Category: Brian DePalma

BLOW OUT

By Marc S. Sanders

Brian DePalma’s Blow Out is an inventive approach to the political conspiracy thriller.  In 1981, following a mask of innocence the United States lost with the assassination of President Kennedy, later his brother Bobby, plus the drunken, liable carelessness of their brother Ted, and then finally the Watergate scandal, DePalma capitalized on newsworthy incidents to make a paranoid thriller of present day while incorporating what he likely knows much about which is sound effects editing.  Despite the cheesy music soundtrack that is highly intrusive and poorly composed, Blow Out is a good blend of hysteria and suspense.

John Travolta plays Jack Terry, a Philadelphia sound effects recording artist for b-grade schlock horror movies.  One night, while out in a park trying to pick up sounds of outdoor nature, he witnesses a car suffer a blown-out tire and crash into a nearby river.  Jack is able to rescue a woman named Sally (Nancy Allen) but cannot save the Pennsylvania governor who was driving the car.

As he is about to leave the hospital, he is specifically instructed to never speak to Sally nor acknowledge to anyone about any of his own involvement in this incident.  However, Jack cannot help but recount the sequence of events in his head and as new details come to light, he knows that there is a cover up at play.

Blow Up operates like a how-to kind of picture.  The expertise of a sound effects recording artist is demonstrated as Jack replays every sound that his equipment picked up. Later he’s able to manufacture his own film by assembling a series of published photographs that also captured the crash.  Sync up the sounds with the sights and a new theory surfaces.  Other mysteries change the course of the riddle through dialogue.  This character has to work by himself using the skills he’s acquired to learn the truth.  He hardly has anyone to commiserate with.

John Travolta is convincing within this occupation that’s not as common as a cop or a private eye.  I like how I can pick up how he uses his recording equipment and even the minute details like labeling what he has preserved within his inventory.

It took a little bit of patience to get used to Nancy Allen’s damsel in distress who plays it up like Judy Holliday or Jean Hagen with the squeaky, dingbat voice.  When we first meet her, she is in an intoxicated stupor that goes on a little too long. Nevertheless, I came around because the tension of the film builds quite well.

John Lithgow is the sadistic adversary – a serial killer and assassin rolled into one.  He’s got the weird, unwelcome appearance like any bad guy in a Hitchcock film.

DePalma is known for his split screen cuts that he offered in Carrie and later in Mission: Impossible.  More well known is his reliance on bringing a character in zoom close up, while in the same frame, another object will be zoomed out at a distance.   During an outdoor evening in the park, an owl hoots and stares us down while John Travolta is far in the background standing on a bridge. Within this same moment, DePalma does it again with a toad ribbiting up close with the actor again positioned out. It’s a disorienting approach that works well at maintaining the perplexity of his story.

I think the final act of Blow Out falls apart a bit.  Travolta is on the heels of rescuing Sally by rampaging his jeep through a crowded parade.  The scene is shot so aggressively that it was hard for me to believe he would survive much less not run down a cop, spectator, or the entire marching band.  DePalma could have tightened this up a bit.

Blow Out ends on a bleak irony that’s quite surprising and definitely against formula.  There’s a running gag for Jack and a film director as they edit a silly problematic issue for a new slasher flick.  I guessed early on how this was going to resolve itself.  Though I was right, I didn’t expect how the conclusion arrived at my predication.  

As well, there are some notable questions left unanswered.  I had to roll back and see if I missed something.  I didn’t.  DePalma’s script neglects some key points with unfinished resolutions. So, I was not entirely satisfied. Still, the how-to procedures along with the pursuit of the truth, while also evading demise, are very engaging.

When I conduct workshops on playwriting, I always recommend keeping up with the news.  An unending wealth of ideas are there to be discovered.  As a sincere compliment to Brian DePalma, it could not be more apparent where his creativity took off with this film.  As a skilled and educated filmmaker, he also writes what he knows.  

Blow Out is very close to being a smart nail biter that echoes the sad truths of political rule breaking by means of savage crime. I wish modern films would be as risky today.  There are so few of these kinds of thrillers being made anymore.

SCARFACE (1983)

By Marc S. Sanders

On Thanksgiving Day when we glutton ourselves with an abundance of food, it seemed highly appropriate to watch one of the most self-indulgent pieces ever put on film.  Brian DePalma’s Scarface with a script written by Oliver Stone and featuring Al Pacino.  This is a movie that brags about its boastfulness.  I mean look at everything that is mashed into this thing.  Blood, bullets, lots of cocaine and too much Al Pacino.

Pacino is Cuban refugee Tony Montana.  He is one of a handful of small time criminals who is shipped over to the United States when Castro wanted less people to oversee.  Refugee camps are fenced up under the highways of Southern Florida where no law is enforced among the tented populations.

Soon after Tony arrives he’s hot on the scene of pushing the newest underground product through Miami – cocaine.  With his buddy Manny (Steven Bauer) the two men get in good graces with a well dressed sleaze named Omar (F Murray Abraham), who is second in command to an established drug kingpin named Frank (Robert Loggia).  For Tony and Manny it’ll only be a matter of time before they take over as the numbers one and two bad guys.  That’ll include Tony marrying Frank’s blond trophy girlfriend Elvira (Michelle Pfeiffer in her breakout role) and winning a trusting partnership with a South American drug czar named Alejandro (Paul Shenar).  If you ever expect to get killed, you don’t want to be by the orders of Alejandro.  A helicopter serves much more of a purpose once it takes flight.

Scarface is a step-by-step movie or a climb up a three-hour ladder and then a gradual drop down off a balcony into a bloody fountain below.  There’s no depth and it works like a shopping list that you check off as it moves along. Props and houses and suits and jewelry and cars and cocaine and cash have more significance than what anyone has to say. Other than Tony, none of the people in this film matter. What Tony acquires and what he says about himself is all that is important.

This is a big ass movie with bloody graphics and killings, mountains of drugs and money, a lot of fucks, a gaudy estate home, a way over the top Al Pacino and lots and lots and lots of bullets and guns to go with them.  The film only settles for one chainsaw killing, though.  At the time, I recall that scene was up for big debate on the film’s MPAA rating.  Brian DePalma wanted to up the ante on brutality to grab moviegoers’ attention.  The scene remains quite stomach churning.

DePalma’s best work is at the beginning of the Scarface.  Following the establishing real life footage of the Cuban refugees arriving by boats in search of an American dream, Tony is taken into custody and questioned by a batch of immigration agents.  DePalma only keeps one steady camera focused on a very tan Pacino with a faint signature scar on his left cheek, sitting in the middle of the room and putting on a Cuban accent that only he could uniquely own.  Pacino’s concentration in this moment is admirable as he responds to questions from all different directions.  It’s all done in one take with the director’s camera circling around Pacino.  After this introduction is over, the tone of the movie changes for the next two hours and ten minutes into a gritty interpretation of Lifestyles Of The Rich And Famous.

Oliver Stone’s dialogue with Brian DePalma’s set ups don’t require much of the other actors.  It’s like everything caters to an always inebriated, hyperactive Al Pacino doing his Tony Montana with the gold chains and wide collared shirts over the linen suits.  He’s a motor mouth of endless f-bombs, with a slinky Michelle Pfeiffer in a blond bob-cut, dressed glittery evening gowns, at his side.  She has nothing of significance to say.  This is all you learn about Elvira; what you see of her materialism and all the coke she snorts.  She never smiles or exudes any connection to the Pacino character.  It’s all eye candy.  In fact, there’s never a clear answer of what becomes of this character.  That’s a problem because the movie is so much about Tony Montana, nothing else matters.

Other characters not given enough attention are Tony’s sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) and their mother (Miriam Colon).  Momma despises Tony for the criminal thug he is while Gina becomes enamored with the wealth and drug night life.  Unfortunately, Momma only has one meaty scene and Gina’s purpose to the script is to lend reason for another character’s eventual demise.  Both of these actresses are very good with what little they have.  Yet so much is devoted to Tony’s indulgence and the mania that Pacino brings that they are sidelined as well.

Brian DePalma seems to be more proud with how excessive he can make this guy than actually turning him into a guy.  Wait until you see the mansion that Tony gets. His office alone is of black, gaudy exuberance. His master bedroom contains a small swimming pool size tub right in the middle of the carpeted floor.  That setting occupies a fifteen-minute-long scene of Tony in a bubble bath, watching his five TV screens while not talking about anything meaningful except himself as he chastises Manny.  Elvira is only there to uphold her dread for her husband as she snorts coke off of her vanity.  When they both leave, an Oliver Stone monologue ends with a now recognizable sound byte of “Well say ‘allo to da bad guy!” Ah! Big deal! Tony never seemed so bad ass as he does feel obnoxious.

Again, Scarface is about not much else except the conceit of sleazy criminal.

When someone has to die it becomes a long drawn-out process as Tony, aka Pacino, puts on a performance or delivers a sermon.  Tony will meet with kingpins from Columbia along with other South Americans and dirty government officials.  There will be 5-7 guys in the room but for the most part it is only Tony talking.

“Say ‘allo to my little fren!” is one of the most memorable lines to come out of the 1980s decade of excess and it arrives during the ongoing and endless bloody shootout that closes the film.  There’s buckets of blood and truckloads of ammunition fired off.  These machine guns seem designed to kill things twice the size of elephants.  Little Al Pacino, with a ginormous cannon gripped in one hand, gets hit in all places and extremities except the head so that he can keep ranting – I mean this guy never shuts up – and going as he fends off the armies of goons coming at him from all directions.  Truly, it’s laughable and nowhere is it ever absorbing.  It’s like I’m watching someone else play a first-person shooter video game during a sleepover.  My friend is entertained while I’m just watching him be entertained.

Scarface comes to an abrupt halt when the final shootout stops.  There’s no footnote to ponder or real news story to follow up on.  The credits roll and the orchestral strings of the soundtrack cut in. You get the idea that DePalma, Stone, and Pacino became exhausted over this monster of a movie and simply declared “Okay! That’s enough!”

Considering the later insightful pieces that Oliver Stone delivered like Platoon and JFK, I wish he explored more of the politics and Cuban dealings affecting the United States.  As this film arrived in 1983, soon after there would be more of an intellectual standpoint to make us aware of a very real drug epidemic in this country.  It may appear to be sending some kind of message, but Scarface doesn’t challenge the brains that flourished this contraband industry.  Forty five minute episodes of Miami Vice tell more than this three-hour opus.

Plenty of gangster films like Chinatown, The Godfather, and Goodfellas offer up the greed and ego of the criminal mind, but the men of those pictures are never as self-indulgent or off putting as Tony Montana.

Besides, what does it say about a movie called Scarface when no one calls the main guy Scarface, and you hardly ever see the scar graced across his profile?  The real Scarface, Al Capone, would be very disappointed in Al Pacino.

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

By Marc S. Sanders

Brian DePalma directed the first installment of Tom Cruise’s film adaptation of the Mission: Impossible series. It’s good, but not necessarily the best of the bunch.

DePalma’s approach with a script by screenwriter Robert Towne (Chinatown) & David Koepp opens with last ditch effort at a Cold War setting. (By 1996, Pierce Brosnan’s James Bond had already abandoned that point in history.)

Cobblestone streets in Prague glisten under wet street lamps as a team of spies, led by Jim Phelps (the “Captain Kirk” of the original series) with Cruise’s Ethan Hunt as point man. They are attempting to prevent a buy/sell exchange of a disc containing identities of undercover agents spread across the globe. There are shadows. People walking covertly and other people watching people through cameras on eyeglasses and computer monitors. Everything is going according to plan, until as we expect, nothing goes according to plan, and Tom Cruise seems to be the only one surprised by it all. Now he’s accused of being a traitor having gotten his whole team murdered and he must go rogue (he does this a few times in the M:I films). DePalma’s opening is straight out of a John LeCarre novel. All good stuff.

More good stuff appears in act 2 when Ethan Hunt has to infiltrate CIA headquarters to retrieve another disc and allow himself to cable down into the most high tech secure room in the…well lets just say the world, that is conveniently run by the most incompetent dweeb in the…well let’s just say the world…again. The primarily silent sneak is as beautifully choreographed as a Russian ballet. It’s spectacular.

Even more good stuff occurs in act 3 in a high speed super train crossing through the Chunnel in Europe. There’s a helicopter and Tom Cruise on the roof of the train and even some exploding chewing gum. Act 3 is where DePalma, Towne & Koepp opt to leave the Cold War behind because let’s face it, no spy can remain covert when a helicopter gets tethered to a high speed train in a tunnel.

So yeah, there’s lots of goodies in Mission: Impossible, but it falls terribly short because Tom Cruise produced the film with his ego in the way. For example, he sets up a team of four, all with different specialties. They get properly introduced and then they are given not much to do except watch Tom Cruise “Ethan Hunt” his way out of one dangerous situation after another. Ving Rhames seems like an especially interesting character but all he’s reserved to is typing on a keyboard. Vanessa Redgrave puts on a charming mystery about herself for one short scene as an arms dealer only to do nothing else but sit on the train later on.

Lots of talent was assembled for this film including Jon Voight, Emilio Estevez, Jean Reno and Kristen Scott Thomas but they’re only here to be a live studio audience for Cruise’s heroics.

Compare this film to Eddie Murphy’s Beverly Hills Cop. Murphy is no doubt the centerpiece, but he does not own every scene. Big moments come from the supporting cast as well. There’s more variety to that picture, which Murphy produced, than Cruise’s production.

A well utilized cast can be the difference between a good picture and a great picture.

THE UNTOUCHABLES

By Marc S. Sanders

Brian DePalma directed the very loose cinematic adaptation of Eliot Ness’ squad of treasury agents during the 1930s prohibition era. The movie is The Untouchables, based on the famed TV show starring Robert Stack. It’s a gorgeous picture with incredible set designs, props, and Georgio Armani costume wear. It’s also bloody as hell.

Kevin Costner solidified his leading man status as the righteous Eliot Ness who swears by the law he promises to uphold, while making efforts to topple Al Capone’s (a convincing looking Robert DeNiro) massive Chicago empire that thrives on the buy and sell of illegal alcohol. Capone controls the city on all levels, from government officials down to the police force. His power is unlimited, but he has not filed his tax returns in four years. It’s crazy, but that just might bring him down.

Ness teams up with veteran beat cop Jimmy Malone played by Sean Connery, in one of the most celebrated and winning roles the Academy Awards ever bestowed. Malone knows where the underground liquor operations are located. He knows who accepts the bribes and kickbacks too. The question is how involved does he want to get. He’s the grizzled Irish mentor for Ness, and his timing is perfect for David Mamet’s script.

Memorable additions to the team also include a young and tough Andy Garcia and nerdy Charles Martin Smith as the IRS agent happy to pick up a shotgun for the cause.

DePalma’s film carries the epic look. There’s much splendor in the art direction of the film. It’s a glamorous piece of film, but it’s also just a movie.

Mamet’s script takes lots of liberties against the actual occurrences that came through historically. I do not recall hearing that The Untouchables ever took down a deal while riding horseback alongside the Canadian Mounties, for example. A villainous henchman for Capone is Frank Nitti (a happily slimy Billy Drago), always dressed in bad guy white and putting on the bad guy charm. His demise in the film never happened and most certainly not so adventurous or violently, but DePalma and Mamet clearly don’t care. This is lean entertainment for action sequences set in a gorgeous gangster period. The Untouchables is a slick looking gangster flick and nothing more.

A real star of the film is the Oscar nominated score of the film from The Maestro, himself, Ennio Morricone. His opening piece of drum beats with quick piano keys during the credits will get your pulse going. He also has great horn sections that capture the four heroes in tight shots of shining cinematography from Stephen H Burum. For me personally, this is my favorite soundtrack of Morricone’s massive career.

Costner is well cast. He has the handsome hero look to him. Garcia became a well-known and sharp looking tough guy. Smith did not move on to more celebrated material beyond this. He was remembered comedically here, just as he was in American Graffiti. He also directed since this film. As a team though, Costner, Garcia, Smith and Connery have wonderful chemistry together.

DeNiro actually took a step back from the spotlight here. His Al Capone is not so much a character as he is an every so often antagonizing appearance with a couple of well paced lines from Mamet’s famed dialogue. He’s got a memorable moment with a baseball monologue that convinces you of Capone’s strong arm, but his villain does not get too personal with the hero.

The Untouchables holds a special place in my heart. It was the last film I saw before my life changing move from New Jersey to Florida in 1987. Because the move was hard on me from a teenager’s perspective, I found great escape with this film as I memorized the lines of the enormously colorful characters along with getting absorbed by the violence and emotional variety of tones in the score. Having watched the movie many times since it was released, it’s become a kind of therapeutic experience for me. I take in the gorgeous craftsmanship of the film, the humor and the surprise moments many of the beloved characters face.

The Untouchables is not a perfect film I thought it was at age fourteen. It’s almost proud of its admitted inaccuracies, but it remains a favorite and very personal piece for me. I still love the film, all these years later.