from The Fury (1978)

If Zach already mentioned that a number of De Palma frames feature disorienting diagonals, here’s a typical composition in my favorite De Palma film. Not his most well-executed (Dressed to Kill) or his most audacious (Hi, Mom!) or his most memorable (Carrie), but maybe the greatest representation of his formal dexterity. Here, as well as in the setpieces like Amy Irving watching Andrew Stevens being told to “watch the screen” or the blazing finale, De Palma anchors his camera on a clear horizon and somehow finesses angular extremity. Obviously, here the wallpaper’s doing the work for him, but Irving’s hand and the lamp throw the balance off until Irving’s hand reaches the spot in the dead air that trips her psychic flashback and causes Stevens to snap the frame into another scene entirely.

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from Raising Cain (1992)

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Today is the one-month anniversary of the last time I posted in this blog. Time truly flies when you’re attending weddings, moving out of an apartment and, in the space of a month, starting a new part-time job and getting a promotion to full-time after you’ve barely finished training. My writing usually comes from shame and inadequacy, and this month has been a relatively motivated, professional period of time.

Zach Campbell’s given me a quick way to make a low-impact return with his De Palma Image of the Day. So, for the next week, I’m going to run with it.

The above framegrab comes from Body Double (1984), maybe my second-favorite of the overtly Hitchcockian overtures (behind Dressed to Kill, ahead of Sisters, haven’t seen Obsession yet).

Craig Wasson is the fall guy for “bad” performances in Brian De Palma films. He’s certainly not alone in giving a performance that doesn’t cut it by Oscar standards. Nancy Allen’s back-to-back prostitute roles in Dressed and Blow Out are supposed to be complete opposites: a tragic, martyr bimbo and a conniving Wall Street-cum-Rhodes scholar. Hell, even the one De Palma performance that did win the Oscar — Sean Connery’s in The Untouchables — is nothing special, as much a career-reward as Dressed’s Michael Caine in Cider House Rules.

But I like Wasson in this movie. Body Double is the most aggressively false of all De Palma’s movies, most of them already pretty self-distancing. The bad actor in a seamy movie as a bad actor in a sleazy movie driving away from his failure on the set towards a (purposeful?) failure in a cheesy rear-projection car scene. Is the smirk not all over his face?

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