When QT was still watching Saturday-morning cartoons, De Palma was folding the cinema culture he loved into his own work. His fellow movie brats Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas baked elements of the movies they loved into their early work, too, but De Palma lifted full sequences and even entire plots, playing with recontextualized narratives decades before Quentin watched his first Hong Kong import.
His masterpiece, Blow Out (screening July 16), is a 70s conspiracy thriller built over the spine of Antonionis Blow-Up the best sequences of The Untouchables (July 30) and Mission: Impossible (August 18) are imitations of Eisensteins Battleship Potemkin and Dassins Rififi respectively. And he remade Vertigo twice, as Obsession (July 14) and Body Double (July 17). No wonder cinephiles love him.
Everyone thinks Martin Scorsese discovered Robert De Niro, but De Palma had already made three pictures with Bobby before Mean Streets made him a star. Watching Greetings (July 1) and Hi, Mom! (July 7) now is like glimpsing an alternate reality where De Niro was celebrated for his perfect comic timing rather than the intensity that Scorsese cultivated and De Palma banked on when he cast his pal as Al Capone in The Untouchables.
De Palma also did great things for Jessica Harper and Paul Williams in Phantom Of The Paradise (June 30), Margot Kidder in Sisters (June 24), Sissy Spacek in
Carrie (July 8) and Melanie Griffith in Body Double, too. Casualties Of War (June 18) is a problematic Vietnam melodrama, but it gave Michael J. Fox a rare dramatic showcase. And of course the actual stars of The Untouchables, Kevin Costner and Andy Garcia, were relative unknowns when De Palma cast them as its leads.
Virtuosity has always been De Palmas stock in trade, and as technology evolved he made the most of every advance in cinematic storytelling. He never misses a chance to construct a split-screen sequence, and elaborate Steadicam takes are a hallmark of his work: theres one in Raising Cain (August 5) that single-handedly validates an otherwise disposable Psycho riff. Blow Out builds its plot out of the minutiae of film tech as John Travoltas obsessive sound engineer uses everything in his toolbox to solve a murder. But De Palmas also willing to abandon old methods to try something new. Shot with an assortment of HD surveillance cameras, his 2007 found-footage feature Redacted (August 27) fictionalizes a real abuse of American military power in Iraq and gives De Palma a way to revisit the themes of Casualties Of War.
Well, most of them. The Bonfire Of The Vanities (MIA from the retrospective) and Mission To Mars (August 25) are spectacularly awful, but Scarface (July 23), The Untouchables, Carlitos Way (August 12) and Mission: Impossible demonstrated that big studio pictures could also function as inventive works of art.
The Fury (July 15) might have been produced as a Carrie cash-in, but it hums like a race car.
A year before The Rocky Horror Picture Show became a midnight movie sensation, De Palma perfected the form with this glam rock mashup of The Phantom Of The Opera and Faust. The epic tale of a disfigured composer (William Finlay, one of De Palmas least appreciated stars) trying to save a young singer (Jessica Harper) from a Mephistophelean producer (Paul Williams), it may not be his best film, but its absolutely his defining picture.
Finlay invests his miserable hero with layers of grief and rage, Harper finds the perfect mix of innocence and curiosity for her corruptible ingenue, and Williams, cast against type, is downright chilling. The gorgeous production design perfectly captures the decadence of the record industry in the early 70s, and the grand finale, in which swelling emotional stakes pay off in terrifying mayhem, might be De Palmas finest hour.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
