Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma’s debut feature. Describing this Möbius strip of a film will prove tricky. Spoilers follow.

Robert De Niro’s first credited feature. He plays one of three New York City twenty-somethings navigating the Vietnam War draft, computer-dating, and JFK conspiracy theories. De Palma structures the film as a series of vignettes, each with its own title card.

Despite featuring an early performance from a young Robert De Niro, director Brian De Palma proves the star of his first filmed picture. He employs an array of formal devices to tell a farcical story of a groom-to-be’s second thoughts after encountering his fiancée’s eccentric family. De Niro plays a groomsman.

Brian De Palma films the Performance Group’s stage play adaptation of Euripides’s The Bacchae. Experimental theater fans might enjoy it, but I found it pretentious and opaque. De Palma uses a perpetual split-screen to simulate the theater-in-the-round experience, but it proves a poor analog. William Finley’s performance—his final monologue in particular—provided the lone highlight.

A sequel to Greetings that sees Robert De Niro reprising his role as Jon Rubin, now a Vietnam War vet returned home to New York City.

Brian De Palma’s first studio film. Tom Smothers plays a burned-out corporate exec who quits his high-paying job to become a tap-dancing magician.

Brian De Palma’s first Hitchcockian thriller. I won’t discuss plot and have redacted spoilers.

It’s not a musical. The Andrew Lloyd Webber version is a musical. This Phantom of the Opera adaptation plays as a black comedy, transplanting the classic tale from the world of opera to glam rock with Faustian touches. And it’s terrific.

Cliff Robertson plays a wealthy New Orleans land developer. As the film opens, he and partner John Lithgow have just closed a lucrative deal. We meet Robert’s wife and nine-year-old daughter who soon fall prey to kidnappers. Robertson double-crosses the kidnappers, leading to a car chase and his family’s death. Fast-forward fifteen years and Roberts, on a business trip to Italy, chances upon a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to his late wife.

I’d seen Carrie at least twice prior. I remembered it as a competent, albeit unremarkable Stephen King adaptation. Having now seen director Brian De Palma’s prior films, I came away from this viewing with a renewed appreciation. This is De Palma’s baby, for better and worse.

Director Brian De Palma’s follow up to Carrie starts well enough. Kirk Douglas plays a former spy battling a shadowy government agency who’ve kidnapped his teen-aged psychic son, Robin. But after a terrific sequence where Douglas flees a flop house from government agents, Douglas drives his getaway car into a river. No explanation. The inanity had me laughing.

While teaching a film course at Sarah Lawrence College, Brian De Palma devised a learn-by-doing curriculum. His students would write, produce, and direct a feature under his supervision. But as the project unfolded, the budget grew. Kirk Douglas came aboard to star and De Palma took over directing duties. The result harkens back to De Palma’s early farcical black comedies.

Angie Dickinson plays a middle-aged housewife with a dutiful husband and a precocious teenage son focused on a computer competition. But she is unhappy. She confesses her sexual frustration to her therapist, played by Michael Caine, then makes a failed pass at him. We then follow her to a museum, where she trolls for a pickup. When she leaves, we learn a black-gloved stranger is stalking her.

John Travolta plays a Foley engineer recording wind sounds for a low budget horror movie. A nearby car blows a tire and crashes into a lake. Travolta captures the audio on tape, only to discover he’s stumbled upon a far-reaching conspiracy executed by a sinister John Lithgow.

Most remakes disappoint. Scarface proves an exception. It reimagines Howard Hawks’ 1932 gangster picture as a contemporary psycho-sexual thriller with terrific results.

Craig Wasson plays a struggling actor who witnesses a murder while spying on his exhibitionist neighbor.

Bond trader Tom Hanks and mistress Melanie Griffith take a wrong turn into the South Bronx, hit a local kid, and flee—sparking a media circus fanned by alcoholic journalist Bruce Willis.