Body Double (1984) We had planned a post on this film well over a year ago,but found ourselves sidetracked by medical issues.....by the time we added it back to our 'to do' list, we then ended up stunned to find out we didn't own our own copy.....but once again, Tubi came to our rescue......
No director ever reveled in the visuals and tropes of Alfred Hitchcock like Brian DePalma. His Hitchcock homages became his entry to into the mainstream of major filmmaking for big studios.
No one denied the cleverness at play. The studied elegant camera movements, the precise editing. the deliberate arrangement of images to poke and surprise audiences.........
But critics and viewers of DePalma's work couldn't help noticing the fundamental emptiness of the films. Unlike Hitchcock, DePalma couldn't have cared less about the stories he was telling and their characters. Steeped in meticulous imitations of Hitchcock's signature stylings, you'd begin to realize there was nothing to the film other than its smart aleck copycatting.
But to be honest here, we couldn't deny the films were a hoot to look at and thoroughly enjoyable, even to the point of repeat viewings every so often.
'Body Double' came across as DePalma's most aggressive, in-your-face, take-it-and-like-it Hitchcockery. A blatant mash-up of "Vertigo" and "Rear Window", the film wallows in levels of perversion, voyeurism and sexual violence that Hitchcock was never allowed to indulge in.....(that is, until his next to last film, 1972's 'Frenzy')
Struggling young actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson) loses a prime role in a cheapo horror film due to his acute claustrophobia. (Playing a vampire, he freaks at being confined in a coffin.) And his bad day turns worse when he discovers his girlfriend in bed with another man, achieving heights of pleasure he never gave her.
Brightening his gloom, fellow actor Sam (Gregg Henry) asks him to take over a house-sitting gig for him. The house, a circular wonder atop its own tall pillar, also comes with a high powered telescope to watch a voluptuous woman (Deborah Shelton) perform an elaborate, but solitary striptease every night.....which of course begs the question....for whom?
Jake embraces the peeping, but turns worried and frightened when he also spies a hulking, violent man terrorizing and abusing the sexpot. (And here's where you'll need to chastise and forgive the movie for referring to this shadow man as 'The Indian' because of his appearance.....)
And then DePalma's really off to the races, with expertly composed sequences of Jake's descent into obsessive fear and lust, along with his further attacks of claustrophobia...(designed to leave Wasson as gasping and paralyzed as James Stewart in 'Vertigo')
Amping up the sleaze, comes the film's major Big Twist, which puts Jake in the path of porn star Holly Body (Melanie Grittith, who tests a viewer's patience with her whiny kewpie doll voice)
What we most definitely loved - DePalma, a social satirist at heart, always peppers his films with flourishes of pitch black humor....(we're thinking of Wasson's desperation in an overly crowded Mall glass elevator and the film's bravura murder set piece with an enormous power drill wielded like industrial strength penis. A literal screwing indeed.....
Unlike other film critics, we never minded DePalma's flashy, empty headed, celebrations of his own filmmaking dexterity. These are the same critics who use to fall over themselves praising Robert Zemeckis for the same thing......until they grew tired of the endless, worn out special effects tricks in service of his thin stories.
T
3 stars (***).
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