Word: depalma
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MARQUIS DE SADE should be alive today. DePalma and DeSade would make a brilliant director-screenwriter team. In Brian DePalma's latest thriller, The Fury, Fiona Lewis plays a high-class, whorish British bitch-doctor whose titillating, condescending blue eyes make you want to punch her in the nose. Hitchcock would have let Cary Grant do just that--assuming that we in the audience are all voyeurs--and in his later days would have sent her to his legendary shower. DePalma, characteristically, goes further. In one of many representative sequences in The Fury, Robin (Andrew Stevens), Lewis's jealous lover...
Whether or not DePalma's perversities appeal to you, and you have nothing to be ashamed of if they don't, you must at least concede that he's flamboyant, like his protagonist in The Phantom of Paradise a virtuoso gone ga-ga, which puts him far ahead of literal-minded bores like Richard Donner and Michael Crichton. His last film, Carrie, was a gory, silly, outrageous, and incredibly beautiful piece of movie-making--far more structured, spare, and cohesive than The Fury, and unfortunately, a far more satisfying movie...
...Fury should have been DePalma's goony epic. The ingredients include a pair of telekinetic teenagers (double Carrie's load), nefarious international spy organizations, a dastardly Bond-style villain, a goofily bloated score by John Williams, a delightfully eccentric group of players, and a mammoth budget--courtesy of schlock-producer Frank Yablans. The movie fails not because it's so gory, and not even because DePalma cruelly lingers over the deaths of our favorite characters (although this is annoying), but because the storyline is so slack. Screenwriter John Farris has plotted the film with routine situations that are unworthy...
...must be his audacious reply to those who would put all-American zombies like Gregory Peck and Lee Remick in similar roles. Kirk Douglas's face has never seemed longer, and that dimple never more defiant. With the stature and angry leer of a depraved baboon (perfect for a DePalma hero), and a cuddly, newfound warmth, Douglas looks like a MAD magazine caricature of himself, and that is somehow very appropriate. Carrie Snodgrass, in her first appearance since Diary of a Mad Housewife, walks off with the movie, and if she can bring this much warmth and humanity...
...DePalma uses familiar devices for familiar effects. He considerably subdues his revolving camera here, although when it arcs slowly around Douglas during the first scene, taking in the surrounding beach area, it conveys with great subtlety the oncoming danger. DePalma stages the most powerful action sequence, the escape of Gillian from the parapsychic institute, in slowmotion, lingering over all the deaths. He characterizes his performers by how beautifully they bleed; a little snit in Gillian's school has blood dribble from her nose all over her lunch, but Carrie Snodgrass' blood splashes lovingly, lyrically over a windshield. Clearly, the more...