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I rewatched Brian De Palma’s Body Double (1984) recently. Again. And once more I’m reminded why this film remains one of the most underrated entries in his impressive catalog. If you haven’t seen it I highly recommend you check it out. It’s also eminently re-watchable, and you can most certainly discover something new with each viewing.

Released in 1984 to nearly universal critical scorn, Body Double was dismissed as gratuitously lurid, derivative Hitchcock worship. Critics at the time couldn’t see past the ample nudity and genre pastiche. Even Pauline Kael, typically a De Palma champion, called it “stupid yet moderately entertaining.” It bombed at the box office, earning just $8.8 million against a $10 million budget.

They were all wrong.

The De Palma Deep Cuts Hold Up

When casual moviegoers think of Brian De Palma, they reach for the obvious: Al Pacino’s cocaine mountain in Scarface (1983) or Kevin Costner stalking Robert De Niro through Prohibition-era Chicago in The Untouchables (1987). These are fine films, well-crafted crowd-pleasers that showcase De Palma’s technical prowess. Certainly nothing wrong with those, and I’m guessing they helped pay the bills.

But his lesser-known works are arguably where he’s at his best. Sisters (1972), Obsession (1976), and yes, Body Double form a more personal trilogy of Hitchcockian fever dreams where De Palma operates without the constraints of studio expectations or star vehicles. These are the films where he takes real risks. Where the voyeurism becomes uncomfortably explicit. Where style and substance merge into something genuinely unsettling.

Body Double might be the apex of this approach.

Meta Before Meta? (Yes!)

What those critics missed is that Body Double isn’t just another Hitchcock homage. It’s De Palma making a film about making films. It’s a director holding a mirror up to his own obsessions, his critics, and the entire Hollywood machine. This might be his take on Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963), albeit told in a completely different style. Yet, equally entertaining in my opinion.

Weirdly — no really, weirdly, because this is a film where one character bashes in the head of another character with a baseball bat — I think what makes this film work is restraint. Brian De Palma is Brian De Palma-ing himself all over this film, with all his stylistic tics and touches and his oh-look-do-you-see-how-I’m-referencing-Eisenstein-aren’t-I-so-very-clever-ness, but he’s doing it at about an 8, rather than an 11. Yes, there is that (rather famous) scene involving a baseball bat, but here’s the thing: what makes it shocking isn’t the assault, it’s the context. De Palma shows us enough of the assault (and the aftermath) to make the point, but, unlike, say, Scarface, there’s no lingering. De Palma gets in, gets what the scene needs, and gets out.

Now, I am going to accept there is skepticism for this thesis of mine. The Untouchables does not exactly skimp on the blood or the occasional shot of someone’s brains all over a window pane. This is a movie that rather handily earns it “R” rating. But my argument is that in these cases it’s not about quantity, it is about quality. Those brains on the window pane are actually in service to the story. They are just enough to fill in the scene, and then we’re moving on. For De Palma, for whom so much of his directorial style is basically more, of whatever it is, not just blood although certainly blood too, this sort of restraint in the service of story feels a little revolutionary. Turns out you can do a whole lot, if you’re not trying to bludgeon your audience into sensory overload.

De Palma didn’t have to drive his audience into sensory overload in no small part because the whole affair is just so incredibly handsomely mounted. The script, by David Mamet before his metaphorical cheese starting slipping off his metaphorical cracker, is sharp and pithy and melodramatic as hell. The set design offers up a version of Chicago that is a beautiful fable — 1930 Chicago didn’t look like this but how wonderful it would have been if it had. The wardrobe — the wardrobe! — is done by Georgio fucking Armani, and by God you can tell, everyone looks so ridiculously good. You can pause the movie at just about any point where there’s not blood being sprayed about, and it will look like a fashion shoot. It’s all so good that the terrific Ennio Morricone score is almost an afterthought. Almost.

And then there’s the cast. Sean Connery won an Oscar for his portrayal of a cop past his prime who decides to do the right thing, even if he knows how little good it will do, and as it’s the film’s only Oscar, it’s not unreasonable that this performance is what the film is remembered for. With that given, I will yet argue that this is Kevin Costner’s movie. It’s hard to remember on this side of Field of Dreams and Dances With Wolves and even Yellowstone, but this is the film that made Kevin Costner an actual star; before this he was playing corpses (The Big Chill, out of which he was mostly cut) and second bananas (Silverado).

In Elliot Ness, Costner found the character he’d carry forward: The compelling square, the do-right stiff you can’t actually take your eyes off of. He’d occasionally tilt off this character, mostly when Ron Shelton needed him to play a gone-to-seed sportsman, but it’s pretty clear that with The Untouchables, Costner learned how his bread would be buttered going forward. He went with it for a good long while.

As for De Niro as Al Capone; well, scenery is chewed, and the chewing is delicious.

The Untouchables is the one Brian De Palma movie I unreservedly love, and enjoy, and rewatch, but this is not to say it is a great film. Even Pauline Kael, famously a De Palma champion, understood this; she wrote that The Untouchables was “not a great movie; it’s too banal, too morally comfortable… But it’s a great audience movie — a wonderful potboiler.” This is exactly right. Not every film has to be great, sometimes “just really goddamned good” is good enough. It just needs every good thing in proportion, and for the director to understand when enough is enough.

For this one film, Brian De Palma seemed be content with just “enough.” It wouldn’t last, and that’s fine. It didn’t have to.

When one talks of the venerated American cinema of the 1970s, the same titles invariably come up: The Godfather, The French Connection, The Conversation, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon... and that’s just the tip of the uber-male iceberg. In this screening series, we flip the script on this legendary era, retraining the spotlight on the women, both in front of and behind the camera, who equally made filmmaking what it was. This exploration of American cinema during the cultural ascendance of second-wave feminism centers on megastars such as Jane Fonda and Barbra Streisand and Diana Ross, critical darlings like Gena Rowlands and Barbara Loden, trailblazing filmmakers such as Barbara Kopple and Claudia Weill, fiction and documentaries alike. The series will be kicked off by an extended conversation with groundbreaking 1970s feminist film critic Molly Haskell and will feature a host of special guests and conversations around these unforgettable films, some of which remain controversial and provocative to this day, but all of which are classics worth seeing on the big screen.

Dir. Brian De Palma. 1976, 98 mins. DCP. With Sissy Spacek, Piper Laurie, Amy Irving, Nancy Allen, John Travolta. In the able hands of the suspense maestro Brian De Palma, Stephen King’s best-selling debut novel became one of the big screen’s greatest supernatural chillers, a wildly stylish and intensely emotional throat-grabber about a mercilessly teased—and telekinetic—high schooler who exacts outsized revenge on her peers at the prom. Grounding all the kinetic mayhem is a brilliant, Oscar-nominated Sissy Spacek, whose achingly humane portrayal of this misunderstood monster makes her plight all the more tender and scary. As her abusive, religious zealot mother, a staggering Piper Laurie, also Oscar-nominated, transformed into one of horror cinema’s most frightening villains. The grabber of an ending still has yet to be matched.

BETA AXE #1 – Deluxe Collector’s Edition Contents Each set is individually numbered and housed within a collectable display box, offering an anthology of film-inspired memorabilia and premium collectables:

Limited & Numbered Deluxe Collector’s Box – 0001 / 1200

Matching Numbered Collector’s Editions – 0001 / 1200

Luxury Magnetic-Closure Collector’s Box, Satin finish, textured embossing & spot gloss detailing

Collector’s Edition Premium Slipcase, Exclusive artwork with gloss & textured embossing

Zavvi Exclusive 4K UHD SteelBook With Acetate O-Ring

Pendant & Key Replica Set

1664 Racine Matchbook Replica

Eliot Ness Identification Card

Prohibition-Era Drinks Token

Two Perfect-Bound Photo Booklets (A5 & A6 formats)

Collector’s “Ledger” Folder

Exclusive Numbering Sticker

6 Character Art Cards

6 Concept Art Cards

Vintage-Style Restaurant Photograph

Premium Foil-Stamped Envelope

A definitive collector’s release for one of cinema’s most iconic crime dramas. The Steelbook design draws inspiration from the gritty newspaper print aesthetic of Prohibition-era Chicago, recreated in authentic halftone styling to evoke the look and feel of front-page crime reports from the time. Beneath the artwork, a subtle vintage street map forms the background, grounding the design in the city itself and deepening the sense of place. Finished with a tactile textured coating, the surface brings the piece to life in the hand, adding both physical depth and visual character.

Here's a series description at the UCLA Library:

Cartoonist and illustrator Nathan Gelgud is probably best known for his series of auteur tote bags, illustrated filmographies on canvas for directors such as Chantal Akerman, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Yasujiro Ozu and Agnès Varda. Since 2009, when he was commissioned to design a poster for a re-release of François Truffaut’s Small Change, Gelgud’s work has graced cinema ephemera for film screenings and retrospectives at major venues in New York, Paris and Los Angeles. His nonfiction comics about directors and actors have been featured in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Paris Review and Hyperallergic. Lately, Gelgud has turned his attention to Reel Politik, a daily Instagram comic about a ragtag group of cinephile movie theater workers beset by the algorithmic indignities of the streaming age. Gripes about assigned seating and in-theater dining quickly lead to open rebellion when they “seize the means of projection,” then turn their sights on hijacking the Criterion Mobile Closet. Gathered together in a new collection published by Drawn & Quarterly, the Reel Politik strips comprise an absurdist, loving satire of all things arthouse with a Marxist-Leninist twist, an accessible primer on revolutionary thought and a wry, movie-mad antidote for troubled times. The Archive is thrilled to turn over the Billy Wilder Theater to Gelgud for this five-night series of revolutionary films that inspired him and his rebel band of popcorn slingers.

Series programmed by Senior Film Programmer Paul Malcolm and Nathan Gelgud. Notes written by Paul Malcolm.

Putney Swope (1969)

Anarchic trickster of American cinema, Robert Downey Sr. is another pillar in the canon of radicalized movie theater workers in Nathan Gelgud’s book Reel Politik, and Putney Swope stands at the zenith of Downey’s devilish, bomb-throwing career. After the corporate board of a Madison Avenue ad firm accidentally votes its only Black member to be chairman, Putney Swope (Arnold Johnson) transforms the company’s image-making apparatus into a machine for revolution and profit. Soon, a parade of CEOs and activists alike are beating a path to his door to pay respects (and cash) to get their piece of the action.

35mm, color and b&w, 85 min. Director/Screenwriter: Robert Downey Sr. With: Arnold Johnson, Stan Gottlieb, Allen Garfield.

Hi, Mom! (1970)

Raw and raucous, Brian De Palma’s early career dark comedy with Robert De Niro fuses underground aesthetics and Hitchcock homage on the streets and in the tenements of New York. De Niro reprises his character Jon Rubin from De Palma’s Greetings, now struggling to make a living, first with a voyeuristic pitch to a porn producer then as an actor in a political theater troupe looking to cash in on radical chic. Revolution is in the air and everyone seems in on the hustle as De Palma veers wildly from broad comedy to sexual farce to documentary-style realism and outright shock, deftly capturing the tumult of the times.

35mm, color and b&w, 87 min. Director/Screenwriter: Brian De Palma. With: Robert De Niro, Jennifer Salt, Allen Garfield.

Led by Senior Editor and experienced critic Jason Struss, Watch With Us’ team of writers and editors sees almost every movie and TV show from the distant past to the present to determine what’s worth your time and money. Our countless hours of multimedia consumption — combined with years of experience in the entertainment industry — help us determine the best movies and TV shows you should be streaming right now. To be considered “the best,” these films and series can be visually engaging, intellectually stimulating or simply just fun to watch, but the one trait they must have is that they are all, in some way, entertaining. We then check which platform they are streaming on and how you can access them as a subscriber. No algorithm nonsense or paid endorsements here — our recommendations are based purely on our love and interest for the films and shows we love.

A salacious take on Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (with further inspiration from Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Dial M for Murder), Brian De Palma’s Body Double performed poorly at the box office and was controversial among critics. However, its reputation has grown more favorable over the years, generating a bona fide cult following. With its maximalist aesthetics and subversive meta-commentary, some now consider Body Double one of the best films of the 1980s."

chuukyuu Among your work so far done, name the two ads that you like best and tell us the reason why.

Elgort With your indulgence, I should like to name three. The Landlord and Funeral Commercials for the Give a Damn Campaign and the Mistakes Commercial for Mayor Lindsay.

I like the Landlord Commercial because it takes a dry statistic-the fact that almost half of all nonwhites are forced to live in substandard or over-crowded housing-and relates it to an experience that everyone of us has had at one time or another. That of going to look for an apartment.

Like all the commercials we did for the New York Urban Coalition, it's honest. It isn't philosophical or ideological. It avoids a lot of phoney theatrics. And that's got to be part of its strength.

My second choice, the Funeral Commercial, is probably the most powerful commercial I have ever done. We did it during the second year of the Give a Damn Campaign. The mood of the city had changed.

People seemed to be trying to forget that the riots in Newark, Detroit and Watts had ever happened. So we responded by pulling out all the stops in a blatant attempt to shock people and remind them that the job is still undone.

Again, it's based on a fact. And while it's not like the Landlord Commercial, it makes its point. Conditions in our ghettos are so bad, a lot of black babies die.

Here is the description for the Hi, Mom! episode of the Junk Filter podcast:

The actor and writer Mike Mekus returns to the show from Brooklyn to discuss Brian De Palma’s third feature, the vicious satire Hi, Mom! (1970). The film features a breakout performance by Robert De Niro as a young man back from Vietnam who is hoping to convert his voyeuristic tendencies into a career as a pornographer with artistic pretensions, but who ultimately winds up playing a cop in a revolutionary theatre troupe’s new underground experimental play, “Be Black, Baby!”

This anarchic comedy serves as a time capsule of late 1960s NYC. De Palma uses it to show off his craft and his enthusiasm for the full potential of cinema—specifically, the possibilities for an American political cinema—demonstrating that Godard was just as much of an influence on his style as Hitchcock.

Mike and I discuss how incredibly prescient De Palma was in Hi, Mom!, as he sends up incels, computer dating, the entire Dimes Square style art scene, and New York’s guilty white liberal community. This is highlighted by the incendiary film-within-a-film, “Be Black, Baby!”, the first great cinema sequence in De Palma’s long career full of them, all of this barely contained within an 87-minute film that possesses a surprising New York Dirtbag Cinema energy still detectable today.

...

”Landlord" - the 1969 commercial by the New York Urban Coalition that Hi, Mom!parodies at the very beginning

Trailer for Hi, Mom! (Brian De Palma, 1970)

I think the thing that Brian De Palma does that I love is when the films become fully operatic. It’s not like it’s self-conscious, but it really has this larger-than-life feeling. And my favorite – it’s in Carrie – is the long crane shot leading up from Tommy Ross and Carrie White on the dance floor, through the crowd as they go to the stage, going up the rope to the bucket – with that Pino Donaggio score, it’s just fantastic. And that, to me, that is pop opera at its best. I love it.

After that, Wright talks about the extended exposition long take in De Palma's Raising Cain, and also meeting John Lithgow, asking him if he had seen the Peet Gelderblom recut (Lithgow had heard about it but had not seen it).

King’s writing in Carrie is raw, propulsive, and full of empathy for outsiders. The horror works because it’s rooted in real emotion – shame, isolation, and the desperate hunger for acceptance.

Anyone who’s ever felt like an outsider will be able to empathise with Carrie. The book is also surprisingly concise by King’s later standards, coming in at under 250 pages, which keeps the pace taut and suspenseful. There’s an almost tragic inevitability to Carrie’s fate: even knowing what happens in the end, as you read or watch you’ll still find yourself rooting for a different outcome.

Brian De Palma’s 1976 adaptation captures the feverish atmosphere of the book and adds a lurid, dramatic flair. Sissy Spacek, with her wide eyes and eerie fragility, gives a performance that’s both haunting and heartbreakingly human. Piper Laurie, playing Carrie’s mother, delivers religious mania as high art. And the final prom sequence, with its split screens, slow motion, and silence before the storm, remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable moments.

The film streamlines King’s fragmented narrative, removing the reports and letters that frame the novel. Instead of a post-event investigation, it unfolds in real time, which makes the climax feel more immediate and emotive but less reflective.

The destruction in the book is also on a far larger scale – Carrie’s rage levels an entire town, not just a gymnasium. The epistolary fragments give a wider sense of the disaster’s aftermath, suggesting government cover-ups and long-term fallout. The film, by contrast, tightens the focus on the human emotion and spectacle at the core of the story.

The endings also differ: the novel ends with a hint that another telekinetic child has been born, leaving open the possibility of future incidents. De Palma opts for a pure horror punchline to the film – that infamous hand bursting from the grave – designed to make audiences jump out of their seats. It’s very effective.

So, which is better: book or film?

This is one of the rare cases where both are brilliant in their own right. The book is a better psychological study: claustrophobic, strange, and full of pathos, with a wider and more ambitious scope. The film, though, is the better experience: stylish, shocking, and unforgettable, it brings you up close to all the emotion and the human story underneath the destruction of the book.

In this instance, I don’t think it matters which way around you take them: the book will unsettle your mind, while the film will unsettle your nerves. Either way, it’s clear that this is the type of horror that works best precisely because it makes us feel sorry for the monster.