There are some fantasy, science fiction, and horror films that not every fan has caught. Not every film ever made has been seen by the audience that lives for such fare. Some of these deserve another look, because sometimes not every film should remain obscure.
Sometimes, you realize that not all the players are on the same team…
The Fury (1978)
Distributed by: Twentieth Century Fox
Directed by: Brian De Palma
There were two trends from the 1970s that probably don’t come up together in conversation as readily these days: interest in parapsychology, and CIA shenanigans.
The big year for both ended up being 1972. That year, a covert team of ex-CIA assets put together by Richard Nixon’s re-election committee broke into Daniel Ellsberg’s office at the Watergate complex, which when it was discovered helped bring down Nixon’s presidency.
As that was going on that year, the CIA started a program to examine “remote viewing,” the ability for a person to use their mind to look in on another location. Unlike the White House Plumbers, this managed to stay out of the news. One could imagine how much this program would’ve be a bombshell had details come out about this a year later, just as Uri Geller went on The Tonight Show.
Mind you, the way we imagined covert psychics even without knowing this, it was still likely to have an impact…
Please note that there will be a few spoilers for both the film and its source material.
We open on the beach under the imposed titles that read “MID EAST 1977” (though it becomes evident fairly soon that this is in Israel on the shores of the Mediterranean). We watch from shore as Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) and his son Robin (Andrew Stevens) run out of the water as part of a race between them.
They need a ruling as to won and turn to the man whose feet they collapse at, Childress (John Cassavetes), who doesn’t really resolve the issue. He’s too busy getting ready to do other things, like getting ready to say goodbye to Peter, a colleague of his in the CIA for the last twenty years. Peter’ meanwhile is to reassuring Robin that the school he’s going to in Chicago will be good for him, especially someone with Robin’s undefined “talent.”
Part of Childress’ goodbye for Peter involves staging a terrorist attack on the beach, where Peter was supposed to die. Peter ruins the surprise, though; not only does he survive, he deduces quickly that it was his former partner who put together the op. Peter disappears, but not before wounding Childress, who loses the use of his left arm.
The scene shifts and there’s a new imposed title, “CHICAGO 1978.” We follow from behind as two young high school girls take advantage of the warm weather by walking along the beach in their bikinis. We watch as LaRue (Melody Thomas) tries to get Gillian (Amy Irving) to take her upcoming history test seriously. At one point, a name pops into her head, “Raymond Dunwoodie,” who’s the creepy guy who tries to follow them (William Finley). Dunwoodie, we soon discover, was retained by Peter to find leads on where Robin is, having spotted someone with the gift; he tries to shake down Peter for a higher finder’s fee, while the Agency traces the phone call to get Peter.
From there, the film goes back and forth between following Peter and Gillian. Peter uses his training in the Agency to avoid capture, including carjacking a newly bought set of wheels from two security guards (Dennis Franz and Michael O’Dwyer). At the same time, Gillian becomes more involved with her “gift,” starting with a visit from Dr. Lindstrom (Carol Rosen) and her assistant Hester (Carrie Snodgrass) from the Paragon Institute, who set up a demonstration of ESP for a science class (!?!) that doesn’t go quite that well for Gillian:
Gillian has a later encounter with a school bully that freaks her out, and she asks her high-powered-and-never-home mother (Joyce Easton) to put her in the Paragon Institute to help sort herself out. She’s met by the kindly staff, including Doctor McKeever (Charles Durning), with whom Gillian has an even more intense incident:
Hester, we soon discover, is Peter’s girlfriend, and when she reaches out to him, the two narratives come back together when Peter plots to extract Gillian from the school to help him find Robin. It’s a lucky thing, too, as Childress has just ordered McKeever to ramp up testing on Gillian, which he’s reluctant to do out of concern for the poor girl.
He’s probably hesitant to see another kid suffer, considering he has some idea what happened to Robin. Peter’s son is deeper in the Agency’s program, with a doctor who sleeps with her patient as his handler (Fiona Lewis) and is horribly spoiled, as he demonstrates during a semi-supervised release to go to Old Chicago:
The film itself is also a pretty harry ride. It’s a great mix of subversive spy shenanigans and psychic peril as the story comingles two of the decade’s prominent foci into one almost-perfect film.
It’s easy to take most of the “gimmies” the film asks for, those story aspects where the writer puts it out there as a prop or aspect of the set, and asks the audience to go along with the tale and give the writer some grace. The idea of kids with psychic powers being used by our government for covert operations is a fairly easy “gimmie” to accept, and the script by John Ferris offers a lot of beats at such a pace that you can go along easily with it.
The climax, though, asks a lot. We have Peter and Robin reunite after an out of control Robin just put an end to his handler by spinning her around the room until she bled out. When they see each other, Robin is floating in the middle of the room. Peter tries to get through to his son, who attacks him and pushes them both out the window. Peter tries to hold on to his son, but fails and has to watch Robin fall to his death.
Which seems odd, that someone so powerfully telekinetic would die like that even though he could stop or slow his fall enough to walk away with just a bruise and a scowl. Whatever hand-wave away in your “gimmie,” like Robin losing his focus for a moment, will not keep the audience from feeling cheated with this part of the tale.
The thing of it is, this actually was an improvement over Robin’s death in the original novel from 1976, which Ferris also wrote. In that one, Peter’s just a hitman whom Childress kidnaps and brainwashes, having him set to kill his own son on command. Much of the novel, in fact, is greatly improved upon when Ferris did the screenplay; it’s a much tighter story that asks a lot less of the audience while still delivering a potent narrative.
The script could not have been in better hands than De Palma’s. His dynamic shot sets, willing to keep the camera in motion as often as possible, makes the action in the scenes flow in a lively manner. It’s also in service to the main plot points, giving the viewer a sense of being able to spy on anyone covertly without any physical restriction.
About the only real minus to the film is the score by John Williams. In and of itself, it’s a decent soundtrack, but it feels like it belongs to an entirely different movie. It gets distracting, standing in the way of what De Palma and his cast (especially Douglas and Irving) are trying to do on screen. It feels like it doesn’t belong, and that a less obtrusive arrangement like the one Pino Donaggio did for Carrie, would have played better here.
Not that the score was fatal. Critics at the time gave The Fury high marks, and the film modestly made back its budget, but the movie tends to be overshadowed by De Palma’s earlier telekinetic horror piece. Perhaps there was a sense that everyone had seen this all before two years earlier, which kept an otherwise decent movie from being better remembered.
Or maybe everyone was disappointed that The Fury wasn’t a direct sequel to Carrie, assuming that for two films on the same team, they should more closely hue…
