2006 - THE BLACK DAHLIA, extremely disappointing film from Brian De Palms

Considering the expensive look of this film, the impressive photography and the involvement of Brian De Palma, this film is a major disappointment.

The film is based on the true murder of a woman called Elizabeth Short in 1947 Los Angeles a still unsolved crime.  The author of the novel James Ellroy took the factual aspects and wove them into a fictional narrative of a couple of LA PD homicide cops who attempt to solve the crime. The director Brian De Palma was clearly trying to make a 1940's crime thriller along the lines of Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep or Out of the Past, but something seemed to go completely wrong the pacing and storytelling is all off.

The screenplay is a convoluted mess extremely difficult to follow.  The casting is completely wrong.  Scarlett Johansson, Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart may look like 1940's characters but they seem completely unable to get a handle on their characters, the writing certainly doesn't help them.  Even De Palma who is a technically brilliant filmmaker good at mixing eroticism with violence seems constrained.  The film has a few standout scenes but for the most part it's just a matter of setting up the shots and letting the confused story roll out.  Hate to harp on the screenplay but it does seem to be the major issue with this film.  It's hard to believe an experienced filmmaker like DePalma didn't recognize the problems with the story.

 

Apparently the original cut of the film was three hours which according to the author James Ellroy played very well.  However the studio financing the film insisted that it be reduced to a running time of two hours.  It's hard to know the truth since I doubt anyone will ever see the original three hour version of this film.  

 

The Black Dahlia kind of represents the end of the line for Brian De Palma.  He makes a couple of indifferent films in Europe after this, but this film puts him in what film critics like to call "directors jail."

The film was written by Josh Friedman, the running time is 120 minutes.

1974 - PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE , a Brian De Palma musical

 It doesn't appear that most critics knew what to make of De Palma's take on The Phantom Of The Opera and Faust. It also seems like the studio releasing it was equally clueless when it came to selling the film to the public, audiences stayed away.

However, this is one of the best of the early De Palma films that for a change wasn't heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock. Brian De Palma wrote the screenplay and cleverly mixed a lot of film genres.  His lead actor Paul Williams, a man probably more known for his songwriting than acting put together a very amusing score which parodied a lot of different pop music styles.  Williams is also entertaining portraying the crazed music producer who has made a deal with the devil.  

The film follows plot lines from Faust and The Phantom Of The Opera but De Palma keeps things interesting with his clever camera work and his staging of the musical acts that range from a Beach Boys type of group to a goth/heavy metal band.

 

The rest of the  cast is well chosen with William Finney as the helpless composer turned phantom, Jessica Harper as his love interest and De Palma regular Gerrit Graham as one of William's crazed musical performers.

A very entertaining film, it runs 91 minutes.

1979 - HOME MOVIES, Brian De Palma's home movie

Home Movies is certainly an unusual film to put it mildly.  As has been noted De Palma was teaching a film class at his Alma Matter, Sarah Lawrence college and got it into his head that he would give his students actual hands on filming making experience by producing a low budget film.  De Palma managed to get Kirk Douglas to do an extended cameo playing a film character called "The Mastro," apparently George Lucas invested in the project and De Palma cast his then wife Nancy Allen as what else, a prostitute who is the object of his protagonist's affection in a part played by Keith Gordon one of The Mastro's students.  De Palma regular Gerrit Graham also shows up as Gordon's brother and Allen's fiance.

The film is apparently somewhat autobiographical, Gordon follows his father around as he tries to expose his philandering and De Palma's mother was apparently known for emotional outbursts. Throughout the film Kirk Douglas keeps harping on Gordon to "not be an extra in your own life."  Nancy Allen for some reason has a hand puppet of a bunny which she talks to in a plot device which seems reminiscent of Michael Redgrave's story line in Dead Of Night.

 

Then there's Gerrit Graham who really hams it up as some kind of health food nut who is teaching a course in "Spartanetics" a course on macho manhood.  The title of the course is a not so subtle joke about Kirk Douglas's film Spartacus.  Graham also appears to be playing some kind of repressed homosexual character which probably would not be looked on very kindly today.

If all this sounds sort of funny it's really not.  It's more weird than funny.  The film is probably a must for De Palma's biggest fans.  Not to say the film doesn't have it's moments but they are rather scattered throughout the running time. This is after all a student film made by a bunch of college kids.

The film was written by Kim Ambler, Dana Edelman, Robert Harders, Stephen Le May, Charlie Loventhal and Gloria Norris.  The running time is 90 minutes

1972 - GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT, De Palma's first Hollywood film

This is the usual story of a Hollywood studio luring a hip, hot filmmaker from New York in this case Brian De Palma, to make a film that would appeal to a younger audience.  Not liking the approach De Palma took,  the studio and the producer Tommy Smothers, proceeded to interfere with De Palma so much that the end result was a poor comedy with a couple of inventive visual touches.

The story has something to do with a businessman who drops out of the corporate culture and decides to be a dancing magician with the help of his teacher played by Orson Welles of all people.

 

Along the way Smother gets involve with Katherine Ross playing a character called "the beautiful girl," and realizes that he has just traded one corporate straight jacket for another type of straight jacket.  There's probably a decent idea or two rolling around in this film but it's all for nothing, the film just doesn't work.

 

Written by Jordan Crittenden the running time is 92 minutes.

1987 - THE UNTOUCHABLES, mainstream success for De Palma

After a couple of less than successful box office pictures.  Brian De Palma came roaring back with this remake of the popular late 1950's early 1960's television show.

This was a large scale production,  The screenplay was by David Mamet, Ennio Morricone composed the score and the cast had the soon to be very hot actor Kevin Costner.  Sean Connery had a supporting role as an Irish cop and he certainly brought a lot of authority to his performance.

  

The movie has a lot of De Palma touches, from the use of overhead shots to long tracking shots.  The expected De Palma violence was toned down but there are still a couple of fairly graphic scenes.  The outstanding scene is obviously the train station shoot out which was apparently improvised by De Palma to save time and money.

The film couldn't miss and it didn't it was a big box office hit when it came out that summer. 

119 minutes.

2012 - PASSION, sub par Brian De Palma

Whenever Alfred Hitchcock had not had a box office success for a few films, he would "run for cover" as he called it.  This meant that he would return to the suspense thriller formula he knew how to do.  Brian De Palma clearly was trying to "run for cover" with Passion.  Unfortunately this extremely disappointing thriller was a critical and commercial flop.  

Probably De Palma's biggest mistake was in the casting of the central character.  Rachel McAdams just does not look like a cold hearted business executive who will stab anyone in the back to get ahead.  De Palma tries to sex McAdams up, but she comes off more like a little kid dressing up in some of Mommy's naughty underwear.  McAdams is apparently some kind of bisexual or lip stick lesbian who may or may not have the hots for her assistant played by Noomi Rapace who gives a real monotone performance throughout the film.  These two actors really throw the film off and it just never really recovers.

As far as De Palma's famous technique goes, he has all his trademark shots.  The moving camera, the split-screen shots however they all seem to add up to nothing and are kind of pointless from a story telling aspect.  In fact the famous Brian De Palma style is looking a little tired in this film.  

A director who could usually mix sex and violence in interesting thrillers.  Passion is not particularly sexy or violent.  A real disappointment from one of the cinema's top stylists

94 minutes, written by Brian De Palma based on a film called Love Crimes.

1968 - GREETINGS De Palma's draft dodger comedy

You can get a nice nostalgic feeling for the 1960's in Greetings.  Return to the good old days when a young man's preoccupation was staying out of the Vietnam War by avoiding the draft at all costs.  This is essentially the plot of Brian De Palma's film.

Since this was a film shot on a limited budget,  De Palma has the scenes run a long time which allows the actors to do their thing.  A young Robert De Niro sticks out in the cast and he's actually kind of likable.  Another De Palma regular Gerrit Graham is De Niro's friend an avid Kennedy assassination conspiracy researcher.

Even if this is an early De Palma film, you still get to see  his fascinations with voyeurism, sex and film with jokes about Blow Up and Hitchcock in particular. 

De Palma has a sense of humor it's just not one that's always been appreciated or understood by the critics.

Nice peppy theme song and nice to see LBJ book ending the film.

88 minutes.  Written by Charles Hirsch and Brian De Palma.

1970 - DIONYSUS IN 69 - film record of an interactive theater performance

Dionysus in 69 is a film by Brian De Palma that captures a performance of Euripides' The Bacchae by a theatrical troupe called "The Performance Group."

This play is an interactive audience experience performed apparently in a garage or a warehouse.  The performers at times enter a frenzied state with and without their clothes.  There is a significant amount of nudity or near nudity at times.  You can see the discomfort in the faces of the audience.

This is also a very imaginatively filmed performance of a theatrical production, De Palma uses his split screen technique to capture the play from different viewpoints.  At times he focuses on a single performance from two different angles perfectly blending it into the split screen.

This film is an excellent record of the type of experimental theater that was going on in the late 1960's that was challenging the conventional staging, performance and even structure of a theatrical play.   An exciting, uncomfortable and at times very difficult film to watch but extremely worthwhile.

85 minutes.

1976 - CARRIE, DePalma's high school nerd revenge/horror fantasy

Brian De Palma's film operates on a number of levels, a wanna be soft core teenage porn flick, a horror film,  a commentary on the depressing nature of high school life, a critique of Christian fundamentalism and most importantly a meta high school nerd revenge fantasy.

Carrie was the film that De Palma had been moving towards since he started making films.  It mixed his fascination with Hitchcock,  a very dark sense of humor and his obsessions with women which seem to border on the shall we say the creepy side.  De Palma is probably a guy you might want to have lunch with but probably not go camping with.

The film was certainly well cast, Sissy Spacek was Carrie the nerd girl with the psychic powers, Nancy Allen the nasty high school tramp and Amy Irving  the do gooder trying to do the right thing but inadvertently causing the whole mess.  But none of them could equal the magnificence of Piper Laurie as Carrie's mother Margaret White,  the crazy Christian fundamentalist and the real horror of the film.  Laurie knew just how far to take this over the top character.

Brian De Palma was always a director who wore his technique on his sleeve.  He had been experimenting with split screen and slow motion since he started making films.  With Carrie he managed to restrain himself until the high school prom sequence and then he went all out with his bag of cinematic tricks as if burning down a high school with the senior class wasn't extreme enough.

De Palma worked on a small budget, apparently the studio had no faith in the film, but he had been making low budget films for years so he knew how to stretch a buck.  The film made a lot of money.

98 minutes.

1968 - MURDER A LA MOD, entertaining early Brian DePalma film

It's all here for Brian De Palma fans, the unusual camera angles, the sick sense of humor, violence directed towards women, a fractured narrative style and the filmmaker as voyeur.  Murder A La Mod is Brian DePalma's first real film and incorporates almost all of his future favorite themes. 

For a film shot on a low budget and in black and white it's a pretty sophisticated piece of work.  De Palma uses the multiple narrative structure of Rashomon to present a killing (or maybe it's a killing) with multiple points of view.   He also throws in some really screwy humor with the actor William Finley playing some weirdo named Otto who may or may not have killed someone.  Then there's some Three Stooges like stuff with a real ice pick and a fake ice pick which keeps getting mixed up.

So what does it all mean?  Beats me, this film was made by a gifted young guy with a lot of film making talent and to put it mildly a rather strange outlook on life.

If you like Brian DePalma's films give this a look but don't go expecting one of his super slick studio films this isn't one of them.  However Murder A La Mod if a highly inventive and clever film by someone who knows how to put a film together.

Running time 80 minutes, written by  Brian De Palma.

1992 - RAISING CAIN, De Palma makes fun of De Palma films

Frequently criticized for not having much of a sense of humor the director Brian De Palma actually does have a sense of humor although kind of a sick one.

Its hard to know what De Palma had in mind with Raising Cain the convoluted and pretty ridiculous plot has something to to with stealing toddlers for weird mind experiments, a theme that Michael Powell examined in Peeping Tom.

The acting is to put it mildly stilted and also over the top.  John Lithgow gets to play multiple roles as twin brothers and their father.  Lithgow had worked with De Palma in a couple of films and I'm sure it's fun for an  actor to take on a challenge like this, but he seems pretty hammy even resorting to a lame European accent at times.  The rest of the cast isn't much better, the woman playing Lithgow's wife is sickeningly sweet and she seems unreal.  The two cops assigned to the case are so stiff they wouldn't pass muster in an episode of Dragnet. Was all of this intentional?

Then there are the usual quotes from Hitchcock films, particularly Psycho.  De Palma literally recreates the sinking of the car into the quicksand scene but adds his own sick twist on it.  De Palma has always been accused of stealing from Hitchock and in this instant it almost seems like he is giving the finger to his critics with this bit.  De Palma even steals from himself quoting from the train station sequence of The Untouchables complete with the baby carriage rolling around. 

Brian De Palma is famous for his wandering camera, particularly effective in the museum scene in Dressed To Kill.  In Raising Cain he recreates that scene and spoofs it at the same time.  The climax of the film involves one of those famous set pieces he likes so much incorporating elaborate camera movements and slow motion but somehow not his famous split screen technique.  Even this seems played for laughs with ridiculous coincidences happening throughout. 

De Palma appears to have enjoyed himself orchestrating this nonsense.  However I'm not sure a viewer watching this film would know that the film is primarily a joke.

 91 minutes.