The Instant Expert's Guide to: Brian De Palma

There's no such thing as a grey area any more. Everything from Brexit to the election of Joe Biden has proved that we live in an age of entrenched opinions and polarised positions. Films generate equally vehement passions, as Cinema Paradiso reveals in assessing the achievement of one of Hollywood's most divisive talents, Brian De Palma.

Feted by some as a visionary with a technical mastery that enhances his unique insight into the American psyche, Brian De Palma is condemned by others for misogyny and a fixation with violence that exposes his over-dependence on tropes magpied from Alfred Hitchcock. While acknowledging the flaws that have resulted in the odd box-office flop, esteemed critics like Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert have championed his cause, with the former commending his 'near-surreal poetic voyeurism' and the latter lauding 'the glee with which De Palma manipulates images and characters'. Moreover, the prestigious French journal, Cahiers du Cinéma declared Carlito's Way (1993) to be the greatest film of the decade.

Yet the release of Dressed to Kill (1980) prompted feminists in London to daub slogans in red paint on the screens of any cinema showing it, while action groups like Women Against Violence Against Women and Women Against Pornography have called for a boycott of De Palma's pictures. Academics have since continued to question the rationale behind the director's thinking, with David Thomson stating in his Biographical Dictionary of Film that 'there is a self-conscious cunning in De Palma's work' that is 'ready to control everything except his own cruelty and indifference'. So, who, if anyone, is right?

A Surgeon's Son and Science Nerd

Born on 11 September 1940 in Newark, New Jersey, Brian De Palma was raised with his two older brothers in Philadelphia by his parents, Anthony and Vivienne. As their father was an orthopedic surgeon who also taught and wrote books, the boys spent most of their time with their mother. But, the young Brian frequently watched his father operate and it has been suggested that his unsqueamish attitude towards blood stems from this childhood pastime. Others, however, have claimed that De Palma's sense of dread dates from getting trapped behind a refrigerator while playing with his siblings, an experience that also sparked a fear of losing control and being humiliated.

Having discovered that Anthony was periodically unfaithful to Vivienne, Brian began following his father around town and once searched a room until he found a mistress hiding in a cupboard. He would later base Keith Gordon's character in Dressed to Kill on these snooping expeditions, although the young De Palma was a bookworm, who viewed himself as a science nerd while studying at the famous various Friends' Central School. However, having enrolled at Columbia University to read physics, De Palma became obsessed with cinema after seeing Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958), with the latter helping shape his conception of a film-maker as someone who strives to mould images until they equate to the visions in their mind's eye.

Becoming a regular at Amos Vogel's avant-garde Cinema 16 in New York, De Palma started to make short films in the hope that they would be screened. However, as he admits in Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow's fascinating documentary, De Palma (2015), the early offerings after his debut short, Icarus (1960), were a mixed bag. Following 660124: The Story of an IBM Card (1961), he made Bridge That Gap (1965) for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Show Me a Strong Town and I’ll Show You a Strong Bank for the Treasury Department, and The Responsive Eye (both 1966) for the Museum of Modern Art. Along with Woton's Wake (1962), a collage and folk song-influenced study of eccentric artist Woton Vladimir Wretchechesky (William Finley), the latter is available to rent on the Blu-ray version of De Palma's 1976 thriller, Obsession.

In 1962, however, De Palma began studying film at Sarah Lawrence College, where tutor Wilford Leach introduced him to such influential film-makers as Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, Andy Warhol, and the documentarists, Albert and David Maysles. Salesman (1968), the Direct Cinema masterpiece that the brothers co-directed with Charlotte Zwerin found its way on to the list of Guilty Pleasures that De Palma shared with Film Comment in 2015. Among the other eclectic gems he cited that are available to rent from Cinema Paradiso are Edmund Goulding's Nightmare Alley (1947), Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur (1953), Samuel Fuller's The Naked Kiss (1964) and White Dog (1982), John Boorman's Point Blank, Jim McBride's David Holzman's Diary (both 1967), Luchino Visconti's The Damned (1969) and Ludwig (1972), Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970), Mike Hodges's Get Carter (1971), and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985).

While still at college, De Palma joined forces with Leach and Cynthia Munroe to produce The Wedding Party, which was actually filmed in 1963, despite being copyrighted as 1966 and released in 1969. A debuting Robert De Niro (errantly billed as 'Denero') conspires with William Finley to persuade buddy Charles Pfluger against marrying Jill Clayburgh, as her well-heeled Long Island family take eccentricity to spectacular levels. Shot in monochrome in homage to the nouvelle vague, this scattershot, semi-improvised satire brandishes its cineastic credentials with lines like, 'Bergman knows how to suffer. Fellini knows how to suffer. Even Hitchcock knows how to suffer.' But De Palma was feeling no pain at all, as he was convinced that he was going to become 'the American Godard'.

A Movie Brat in the Making

The energetic iconoclasm of the French New Wave also impacted upon De Palma's first solo outing, Murder a la Mod (1968). For all the point-of-view shots and jump cuts, however, this tale of a budding director being stalked by a perverse maniac is much more restrained than its predecessor, as De Palma (who also scripted and edited) tests the extent to which creepy horror and broad comedy can mix. Replete with Hitchcock references, as well as containing traces of Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (1960) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up (1966), this black-and-white treatise on what would become the recurring themes of male voyeurism and the causes of sexual violence came to seem like a neophyte self-indulgence after De Palma switched tack with a zeitgeisty duo.

Touching on everythng from the assassination of John F. Kennedy to how to dodge the Vietnam draft, Greetings (1968) was a freewheeling romp that suggested De Palma was conversant with Richard Lester's Beatle features, A Hard Day's Night (1964) and Help! (1965), as well as the 1966-68 sitcom, The Monkees, starring the manufactured combo of the same name who would go off at a trippy tangent in Bob Rafelson's Head (1968). Although Jonathan Warden and Gerrit Graham have their moments, the pick of the buddy trio is Robert De Niro, who gives hints of such contrasting future characters as Johnny Boy Civello and Rupert Pupkin in Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) and The King of Comedy (1983).

Indeed, De Niro was so effective as aspiring film-maker Jon Rubin that he returned to him in Hi, Mom! (1970), which is covered in more detail below in our De Palma Top 10. The director's next venture remains his most obscure, as Dionysus in 69 (1970) is notoriously difficult to find. Ostensibly, it's a record of The Performance Group's experimental 1968 stage production of Eurpides's The Bacchae. But De Palma made innovative use of split screens to show the audience reacting to the actors and he would revisit this technique in several early features in a bid to immerse viewers in the perspectives of his principal characters.

Despite the counterculture being on a downswing as New Hollywood began to emerge, Warners Bros had seen enough of De Palma to offer him the left-field comedy, Get to Know Your Rabbit (1972), which stars Tommy Smothers as an office wonk who jacks it all in to train as a tap-dancing magician under Orson Welles. As a part-time conjuror, Welles clearly has a ball. But Smothers and De Palma frequently butted heads and the former had the latter fired as the picture wrapped. He concedes in De Palma that he has since tried to forget about the project, but it served the important purpose of convincing him that he was better suited to making thrillers than comedies.

He proved his point with Sisters (1972; see below), which dwells on the dark side of voyeurism and anticipates the perils of over-sharing on social media. Having couched much of the action of this enduringly disturbing drama in giallo terms, De Palma edged closer to full-blown horror with Phantom of the Paradise (1974), which gleefully stirred in ingredients from such literary classics as Johann von Goethe's Faust, Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Laced with dazzlingly diverse songs by Paul Williams - which not only earned an Oscar nomination, but also influenced Daft Punk - this would make a marvellous double bill with Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). Despite the relishable byplay between Williams's evil record producer and William Finley's tormented masked man, this may not have attained the same cult status as Brad and Janet's encounter with Frank N. Furter. But it confirms De Palma's mischievous wit and his mastery of technique (as in Sisters, the split-screen sequence is gripping).

Following this digression into hybrid horror, De Palma returned to his Hitchcockian roots with Obsession (1976), which clearly bears the influence of Vertigo. The director even hired the Master of Suspense's frequent collaborator, Bernard Herrmann, to write the score. But the composer felt that Paul Schrader's screenplay was overlong and persuaded De Palma to cut a third phase of the storyline regarding New Orleans realtor Cliff Robertson's reaction to the kidnapping and murder of his wife and daughter. Schrader was furious at his script (which was originally entitled Déjà Vu) being truncated, while executives at Columbia urged De Palma to use dream sequences to tone done the implications of a provocative plot device. While he took this on the chin, he was unhappy with the lack of intensity in Robertson's performance and wished he could have matched the complexity shown by Geneviève Bujold in the dual role of Elizabeth Courtland and Sandra Portinari.

By this time, De Palma had become a member of the so-called Movie Brats, whose achievement was so memorably recalled in Peter Biskind's paean to New Hollywood, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998), which inspired a 2003 documentary of the same name by Kenneth Bowser. Along with John Milius (whose own remarkable career is chronicled in Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson's Milius, 2013), De Palma might not have enjoyed the critical acclaim bestowed upon Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese or the commercial success of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. But he was very much part of the gang and his career trajectory might have changed as dramatically as Scorsese's if he had accepted Paul Schrader's offer to direct Taxi Driver (1976), which would have reunited him with Robert De Niro. Instead, he opted to adapt a bestselling novel by the rising star of horror fiction.

At the Peak of His Powers

In fact, De Palma had latched on to Stephen King's manuscript before it hit the shelves, as he had recognised that the story of a high school girl with telekinetic powers would give him the scope to unleash his cinematic panoply. Having his finger on the literary pulse paid dividends, as Carrie (1976) made him one of Hollywood's most talked about directors. Yet, despite the brisk box-office business helping to put horror into the movie mainstream, De Palma was denied the opportunity to adapt Alfred Bester's 1952 novel, The Demolished Man.

He remained in the realm of disconcerting sci-fi, however, with The Fury (1978), which was adapted by John Farris from his book of the same name. Riffing on the kind of paranoid thriller that had emerged after the Watergate scandal, the story follows a former CIA agent (Kirk Douglas) who hires a psychic teenager (Amy Irving) to help find the son who has been abducted by a government agent (John Cassavetes) intent on weaponising his special powers. Driven by a John Williams score, this has always divided critics because its technically taut set-pieces and innovative efforts at depicting interiority are compromised by some peculiar plot twists and the occasional bizarre incident like the underpants chase sequence. But Jean-Luc Godard was a big fan and De Palma repaid the compliment by making his own sidestep into personal cinema when he teamed with Kirk Douglas, Keith Gordon and students from his class at Sarah Lawrence College to base Home Movies (1980) on his own juvenile habit of filming family life.

If this quirky experiment has largely been forgotten, Dressed to Kill (1980) stands front and centre in the ongoing De Palma controversy over his use of gender and violence. Yet, even here, there are diametrically opposed opinions on what the film is trying to say and how it goes about it. See what we have to say below. Thanks to composer Pino Donaggio and sound editor Michael Moyse, the audio element was even more important in De Palma's next feature, Blow Out (1981), a variation on Antonioni's Blow-Up that also borrows from Francis Ford Coppola's Oscar-nominated thriller, The Conversation (1974).

Despite containing a scream that forever haunts anyone who hears it, Blow Out failed to reap its box-office rewards and a frustrated De Palma decided to remake Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932), which had been prevented from depicting the Chicago underworld in all its gory glory by the Hays Code. Moreover, he opted to set it in Miami and use a Giorgio Moroder score to drive the rise and fall of immigrant Cuban druglord, Tony Montana (Al Pacino).

Having strayed into unchartered territory, De Palma returned to a more familiar milieu in Body Double (1984), which links in elements from Rear Window, Dial M For Murder (1955) and, inevitably, Vertigo. Inspired by his experience of working with Playboy Playmate Victoria Lynn Johnson as Angie Dickinson's stand-in on Dressed to Kill, this is a tale of two Hollys. De Palma considered casting adult star Annette Haven as Holly Body, but plumped instead for Melanie Griffith, who is the daughter of Hitchcock's last muse, Tippi Hedren (whose relationship with the director is laid bare in Julian Jarrold's The Girl, 2012). The other Holly is Holly Johnson, the lead singer of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who leads anti-hero Craig Wasson into a kinky nightclub during the 'Relax' sequence, which has been seen as a coded admission on De Palma's part that his obsession with bodies, voyeurism, violence and guilt could be regarded as pornographic by those who fail to look beneath the luridly sleek surface.

Battling the Backlash

Having been eased off Cruising by William Friedkin (1980), De Palma wound up losing Prince and the City (1981) to Sidney Lumet after he had walked from Scarface, He now found himself unable to make Act of Vengeance, about the murder of United Mine Workers leader Jock Yablonski because Paramount wanted him to direct Flashdance instead. Adrian Lyne took over that assignment, as he would later pick up Fatal Attraction (1987) after De Palma turned it down. Instead, he signed up for the music video for Bruce Springsteen's 'Dancing in the Dark', which helped make Courteney Cox a star and can be found on many of the Springsteen documentaries available from Cinema Paradiso. Just type his name into the Search line.

Needing to stay busy, De Palma agreed to direct Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo in Wise Guys (1986), a buddy comedy about a pair of lowlifes who are forced to hit the road in a pink Cadillac after stealing cash from mob boss, Dan Hedaya. Not even a cameo from Harvey Keitel as an Atlantic City hotelier could convince audiences or critics that this was anything other than an unfunny caper. Rather than slide another rung down the ladder, however, De Palma shot back up to the top when he was tagged to direct The Untouchables (1987), playwright David Mamet's big-screen version of the old TV favourite of the same name (1959-63).

Italian maestro Ennio Morricone provided the pulsating score and he returned for Casualties of War (1989) to accompany the harrowing bridge plunge sequence with pan pipes. Having unsuccessfully striven to adapt war correspondent Robert Stone's Dog Soldiers (which Karel Reisz had eventually filmed as Who'll Stop the Rain, 1978), De Palma returned to a 1969 article that Daniel Lang had written for The New Yorker. But, while this remains an important film in his canon, it hasn't always been given its critical due.

In 1990, De Palma adapted Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities in what the press determined was a conscious effort to distance himself from the psychogical slashers with which he had become so associated that one interviewer had expressed surprise that he hadn't ordered raw steak for lunch and watched the blood ooze across his plate after plunging a serrated knife into the flesh. In fact, De Palma was the one who was savaged after the calamitous miscasting of Tom Hanks as Wall Street bond trader Sherman McCoy, who gets stuck in the South Bronx with girlfriend Maria Ruskin (Melanie Griffith). Julie Salamon provided a blow-by-blow account of the production in The Devil's Candy (1991), which paints no one in a good light, although Morgan Freeman managed to see the funny side in Bill Couturie's 2006 documentary, Boffo!: Tinseltown’s Bombs and Blockbusters.

Nettled by the reception, De Palma sought refuge in lacerating self-parody, as he reunited with John Lithgow for Raising Cain (1992). Advertised with the slogan, 'De Mented, De Ranged, De Ceptive, De Palma,' this did pretty much what it said on the tin, as respected psychologist Dr Carter Nix (Lithgow) takes a sabbatical to help his wife, Jenny (Lolita Davidovich) bring up their young daughter. However, the model father turns out to have a darker side - several of them, in fact - and De Palma rolls out his stylistic Hitch tricks to explore both his relationship with his own father and the notion of whether the hero of a film could also be its villain.

He teamed with screenwriter David Koepp to approach a similar idea from a different angle in Carlito's Way (1993), which was based on the Edwin Torres novels, Carlito's Way (1975) and After Hours (1979). Although it didn't set tills ringing, this going straight saga bolstered De Palma's bankability in Hollywood and he had no qualms in joining forces with Koepp again on Mission: Impossible (1996). The on-set tensions with Tom Cruise resulted in De Palma refusing to do any press junkets, but his nous ensured that Cruise would be able to reprise the role of Ethan Hunt on five further occasions in John Woo's Mission: Impossible 2 (2000), JJ Abrams's Mission: Impossible III (2006), Brad Bird's Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol (2011), and Christopher McQuarrie's Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation (2015) and Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018). Moreover, Cruise and McQuarrie have two more outings booked in, Covid permitting, of course.

Flickers in a Long Fade

Scoring the biggest commercial success of his career did little to improve De Palma's status among critics. Indeed. as the hits started to dry up, the knives became sharper, with the loudest voices invariably accusing him of misogyny. He didn't always help himself, especially when he made comments like, 'I'm always attacked for having an erotic, sexist approach - chopping up women, putting women in peril. I'm making suspense movies! What else is going to happen to them?' Yet he was frequently lauded for being a covert feminist whose films also explored queer themes with deceptive insight.

A recurring complaint was the impersonality of De Palma's work. In Variety, Owen Gleiberman called him 'a kind of genius tinkerer' whose films were 'elaborately clever meta-Hitchcock jungle gyms of pure escapism'. Criticising his self-reflexivity, the New Yorker's Richard Brody branded him 'the creator of a mortuary cinema, in which the dead forms of classic Hollywood are brought back to life'. But plenty more enthused about the filmic flair and technical mastery that made De Palma one of the most visually astute directors in the world.

He proved this point again with Snake Eyes (1998), although the feature was released without its spectacular flood finale after test audiences found it confusing. Nevertheless, David Koepp's story of a conspiracy breaking on the night of a big boxing bout in Atlantic City is full of the twists and turns that give Stephen H. Burum's camera the licence to pirouette its way around the sets in a series of audacious long takes. At the centre of the storm is Nicolas Cage, who contributes a slice of prime De Palma ham as Detective Rick Santoro, who locks down the arena in order to discover who took a pot shot at the Secretary of Defense while he was being guarded by Santoro's naval commander buddy, Kevin Dunne (Gary Sinise).

It's a shame the Industrial Light & Magic tsunami was left on the cutting-room floor, but De Palma got another chance to play with the company's SFX gadgetry on Mission to Mars (2000), which was based on the Red Planet rides at a pair of Disney theme parks. Set in 2020, the narrative is pretty formulaic, as Tim Robbins, Connie Nielsen and Gary Sinise form part of a rescue party after Don Cheadle's crew appears to send a distress signal. But, even though he's saddled with some peculiarly unpersuasive extraterrestrials, De Palma delivers the customary moments of eye-popping spectacle, while also pushing the generic envelope, as he explores the bonds between the astronauts. Moreover, he makes knowing use of the musical cues, with Ennio Morricone's forbidding organ score being counterpointed by the life-affirming zero-gravity bop to Van Halen's 'Dance the Night Away'.

De Palma came back down to earth for Femme Fatale (2002), whose reliance on blindsiding twists suggests he must have been watching Richard Quine's Paris When It Sizzles (1964) when he wrote the script. The films share a movie insider quality, as the opening $10 million diamond heist takes place during the Cannes Film Festival. However, any hopes that Rebecca Romijn-Stamos might have had of enjoying her ill-gotten gains are dashed when shutterbug Antonio Banderas paps her in Paris and her carefully constructed secret life as the wife of diplomat Peter Coyote starts to unravel. Some have seen this as De Palma's ironic commentary on the standard of screen storytelling in an age of effects-laden blockbusters in which the contribution of the pixel pushers is increasingly as significant as that of the director. But others were more than a little miffed by the kind of switcheroo that Brian Griffin described in the 'Lois Kills Stewie' episode of Family Guy (1999-) as 'a giant middle finger' to the audience.

Never one to take reviews to heart. De Palma replaced David Fincher on an adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia (2006), which was inspired by the notorious 1947 Hollywood killing of waitress Elizabeth Short. She is presented here as an aspiring actress and cops Josh Hartnett and Aaron Eckhart are drawn into the seedier side of the entertainment industry, as they investigate her gruesome murder. Hilary Swank and Fiona Shaw are allowed to camp it up as a lesbian socialite and her mother, while De Palma himself struggles to hit the hard-boiled tone he had struck so effectively in The Untouchables. Perhaps the decision to film part of the action in Bulgaria threw him off.

He had fewer excuses where Redacted (2007) was concerned, as he had accepted producer Mark Cuban's challenge to make a digital picture for $5 million. Seizing the opportunity to express his dismay at America's involvement in the War on Terror, De Palma drew heavily on the plot of Casualties of War in recreating the atrocity carried out at in the Iraqi city of Mahmudiyah in 2006. Played by a cast of newcomers, the unflinching picture caused a storm of controversy in the United States, where it was slammed for being unpatriotic. But, even though De Palma won the Best Director prize at the Venice Film Festival, the critics were pretty much unanimous in accusing him of being too old school to appropriate trendy digital tropes with any aesthetic credibility. In fact, he was harking back to the avant-gardism of his early career, but the blend of reportagic, social media and documentary styles feels fussy and forced.

Six years passed before De Palma directed again and Passion (2013) was a remake of Alain Corneau's Love Crime (2010), with Rachel McAdams and Noomi Rapace taking over the roles created by Kristin Scott Thomas and Ludivine Sagnier. The cut and thrust of life in a chic advertising agency is depicted with an acuity that echoes another arch Hitchcock devotee, Claude Chabrol. But, as Rapace tumbles into bed with her boss's husband in her bid to climb the career ladder, the convolutions of the scenario drew attention to the gleeful excesses of De Palma's flamboyant technique. It's a rattling yarn, but scarcely improves upon the original, in spite of the reworked denouement.

As he reached his 75th year, De Palma received a bounce from Baumbach and Paltrow's 2015 documentary, in which he was frank and funny ('holy mackerel') about his approach to film-making and his treatment by the press. But the decision to release Domino (2019) directly to video on demand after another lengthy hiatus shaped critical verdicts on the story of Copenhagen cop Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's bid to outsmart CIA agent Guy Pearce and expose the fact that his partner has been murdered by an ISIS commander who is also a key informant.

While waiting for another window to open, De Palma teamed with new partner Susan Lehman to publish his first novel, Are Snakes Necessary? (2020), which took its title from the book that Henry Fonda is reading in Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve (1941). The pandemic has obviously put plans on hold, but De Palma is reportedly in post-production on Sweet Vengeance, a fact-based crime saga starring Brazilian actor Wagner Moura that was filmed in the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo. He has also made frequent mention of a horror movie inspired by the Harvey Weinstein case entitled Predator. Given his survival instincts, few would bet against De Palma shaking up the audience and the establishment one more time, at least.