THE FURY (1978: Dir. Brian De Palma)
Director Brian De Palma loves the camera eye. Often compared to Hitchcock, De Palma is the greatest modern practitioner of lucid point of view cinema. Unlike most young filmmakers of today, there is never a moment in a De Palma film where the audience is unclear about which characters are visible in the scene, where they are geographically positioned in the frame, and what they can see from their own vantage points. Having such a complete mastery of the medium empowers De Palma in his unique ability to successfully manipulate and challenge the perceptions of a willing public. It also explains his natural affinity for surveillance, a common motif in most of his films. This fascination with spying engenders various kinds of paranoia, especially during the post-Watergate age, when institutions of higher authority were becoming highly suspect to a more informed populace. By the mid Seventies, even the C.I.A's most covert operations had been made public in Senate hearings and numerous newspaper articles. De Palma, eager to enjoy the success of his friends George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, saw his chance at a hit by tapping into the unsettling atmosphere of the era by exercising his natural cinematic flamboyance to envision a hybrid thriller. One that would combine such exploitable ingredients as espionage, telekinesis and governmental conspiracies to create a genre cocktail sui generis. Entitled The Fury, it was to be the first of the director's unofficial trilogy that was built upon the public's rising fear of shadow government agencies, mysterious groups responsible for nefarious deeds at home and abroad. Giving a nod to his off-Hollywood roots, De Palma cast rebel independent filmmaker John Cassavetes as the treacherous federal agent who double crosses fellow spy Kirk Douglas in order to harness the supernatural abilities of his son. Douglas, whose left-leaning politics were publicly acknowledged, was, at the time, in the midst of his fantasy film phase, having just completed the Italian rip-off of The Omen, entitled Holocaust 2000 (1977) and about to begin work on his back to back sci-fi films Saturn 3 (1980) and The Final Countdown (1980). Cassavetes would also complete a trio of genre favourites, remembered most notoriously in the role of Mia Farrow's ambitiously evil husband in Rosemary's Baby (1968) and soon to appear as a small town doctor trying to solve a series of bizarre sex murders in the Canadian cult horror The Incubus (1982). As is his habit De Palma also cast actors from previous projects, including Amy Irving (Carrie) and Charles Durning (Sisters). Armed with such a wealth of talent in front of the camera, he was then able to concentrate on his visual realization of the screenplay written by John Farris, based on his own novel. Despite the ecstatic praises of seminal film critic Pauline Kael, De Palma had yet to fully convince the movie-going public that he could deliver the deliriously over-the-top sensory experience that would later become his trademark. With The Fury being his biggest budget to date, De Palma was determined to pull out all the stops. Nowhere was this more evident than in the film's two most famous set pieces, the exhilarating slow motion montage of Amy Irving's escape from captivity, and the jaw-dropping final fate of Cassavetes' black-clad boogey man. All set to a memorable operatic score by John Williams whose menacing melodies underscore the tragic fate of the entire cast, The Fury is prime De Palma, an unpredictably wild ride with one of world cinema's greatest visual stylists. BLU-RAY
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