Word: palmas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...PALMA HAS CAST the film magnificently, with a keen satirical eye. Giving the lead roles to Kirk Douglas and Carrie Snodgrass 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...
...theory anyway, move mountains or, if we are to believe The Fury, afflict people who cross them with ailments ranging from nosebleeds to cerebral hemorrhages, and worse. To most of us, psychokinesis exists in that exotic realm where pseudo-scientific speculation meets metaphysics, but for Brian De Palma it is obviously an obsession. It was the subject of 1976's highly successful Carrie, and he has returned to it again in The Fury...
...terribly complicated, but also very exciting. De Palma's staging amounts to a movie-long chase that is witty, crisp and suspenseful. The film ends with terrible vengeance upon all who attempted to exploit these strangely gifted children. That ending does not quite match Carrie's, perhaps because the picture as a whole does not work as powerfully on one's emotions. The reason is that Carrie herself existed in an ordinary milieu, a middle-class high school. The contrast between it and her "talent" was vivid. Then, too, Carrie was such a plain mousy little thing...
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...
...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 he had psychokinetic powers. Be that as it may, The Fury can be enjoyed, by those prepared for some colorful blood spillage when the kids get riled, simply as an engrossing thriller...