Word: hitchcocked
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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...
Still, The Fury is fine popular entertainment. Kirk Douglas, as the father, mobilizes a kind of crazy energy he has not displayed since he was a much younger actor; John Cassavetes is deliciously evil as the bureaucrat-villain. De Palma, like Alfred Hitchcock, is a superb technician, sure and subtle in such matters as camera placement and editing. These are skills that are often overlooked when they are not employed in the service of "serious" themes...
There is another analogy to Hitchcock. In entertainment after entertainment he has shown, through his spies and criminals, how pervasive evil is in the world, how it can reach out and touch the most innocent places and people and make real the paranoia that so many people seem to feel. The Fury invites the audience to take pleasure in the revenge of those who are exceptional, in their final, violent turning against the straight world. One suspects that telepathic characters are artist-figures to De Palma, that conceivably, in his dealings with Hollywood producers, he has wished on occasion...
...make an impression. It's part of a de-sensitizing, or perhaps, in the case of Coma, an anesthetizing of the audience. No wonder audiences are bored with those wonderful Val Lewton films of the forties, where the terror is in what you don't see. Even Hitchcock's films are beginning to lose their punch...
...Hitchcock would have had a ball with Coma, and maybe we'd have seen some of Boston, too, where the story is supposedly set--imagine the climactic operation taking place in Fenway Park, or on top of the John Harvard statue. But instead we get Dr. Michael Crichton, and it's goodbye to wit, to hell with the unseen, and a scalpel to the audience's brain...