with Noah Baumbach that's on the Criterion DVD, and they are the obvious ones: Antonioni's Blow-Up, Coppola's The Conversation, and, more generally, media treatment of the JFK assassination, energized by De Palma's own evident personal obsessions. Actually, the first root source is probably his own movie of the previous year, Dressed to Kill, which also cast Nancy Allen and Dennis Franz in key roles, is also a self-consciously derivative sexxee thriller, and incidentally made a surprise hit. De Palma says he intended Blow Out to be a small film but when John Travolta expressed interest it soon became big.

It's true the narrative gets rickety if you think about it, but Blow Out is so calculatedly cinematic (the De Palma touch) that, once engaged, its powers are practically irresistible. It opens on a scene from an ultra-low-budget slasher, famously one of the earliest and still most effective uses of steadicam technology. It's also one of the great trick openings to any movie, and a complicated set piece in its own right, with a dormitory at night, a knife-wielding maniac lurking outside the windows (also a random peeping Tom), while inside hot college coeds are dancing, squabbling, masturbating, having sex, walking around in their underwear past doors labeled "Shower," etc.

The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood (1991)

 

For this book, Julie Salamon won a surprising amount of access to Brian De Palma and other principals behind the film version of Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities, including all the stars and representatives from every phase of production. The expectation apparently was that the movie would be as spectacularly successful as Wolfe's book, and that Salamon's account would document that success from the inside out, no doubt providing one more successful promotion and merchandising cornerstone of the coming success empire. Instead, circumstances dictated that it turn into a fascinating chronicle of how a flop comes into existence. Films notoriously require colossal levels of collaboration, with thousands of moving parts set into motion on competing tight deadlines, which make them completely fraught with peril. Who can say, in the moment, what's right or wrong? That's what I appreciate most about Salamon's book—we know, from inevitable benefit of hindsight, what a disastrous mission these people are on. Yet for the most part their decisions rarely seem catastrophic in themselves (beyond that first one of ever pinning any hope on making a movie out of something written by Tom Wolfe, whose work is so entirely driven by a fever swamp of words on a page; even Wolfe, as Salamon shrewdly if quietly catches on early, knew enough to stay the hell away from it. At the same time, this is just rank second-guessing on my part). Salamon's tale is so compelling that I was driven to finally take a look at the movie just for the small victories she reported. And, yeah, it's bad all right—but that brief shot of the jumbo jet touching down is as good as promised.

In case it's not at the library.