De Palma aria
My wife often asks me if there are any upcoming movies I’m excited about. I usually hem and haw, for a few reasons. As a critic who has to see lots of bad movies, I try to go in with as few expectations as possible, no matter what I’m seeing. That way, I’m not so prone to disappointment, and when I see something good, I’m sure to appreciate it. Also, I’ve developed tunnel vision: I focus on the movies I need to see this week, not the ones coming out in a couple of months. Of course I’m aware of dozens of promising movies in various stages of production, but when put on the spot, I often can’t bring them to mind.
All this leads me to a movie coming out this fall that I’m genuinely excited about: Brian De Palma’s “The Black Dahlia.” From the trailer, it looks gorgeous and sinister. Working from a novel by James Ellroy about the notorious unsolved murder of an aspiring actress, De Palma has a chance to create one of the great L.A. noirs.
My admiration for De Palma was hard-won. When I was in college, I thought he was a hack: supremely talented, but without an original thought and prone to empty, showoffy camerawork. Every De Palma movie, I thought, ripped off at least two better movies.
But after reading a lot of Pauline Kael, who rhapsodized about him, and seeing some of his earlier movies, I did a 180. Yes, De Palma riddles his work with homages to Hitchcock and other masters. But he makes incredibly sophisticated, irony-drenched yet emotionally resonant genre pictures. His movies seem like lurid entertainments — and in many ways, they are — but a discerning eye can see sly humor, subtle characterizations and moviemaking glee. They work on multiple levels. As a visual storyteller, De Palma has few equals.
“Carrie,” “The Fury,” “Dressed to Kill,” “Blow Out,” “Casualties of War” and “Femme Fatale” — these are De Palma’s peaks. “Raising Cain” and “Carlito’s Way” are damn good too. “The Untouchables” is worthy if far less personal — his most uncomplicated mainstream thriller. I wouldn’t bother with “Mission: Impossible” and “Snake Eyes,” both released when I was coming of age as a critic. They’re partly responsible for my initial underrating of De Palma.
“Blow Out” best encapsulates my turnaround on De Palma. I saw it when I was in college and was appalled. All I saw was a ripoff of two great movies, “Blowup” and “The Conversation,” drenched in sleaze.
I must have been something of a prig, since I now find De Palma’s juvenile naughtiness immensely enjoyable. More than that, though, I think I just hadn’t seen enough movies to appreciate what De Palma was doing. “Blow Out” is a lot less pretentious and a lot more fun than the movies it pays homage to, and on a second viewing, years later, I came to understand how De Palma toys with genre expectations.
The movie opens with a shamelessly voyeuristic slasher film. De Palma composes one of his signature elaborate tracking shots, following the point of view of a killer stalking a houseful of nubile sorority girls. But when his intended victim opens her mouth to scream, her hideous wail jars the viewer. De Palma pulls back: We’re in a screening room with the makers of the movie within the movie. The sound designer, Jack Terry (John Travolta), is charged with dubbing a more believable scream for the inept, buxom actress.
Sent out to record some fresh natural sound, Jack witnesses a car go off a bridge and rescues a young woman from inside; the man she was with doesn’t make it. He soon finds out that the man was the governor of Pennsylvania, who was running for president (the movie is set in Philly). And the cops seem more concerned about crafting an acceptable cover story than finding out what happened. With the help of the sound he recorded at the murder scene, Jack seeks to unravel the conspiracy.
Here’s the cool thing about “Blow Out”: Jack misinterprets what sort of movie he’s in. He thinks he’s in a sophisticated, paranoid political thriller like “The Manchurian Candidate” or “The Parallax View.” He’s convinced the governor’s death was intentional and that powerful forces are seeking to cover up the circumstances surrounding it. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s actually wrapped up in a lurid, voyeuristic slasher movie like the ones he works on. The death of the governor was actually a rogue operation by a baroque villain named Burke, played by John Lithgow in the swaggering, outre style that only he can get away with. Burke wants to kill Sally (Nancy Allen), the young woman who was in the car, because that way no one will be able to corroborate Jack’s story; he decides to make it look like one in a series of sex killings. Except there would BE no series of sex killings if Burke weren’t garroting and stabbing women in his spare time. The architects of the conspiracy — who paid Sally to seduce the governor and merely wanted to discredit him, not kill him — are horrified and sever all ties with Burke.
SPOILER ALERT if necessary. Things do not end well for Jack. He tries to use his skills with sound to prove his conspiracy theory and ends up playing right into Burke’s hands. We already know, thanks to a wrenching flashback, beautifully played by Travolta, that Jack once worked for the police department before a faulty bug he installed got an officer killed. He sees a chance to right this mistake, which he attributed to inadequate technology. But he underestimates the savagery of his adversary. The tragic climax plays out amid a Liberty Day parade, as Jack listens to his companion’s dying screams, unable to save her.
De Palma tacks on a bitterly ironic and heartbreaking coda that encapsulates the movie’s journey from sleazy slasher film to polished political thriller and back again. After all, Jack was charged at the beginning with finding a good, believable scream, and by the end of the movie he’s got one: Sally’s desperate, dying wail, which he recorded. So he uses it in the movie, a lasting reminder of his failure and impotence. END SPOILERS.
Beyond the many layers of meaning, “Blow Out” is a gorgeous piece of pure cinema. De Palma makes elegant use of split screens and dual-focus shots; few directors work better with the Scope aspect ratio (2.35:1). The richly colored cinematography, by the great Vilmos Zsigmond, is a marvel; there’s a heart-stopping throwaway shot outside a motel with the Philadelphia skyline, miles away, in perfect focus. I have only seen it on DVD and would jump at the chance to see it in the theater. It looks great and sounds great despite a pedestrian widescreen transfer and 2.0 audio mix, but DVD simply doesn’t do it justice: De Palma makes movies that fill the screen. “Blow Out,” released in 1981, would make absolutely no sense panned-and-scanned, which could be why it wasn’t a big hit at the beginning of the home-video era.
I could write equally enthusiastic appreciations of the other De Palma movies I mentioned — “Casualties of War,” one of the best war films ever made, is arguably his masterpiece — but I’ll save that for later. He’s of the greats of our time — and perhaps the most underrated.
(Oh, by the way, I have never seen what is probably De Palma’s most beloved movie: “Scarface.” People seem to revere it for its content, not for De Palma’s filmmaking, which, by most critical appraisals, has been better.)
ADDENDUM: Turns out my high hopes for “The Black Dahlia” were bitterly dashed. The movie is a mess, but I think the screenwriter, not De Palma, is to blame.