Sony Pictures
At the height of his commercial power after Carrie, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, and Scarface had all outperformed expectations, Brian De Palma resolved himself to make a film as deliberate provocation to the MPAA, to cultural censors, to conservative critics and Body Double was the result.
In its time, the film was reviled for the no-holds-barred mixture of sex, style, and violence it contains (American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman cites it as his favorite film in the novel), but looking back with 40 years of cultural hindsight, Body Double stands head and shoulders above its thriller contemporaries for its delicious irony, brilliant photography, and pitch perfect script.
Craig Wasson plays Jake Scully, an actor who has just lost his job (depicted in a wonderful De Palma staple, the movie within the movie), his girlfriend, and his apartment in one day.
Down on his luck, a fellow actor Sam (Gregg Henry) offers him a helping hand in the form of a beautiful penthouse apartment that he needs Jake to house sit for him.
The deal is made even sweeter when Sam directs Jake’s attention to a nearby neighbor (Melanie Griffith) who spontaneously performs a seductive dance nude each night at about the same time.
Against his better judgment, Scully spies on the neighbor but his voyeurism reveals that she’s also being watched by a hulking, disfigured, Native American man. Fearing for her safety, Scully begins to follow her about town and his suspicions of danger are confirmed when he sees the Disfigured Man is also tailing.
The suspense culminates in a brutal burst of violence that leaves Jake wondering what he was meant to see and whether there was more than meets the eye at play.
Body Double combines two Hitchcock premises: the helplessness of being able to watch evil unfold but unable to stop it, from Rear Window and the main character’s sexual obsession with a dead woman from Vertigo.
As with Dressed to Kill and Obsession, here we see De Palma moving effortlessly between homage and commentary as he recreates Hitchcockian premises with ease and then finds himself able to delve more explicitly into the psycho-sexual underpinnings of those premises which had to remain subtextual in Hitchcock’s era.
There are show stopping sequences here: the dream logic of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood music video on the faux porno set; the infamous power drill murder; and my personal favorite: the complex web of move and countermove as Jake stalks the Disfigured Man as he stalks the woman he’s been watching. It’s an amazing display of control over editing, geography, and indicative of De Palma’s control over long, dialogue-free, suspense sequences.
Extras include featurettes, archival EPK interviews, Frankie Goes To Hollywood “Relax” music video, still gallery, and trailer.
Body Double was conceived as part homage, part provocation but the thriller that came out of that strange concoction stands the test of time as one of the best produced by an American director in the 1980’s. What was shocking then, has receded now but what was beautiful and intriguing has only gained in the passage of time.
Highly Recommended.
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