“It was all a ridiculous mistake. There was no body.”
Okay, if you’re still looking for the right movie to get you in the mood for Halloween, here’s an old favorite of mine from director Brian De Palma. You know his later movies: CARRIE, DRESSED TO KILL, BLOW OUT, SCARFACE, BODY DOUBLE, THE UNTOUCHABLES, MISSION:IMPOSSIBLE. He also directed THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, which I recommended a few days ago. SISTERS is one of his early films, a loving homage to Hitchcock psycho-thrillers. It’s wicked, sharp, suspenseful, funny, and, like the best of the De Palma thrillers, delicious enough for multiple screenings. De Palma is crafting his wonderful style here — inventive camera set-ups; split screen storytelling; murder and mirth in equal measures; women who are more compelling than the men; and a pointedly funny ending.
SISTERS boasts two fantastic performances: Margot Kidder as a formerly conjoined (“Siamese”) twin, and Jennifer Salt as a witness to a murder nobody else believes has occurred. And perhaps most importantly, the movie is enhanced by a frightening music score from Bernard Herrmann, the maestro behind Hitchcock’s classics. (And look for Olympia Dukakis in a very small, early role!)
Halloween is just as much about fun as it is fright, and director Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock-and-roll musical THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is a real scream. It’s THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA set to a beat and De Palma’s visual mastery, with Dorian Gray and Faust thrown in for extra color. PHANTOM is a worthy cult film, actually a much better movie, more outrageous, than THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. De Palma’s special ingredient? Paul Williams — that’s right, the guy who wrote the songs “The Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog and “Rainy Days and Mondays” for the Carpenters — as the Faust character, an evil record producer. Williams also wrote all the songs for the movie, including the killer glam rock tune “Life at Last”. And a bit of trivia: The set dresser for the movie was Sissy Spacek. Two years later she’d be the lead star of De Palma’s CARRIE.
This is a regular list of random things that have fueled my love affair with cinema over the years.
I LOVE seeing my hometown in the movies. Although it’s been three-and-a-half decades since I left Philadelphia, I love the city from afar, and seeing it on the screen always triggers mixed emotions in me — nostalgia, a bit of pride, a love of family, fleeting homesickness, relief that I’m now over 2,000 miles away.
Whether it’s the gloomy blue-collar mid-1970s neighborhood that was Sylvester Stallone’s urban gym in ROCKY,
or the socially diverse human interest map of TRADING PLACES,
or the fantastically imagined near-future dystopia of Terry Gilliam’s 12 MONKEYS,
or the quiet but very menacing haunted row homes of M. Night Shyamalan’s THE SIXTH SENSE,
or the streets and sites, both mundane and grand, photographed so mysteriously and mythically in Shyamalan’s UNBREAKABLE,
… seeing this city again on the screen reminds me that Philadelphia is an exciting, spirited and remarkably historic city, and it was an inspirational and fun place to call home the first 15 years of my life.
The movie with the most vibrant and beautiful shots of Philadelphia is definitely Brian De Palma’s BLOW OUT. From the patriotically decked-out tourist destination of Penn’s Landing on the Delaware River to City Hall, the nation’s largest municipal building; and through the display window of Wanamaker’s, the city’s first department store, to the marble, gold, red and cream interior of the 30th Street train station (see UNBREAKBLE photo) and the pedestrian walkway beneath the Wissahickon Bridge in Fairmount Park, BLOW OUT is an authentic tour of the City of Brotherly Love in the early ’80s.
Damn!, what is that feeling? Homesickness? I think it’ll be time for a trip back to Philly soon!
I LOVE Barbra Streisand’s film debut as Fanny Brice in the 1968 production of the musical FUNNY GIRL. Streisand played the role on Broadway from 1964-66, but producers wanted a more established Hollywood actress for the movie. Shirley MacLaine turned it down, and director William Wyler insisted on Barbra. The movie might be sketchy on biographical truth, but there’s no denying Streisand’s extraordinary, powerful intorduction to film audiences. A star was indeed born. (Streisand split the Oscar for Best Actress in a rare tie with Katharine Hepburn in THE LION IN WINTER.)
I LOVE the attack of the skeletons and sword fight in the 1963 fantasy adventure JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS. The movie was helmed by a television director, but stop motion animation genius Ray Harryhausen directed the special effects scenes, including the giant living statue Talos, the murderous winged Harpies, and the seven-headed snake creature Hydra. But the most memorable of Harryhausen’s Argonaut antagonists is the army of sword-fighting skeletons. This scene has been copied many, many times in the 50 years since, but never with the imagination, patience, sense of wonder, excitement, talent and love of craft that Harryhausen brought to all of his creations, from MIGHTY JOE YOUNG in 1949 to CLASH OF THE TITANS in 1981.
I LOVE this movie poster. EYES OF LAURA MARS will be on another of my lists soon enough, thanks to a challenge from a friend, but this striking image has been a favorite since the night in 1978 that a 14-year-old me sneaked into a theater to see the movie.
I LOVE the scene in HIGH ANXIETY in which Mel Brooks is attacked by birds. He’s poking Alfred Hitchcock in the ribs, of course … these birds don’t want to peck eyeballs, they’re just doing what birds do. HIGH ANXIETY isn’t Mel’s best movie — hello YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, hello BLAZING SADDLES, hello THE PRODUCERS — but it is a delightfully chaotic mix of two particular favorites: 1970s Mel Brooks and Alfred Hitchcock’s entire film canon. (I also love the joke about movie music cliches: During a suspenseful car chase, Mel Brooks is jolted and confused by the sudden rush of bombastic, overwrought action movie music. An orchestra is performing in a bus that passes him in the next lane. Classic Brooks. And I just adore Cloris Leachman as sinister sex fiend Nurse Diesel.)
I LOVE Oddjob, my favorite James Bond villain, portrayed by Harold Sakata in GOLDFINGER. That hat, those heads … (Strangely, hours after I added Oddjob to my list, I read Richard Kiel, the actor who played “Jaws” in the James Bond movies THE SPY WHO LOVED ME and MOONRAKER, had just died. Jaws was an effective bad guy also … at least until he switched sides in MOONRAKER to help Bond.)
I LOVE James Coburn’s bid for freedom on a bicycle in THE GREAT ESCAPE. Australian Flight Officer Sedgwick is a secondary character in the movie, but he is “the manufacturer,” the go-to guy who can build or repurpose just about anything to help his fellow POWs escape a Nazi camp. During the mass prison break, Sedgwick snatches a bicycle to start his solo journey through the German countryside into Nazi-occupied France. THE GREAT ESCAPE is filled with the toughest, coolest, smartest men’s men of the era: Steve McQueen, James Garner, Charles Bronson, Richard Attenborough and Coburn; but though he had the least amount of screen time and lines among his co-stars, Coburn’s Sedgwick calmly and in good humor performs his tasks and waits for his opportunity, not even breaking a sweat during a close call with Nazi officers at a French cafe.
I LOVE the soundtrack for Brian De Palma’s 1978 suspense thriller THE FURY. John Williams composed the music during his 1970s peak, but the work is much different, darker, more other-worldly, than JAWS, STAR WARS, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND, SUPERMAN or his other soundtracks of the period. It most resembles his score for the sadly forgotten DRACULA of the same year, the version with Frank Langella, Laurence Olivier and Donald Pleasance. Both THE FURY and DRACULA soundtracks are hard to come by: They’re out of print and will cost you a few pints of blood … though if you ask nicely I might burn copies for your late-night listening pleasure.)
I LOVE the scene in David Lynch’s THE ELEPHANT MAN in which John Merrick shows his benefactors a photograph of his mother. This is a moment of wonderful acting from three veterans … watch how characters react to the photograph and how they react to each other’s reactions. Splendid, heartbreaking. “I must have been a great disappointment to her.”
I LOVE the 1941 romantic screwball comedy THE LADY EVE. Barbara Stanwyck plays a card shark who boards an elite cruise ship with her con artist father to cheat lots of money from wealthy passengers. She sets her eyes on Henry Fonda as an easy mark … and of course falls in love with him. Stanwyck is absolutely enchanting, and Charles Coburn is a hoot as her father, a criminal with the perfect touch of brains, heart and class. “Don’t be vulgar, Jean,” he reminds her. “Let us be crooked, but never common.” Henry Fonda is the consummate foil, head over heels for Eve and smart enough to know he’ll be better off for it. I’m so ferociously critical of romantic comedies that my friends think I just don’t like “that kind of movie,” that I’m missing some sort of gene that would allow me to moon over the happiness of characters in movies. No. Rather it’s that today’s romantic comedies are creatively stillborn, unimaginative, cheap wish fulfillment fantasies for lazy sods. I actually really love romantic comedies, thanks very much, and THE LADY EVE is one of my favorites.
The Most Beautiful Fraud 