Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
Is director Brian de Palma a sick puppy? I think not. Often vilified for his obsessive use of violence and his voyeuristic style of exploitation, he is nevertheless a master cinematic stylist.
De Palma, whose latest film Snake Eyes opens next week, has directed 25 movies, all exquisitely visually styled. In recent years, he has become more demure, probably because of tight budgets, but he has retained his cinematic psychosis.
De Palma’s third feature, Greetings (1968), which starred Robert de Niro, dealt with draft dodging, sex and assassination in a silly but substantial way. De Niro also starred in the sequel, Hi Mom!, which is about a Vietnam veteran who returns home and becomes a pornography producer, an insurance salesman and eventually an arsonist. It is a marvellous collection of set pieces, filmed as an urban guerrilla variety show.
De Palma is playful in all of his films. After his first few features, he delved into the darker side of things and became known as the king of the psychological thriller.
Movies like Dressed to Kill with Michael Caine as a cross-dressing serial killer, and Blow Out with John Travolta trying to prove that a wannabe United States president’s car crash was no accident, are superb examples of the paranoid thriller. As is Obsession, De Palma’s remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
Let us not forget that De Palma also helmed Phantom of The Paradise, a superbly imaginative reworking of Phantom of The Opera, Dorian Gray and Faust, where he used split-screen and video technology to maximum effect. It is a scary glam-rock movie that puts Velvet Goldmine in the shade.
Then, of course, there are his brilliant remakes of the US television series The Untouchables and Mission Impossible.
The most defining factor of De Palma’s work has to be his visual sense, his love of extended celluloid sequences. Angie Dickinson being stalked in the New York Museum of Modern Art in Dressed to Kill, Sean Connery being blown away in The Untouchables, the homage to Psycho with a chainsaw in one particularly grisly sequence in his 1983 remake of Howard Hawks’s Scarface, and the seemingly continuous 15-minute opening sequence of his latest film Snake Eyes, spring to mind.
In a BBC interview with Quentin Tarantino – who is an ardent fan of De Palma’s work – the director defended his love of violence, saying: “The audience sees someone being knifed or shot, and they say: `Oh this is reprehensible and I feel really bad about enjoying it.’ But cinema … is a visual medium, and we’re interested in terrific visual sequences, many of which happen to be violent.”
De Palma, as a member of the Hollywood brat pack along with Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and George Lucas, is one of the most stylish exponents of mainstream American cinema. The eccentric touches to his movies convinces one that Hollywood isn’t all about money, that it does have some brains – even if it’s a little psychotic.
In Snake Eyes, Nicholas Cage plays loudmouthed detective Rick Santoro. He accompanies his old friend, Navy Commander Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise), now working with the US Secretary of Defence, to a major boxing match.
The secretary is assassinated and Cage ends up trying to figure out whether there’s a conspiracy behind the attack. Unfortunately, we get to know the identity of the baddie far too soon and the suspense fails. Another problem with the script is the ridiculous ending.
But De Palma’s style and Stephen Burum’s brilliant images enthral. As one critic remarked, Snake Eyes should be shown at cinematography classes at film school.
De Palma, however, is a virtuoso film- maker – moving between personal, quirky movies like Sisters, Blow Out, Obsession, Carrie and Dressed to Kill with all their Hitchockian references and the broader generic stuff like Scarface, Mission Impossible and Carlito’s Way.
In an interview with American on-line publication, Mr Showbiz, De Palma said: “I get tired of making these Brian de Palma movies. You get tired of your own obsessions, the betrayals, the voyeurism, the twisted sexuality. I’ve made a lot of movies like this, so you’re glad to get out there with those Cuban or Puerto Rican gangsters … when I’m thinking about Puerto Rican gangsters, I’m not thinking about long tracking shots down corridors.”
The tracking shots and his dextrous use of camera and montage make him a consummate cineaste, but De Palma is sober about the future of the industry, saying: “I really think the conventional movie-making world is over and the greatest work is behind us. The industry peaked in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s … that was the beginning of the movies, and it’s over. Now everything is going to happen on the Internet. With your own video cam you can make movies like novels now.”
Well, hopefully De Palma will post some of his extensively stylish cinematic ideas in digital form on the World Wide Web in the future. But I think the lure of a 35mm camera, a Steadicam, loads of tracking shots and choreographing scenes with loads of extras will be too compelling for him. I bet he’ll be on the big screen for a while to come.