Meanwhile, posting a clip from De Palma's Carlito's Way, Cinema Tweets writes, "Brian De Palma’s never received the credit he deserves for his genius as a filmmaker. Overshadowed by his peers that exploded on the scene in the ‘70s, countless directors and actors owe part of their success to De Palma. That includes Al Pacino."

And one more - 1428 Elm's Stephen Rosenberg writes about De Palma's The Fury, with the headline, "You probably haven't seen this '70s Brian De Palma movie that channels Stephen King." Here's an excerpt:

In just premise alone, The Fury feels like it belongs right in the vein of Stephen King’s psychic powers-focused stories of that era, including Carrie, The Dead Zone, The Shining, and especially Firestarter, where a shadow government agency tries to use a pyrokinetic’s powers for their own gain. That’s not to say John Farris shouldn’t get his due for writing the story; he’s no one-hit wonder. Farris has written more than 40 novels over the course of his literary career.

The Fury isn’t just good because of its strong, classic horror-sci-fi feel. It’s great to see Brian De Palma’s early fingerprints all over the screen. He has simply always thrived with mystery thrillers, using the camera’s zoom and lighting to increasingly build intensity throughout the scenes.

His split diopter shots and superimposing to showcase Gillian’s psychic abilities are unique and reminiscent of late Hitchcock films, and an early teaser into his best films, like Blow Out and The Untouchables.

At its core, The Fury is just a solid, if not slowly paced, government mystery movie. But peppered between some of the moments that lag are awesome displays of telekinesis, like Robin causing carnival rides to spin apart, or Gillian going full Johnny Smith from The Dead Zone.

Here is the text of the letter, as printed in the November 29, 1960 edition of the Columbia Daily Spectator:

Managers' Movies

To The Editor:

The Board of Managers has done it again. No great work of film art seems to be safe from their clutches. They carelessly prance on mutilating everything tihat comes within their leprous grasp.

They began their ignominious career by utterly defiling J. Arthur Rank's The Red Shoes. Never let it be said that the Board of Managers didn't carefully prepare their grizzly rape of this film. First they assaulted it aurally by distorting Brian Easdale's beautiful ballet score until it sounded like primeval gurglings from the depths of a quicksand swamp. But that was just the beginning of the evening's nightmare. Next the harpies preceeded to ravish the visual elements of the film. First, they managed to destroy the tempo of the film by creating fade-outs and black-outs at the discretion of the projectionist. Secondly, they caused fifteen minute breaks between reels so as to distroy any dramatic tension or mood the previous reel had created. I walked out of this destruction of an art form as many people did—even though this is one of my favorite films. But I came to tihe J. Arthur Rank version not the distortion of the Board of Managers!

This whole past nightmare was relived ... in The Board of Managers presentation of John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath and Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal. The Film had not been on two minutes before I realized, to imy horror, that the phantom of the film was at his black art once more. The nightmare proceeded with the customary fade-outs and ultra low key projectionproduced by the phantom's hand across the projector lens.

There is absolutely no excuse for the complete incompetence which saturates ihe Board of Managers Film Series. They can't hide behind the ruse of technical difficulties" because they have new equipment thus making the only difficultieshuman inadequaties. I project a film series at Barnard and Sarah Larwence and never have I had difficulties mildly comparable to those that are visited upon the Board of Managers. And finally if the Board of Managers don't enact radical improvements in their presentations then they should not be allowed to continue defiling Film Art.

Brian De Palma '62
Columbia College

Brian De Palma is generally a bit dismissive of Alfred Hitchcock’s work after Psycho (1960), claiming it to be too artificial and old-fashioned. There can be little doubt, however, that at least one element of Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964) impressed itself deeply on De Palma’s unconscious: the use of an actor to project psycho-physical states of both adulthood and childhood, veritably regressing to relive a primal scene of trauma. Let’s look at the interplay between Marnie and Obsession (1976).

Regarding De Palma picking up on Hitchcock's cinematic language post-Psycho, I know there are more instances in De Palma we can trace back to these films, but it's always seemed to me that among the elements that make up the centerpiece sequence in De Palma's Mission: Impossible are strong vibes from both Marnie and The Birds. The way that Hitchock shows Marnie waiting in the stall of a women's restroom as everybody leaves introduces a strong sense of silence as Marnie then exits the ladies room, and gets the combination to the safe. As Marnie empties the safe, Hitchcock essentially splits the screen to show us that there is a lady mopping the floor on the other side of the room. Still in complete silence, Marnie has taken money from the safe and as she makes her way toward the exit, she notices the cleaning lady, and removes her shoes. More suspense, as Hitchcock shows the shoe about to drop out of Marnie's pocket - and then it does drop, breaking the silence - but the cleaning lady doesn't seem to have heard it. Between the silence, the suspense, and then the shoe drop, I think we can see (hear?) echoes in De Palma's CIA set-piece: the "complete silence," the suspense, and not only the drop of sweat, but finally, the dropping of the knife, which De Palma shows us in Kubrickian slow motion. In between, there is the creepy moment when our hero, Ethan Hunt, is waiting up above CIA analyst William Donloe like a bird of prey. This moment often makes me think of the playground scene in Hitchcock's The Birds, where flocks of crows have quietly gathered behind Tippi Hedren.

As Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin suggest, these and other Hitchcock elements in De Palma's work are likely imprinted on his subconcious. Although it certainly seems that De Palma can recall any or most of these elements quite vividly, he has likely absorbed them so deeply, they are very much a part of his cinematic ways of thinking.

After reading a Los Angeles Times review of The De Palma Decade by Laurent Bouzereau, I was reminded of the many times I interviewed the Italian-American director as an entertainment journalist and the articles I wrote about his movies.

I met Brian De Palma for the first time in 1978 in his New York office, when I was writing for the Cinema supplement of the Italian newsweekly L’Europeo. We spoke about his latest work, The Fury, and I asked him about some of the movies he had directed until then.

He said about Hi Mom! starring Robert De Niro: “We were seeing the Vietnam War essentially as a voyeuristic experience. America then became a cold nation in front of the horrible things that we were doing.”

Sisters: “It develops the classic theme of the good sister and bad sister, the two aspects of our personality, one light and one dark.”

Obsession: “I was imitating my favorite film, Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock, telling a very romantic story.”

Carrie: “I wanted to represent the high school experience in a different way. It’s typical of a teenager to feel cut off like the ugly duckling.”