De Palma, unfiltered

De Palma
Directed by Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow
New on Netflix
3 1/2 stars out of five

Five movies that capture the essence of director Brian De Palma:

Sisters (1972), De Palma’s first real hit, is a perverse riff on Rear Window, as a journalist (Jennifer Salt) witnesses the brutal murder of a man at the hands of a seemingly benign Québécois model (Margot Kidder). Further investigation reveals that the model is a separated conjoined twin and the other sister may be a homicidal maniac. The inspiration for the movie, the director recounts in De Palma, was an amazing photograph of young Russian conjoined twins, one cheerful and one evidently depressed.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) may seem a gratuitous entry given Winnipeg’s fervent fan base for the film. Certainly, composer-star Paul Williams is largely responsible for the film’s postmodern groove, plucking from a number of musical genres from bubblegum to goth-rock to create a foundation suggestive of artistic indifference and corruption in the music industry. Cinematically, De Palma matches Williams’ magpie tendencies, stealing the long-take time-bomb scene from Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil and the shower scene from Hitchcock’s Psycho to create a unique, darkly perverse musical for which a worldwide audience just wasn’t ready.

Dressed to Kill (1980) was controversial when it came out because of scenes of baroque violence against women, especially in the scene in which Angie Dickinson’s character meets a nasty end in an elevator at the hands of a razor-wielding maniac. (De Palma insists that since the movie was structurally modelled after Psycho, it was a victim of a politically correct time. It’s a spurious argument: most filmmakers know to read the zeitgeist.) Apart from its technical finesse, like a true auteur film, Dressed to Kill really does reflect the director’s psyche, especially in a subplot in which Dickinson’s tech-savvy son (Keith Gordon) launches his own investigation into his mother’s murder, a plot turn inspired by the youthful De Palma’s misadventures secretly surveilling his surgeon father to uncover the fact he was having an affair.

The Untouchables (1987) sees De Palma confidently taking on material Hitchcock would not have considered: an epic crime saga pitting outgunned federal agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner, above) against all-powerful crime boss Al Capone (Robert De Niro). The doc has De Palma recounting how the film ran out of money to shoot an elaborate train chase scene, so the director himself wrote and staged its magnificent centrepiece — the train station shootout — modelled after the Odessa steps sequence of Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

Carlito’s Way (1993) is one of two De Palma collaborations with Al Pacino playing a Spanish-speaking hoodlum. But it’s this one, not Scarface, that demonstrates De Palma’s evolving finesse as we follow Pacino’s streetwise anti-hero doing his best to walk the straight and narrow after being released from prison, a choice that would never have occurred to Scarface’s crudely sociopathic Tony Montana.