Teen Movie Critic
Brian De Palma
September 23, 1996
De Palma is a director who is a master of psychological thrillers, and he has produced some of the greatest films of the past three decades. He was born on September 11, 1940, in Newark, New Jersey. He started making films as a student at Columbia. His earliest film short, Woton's Wake (1962), earned him several awards for his directorial skills. His first feature films included Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969) and Hi, Mom! (1970) were low-budget efforts, that were remembered mainly for the fact that they were some of Robert De Niro's earliest efforts. His breakthrough came in 1976 with the horror classic, Carrie, which introduced his recurring psychological nightmare theme to a mass audience.
De Palma has been slandered as a mere imitation of Alfred Hitchcock, though most critics fail to notice that De Palma adds his own original twists to his Hitchcock-type stories. These stories include:
- Sisters (1973), a movie that could be considered a feminine Rear Window.
- Obsession (1976), A homage to Vertigo, which is devastatingly more tragic than Hitchcock could have imagined.
- Dressed to Kill (1980), a horror story that explores the sexual territory in a way that Hitchcock's Psycho attempted to do (though Hitch was restricted by the strict censoring of his time, where as De Palma is free to cut loose with his methods of filming).
De Palma has also been attacked for his use of graphic violence, which I believe is used more to heighten the impact of the story, rather than make you feel it's just a bunch of needless killing to give the audience a cheap thrill. Such examples of the brilliant use of heavy violence in De Palma's work, include the cult classic Scarface (1983); that film introduced, as Tony Montana, Al Pacino, a violent man whose bloody ways eventually lead to his own self-destruction. Or how about Casualties of War (1989)? Though the violence was tough to take at times, it did get it's point across about the brutality of war. Despite what some people think, De Palma's films do not make violence seem "cool", but show what it's really all about.
Besides some of these great works, his recent film work has been about fifty/fifty. He started off the 90's with the excruciating adaptation of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities (1990). Then came Raising Cain (1992), another homage to Hitchcock that was one of De Palma's most incoherent works of film. He picked up after Carlito's Way (1993), a stunning crime/action film that reunited De Palma with his Scarface star, Al Pacino. His latest is the huge box-office success, Mission Impossible (1996), based on the popular TV series of the same name. Keep watching out for more of De Palma's work. His films are as influential as the work of Francis Coppola and Martin Scorsese.
My rating on a scale of 1 to 10: 8
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