Perhaps no director in the history of modern filmmaking has courted as much controversy with each film he made than Brian De Palma. Of the filmmakers that took Hollywood by storm in the late 60s and early 70s, De Palma was the one the others like Scorsese, Spielberg, Lucas, and even Coppola looked up to as the best technical filmmaker of the bunch. However, it was De Palma's love of exploitation and deviant behavior that sort of tarnished his reputation while those other filmmakers thrived.
Granted, by the time De Palma's careerreaches the 80s, he leans in to that controversy and begins really having fun with all of the excess that his various critics had tried to use as a weapon against his films.Nudity and violence had been elements of his arsenal prior to this, but it was the freewheeling 80s where De Palma really cut loose, courted controversy, andcemented his legacy as the true "enfant terrible" of his generation.
However, let's begin close-ish to the beginning of his career...
Greetings
In 1968, De Palma made three films, but this is the most notable of the three as it was the first film to ever officially earn the newly created X-rating from the MPAA. It was later downgraded to an R-rating, but it was controversial in its time. De Palma and co-writerCharles Hirsch created a film they hoped would be the American equivalent of Godard's 1966 film Masculin Feminin.
It wasn't, but it did give us two pretty good nude scenes. First, Ashley Oliver's large breasts are on display as De Palma regular Gerrit Graham stages a reenactment of the JFK assassination—which had only occurred five years earlier...
Later in the film, a young Robert De Niro plays a peeping tom character who spies on a fully nude Sara-Jo Edlin as she and her man have some stop motion sex!
Weird stuff, not especially groundbreaking just yet, but there was an experimentation with form that would continue through his next several films. Until 1973, anyway...
Sisters
De Palma's love for—and proclivity for borrowing from—Hitchcock was born with this, his seventh feature film. Done experimenting with form, De Palma settles into a nice rhythm where he can begin experimenting with technique, using split screens, flashbacks, and multiple perspectives of the same scene. Aided by a brilliant score by longtime Hitchcock collaborator Bernard Herrmann, the film is both an homage to the past and a bold step forward.
The late, great Margot Kidder did one of her first nude scenes in this film,doing double duty as both halves ofa pair of conjoined twins. After successfully being separated in a horrifying surgical procedure seen in flashbacks, one sister becomes a murderous psychopath, while the other becomes a nymphomaniac, spelling doom for any poor soul who comes home with her.
On the surface, there's nothing overtly controversial about the sex scene in Sisters, but the simple fact that it's an interracial scene in a major studio film that is never commented on in any way is a pretty bold thing. Normalizing interracial sex was a huge step forwardfor film, particularly coming just five years after Sidney Poitier and familywere invited into Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn's house for dinner.
If nothing else, it established De Palma as a sexually progressive filmmaker, something that would come back to haunt him in the 80s.
Carrie
In 1976, De Palma first set his camera inside a shower, and a trend was born that would run through many of his subsequent films. Once you do a horror movie with a prominent shower scene, you're basically begging the critics to harp on you for aping Hitchcock. However, De Palma took Hitchcock's shower terror one step further by making the set-up to the horror more overtly sexual.
The film opens in a girl's locker room, with a dreamlike slow-motion pan past nude teenage girls—including De Palma's future wife Nancy Allen...
He then lovingly shoots Sissy Spacek, as the sheltered title character, washing herself in the shower before having her first menstruation...
And what had started as sensual turns to horror as her classmates pelt her with tampons...
Combining sexuality and horror, and going to extremes in both regards, would become the hallmark of De Palma's films going forward. The film was a hit, both critically and commercially, earning Oscar nominations for both Spacek and Piper Laurie.
Also of note, this would be his first time working with composer Pino Donaggio who would become the Bernard Herrmann to De Palma's Hitchcock, scoring most of the director's subsequent thrillers, including...
Dressed to Kill
This 1980 psychosexual thriller was a turning point for De Palma, one which would come to define much of his work over the next few years. De Palma once again opens his film with a shower scene, however, instead of relative newcomer Sissy Spacek, this time we were seeing Police Woman herself, Angie Dickinson, get herself off in the shower.
While Angie did do the nudity in the wide shots, the boobs and bush we see in those lovingly shot close-ups belong to 1977 Penthouse Pet of the Year,Victoria Lynn Johnson. This shower scene also ends in terror as her fantasies take a turn for the aggressive...
This is, of course, foreshadowing to the character's shocking death at the end of the film's first act, but it also conflates sexuality and violence in the audience's minds in the first few minutes of the film. The film also climaxes with another shower scene, this time featuring Nancy Allen...
There's no denying that there is impeccable craft on display throughout the film, as De Palma plays with split diopters and other camera tricks to keep the audience almost always off guard for what's around the next corner.
The more troubling aspects of the film, however, are still troubling nearly forty years later. The film's main antagonist is Michael Caine's psychiatrist character who leads a double life as a cross-dressing killer who sets out tomurder promiscuous women who awaken certain sexual urges in him.
This was also where he really began getting accused—quite wrongly, I might add—of being a misogynist. His fiercest critics attacked him for constantly putting women in peril from sexually aggressive men who often end up killing them. This is simply a tactic as old as cinema itself to get the audience emotionally involved in the story. As De Palma himself said...
"It goes back to the old horror films with the girl in the negligee walking around the haunted house with a candelabra. They’re a lot more interesting to look at and a lot more vulnerable than if you had Arnold Schwarzenegger walking around carrying a candelabra. You just wouldn’t be too concerned that there would be any problems." [via]
If the accusations did anything at all, however, they simply emboldened De Palma, who gave his critics a boatload of ammunition in the opening minutes of his follow-up film...
Blow Out
If you were to ask me what De Palma's best film is, I'd say look no further than this 1981 riff of Antonioni's Blow Up. A never better John Travolta stars as a sound engineer for a schlockbuster indie horror studio in Philadelphia who stumbles into a murder conspiracy while recording sounds in the park at night.
The film's opening moments, however, are a hilarious middle finger extended by De Palma directly at his detractors. We open on one of the zero budget slasher movies Travolta is working on, where we get lots of nudity as the camera assumes the POV of a murderous psychopath outside a sorority house...
What's that? Oh, just some sexy dancing coeds. What's in the next room?
And of course our killer ends his rampage, where else, but in the shower...
It's not until this moment, roughly five minutes into the film, that we realize we're watching a movie within the movie, and the story starts. Travolta is tasked with finding a better scream to replace theridiculous sounding moan let out by Missy Cleveland in the above moment.
If you haven't seen the film, I won't spoil it for you, but let's say he gets that scream, and it's a harrowing journey to get it. This is De Palma having fun while still operating at top form. There are shots in this film—such as the moment when the camera circles around Travolta frantically checking tapes that have been erased—that are among the best he's ever done.
I hate the phrase "it's all downhill from here," but from a purely satisfying cinematic standpoint, this was probably the last "Capital G" Great film that De Palma would make. His next film, while revered and beloved, is one of his most wildly uneven films...
Scarface
There's not much in the way of nudity in the three hours of this coke-fueled extravaganza that starts at about a nine and only goes up from there. For all that extravagance, however, there's just not much in the way of nudity in this one. There's a nice topless shot of Sue Bowser as she sits in bed with Steven Bauer...
And of course there's more conflation of violence and nudity—this time with a heaping helping of a twisted family sexual dynamic—when Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, as Tony Montana's sister, gets gunned down while topless wearing an open robe...
I'm not going to bad mouth Scarface, it's a classic and it certainly has its moments, but its every bit as messy and complicated as its title character.
Body Double
For the final film we'll be looking at, it's the one where everything sort of comes together and falls apart, all at the same time. Hot off of Scarface, De Palma essentially decided to turn the opening scene of Blow Out into a feature film, and 1984's Body Double is certainly the most off the rails he gets in terms of sexuality.
A hyper-sexualized riff on both Hitchcock's Rear Windowand Vertigo, Body Double stars Bill Maher lookalike Craig Wasson as down-on-his-luck actor Jake, whom we meet shortly before he walks in on his lady, Barbara Crampton, cheating on him...
Offered a place to stay by a sleazy fellow actor played brilliantly by Gregg Henry,Jake begins spying on sexy next door neighborDeborah Shelton...
...whom he later sees murdered by a man with an industrial sized two foot long drill. Do you get it? He's literally screwing these women to death! Not subtle, butpretty ballsy for a guy always being accused of various crimes against his female characters.Jake is soon sucked into a web of intrigue involving a porn star played by Melanie Griffithwho may or may not have been posing as the next door neighbor he saw murdered...
Needless to say, our hero saves the day and ends up getting a job working in nudie horror movies not unlike the ones Travolta recorded sound for in Blow Out. The film ends with—you guessed it—an extended shower scene featuring a topless Ty Randolph during the film's credits...
It's a fun movie, and clearly De Palma had a blast writing and making it, but it's kinda disposable and the first of his Hitchcock-esque thrillers that just doesn't completely come together. As Roger Ebert said in his review for the film, "It's not just that he sometimes works in the style of Hitchcock, but that he has the nerve to."Plus it's got some amazing nudity, which more than makes up for it.
What are you favorite De Palma films? Sound off in the comments section below.
