Body Double DVD: Review By brianroche

Brian De Palma's "Body Double" is a tough sell. Its main plot is unlikely at best, and its surrounded by a framing device that makes no literal sense at all. The film is littered with fake-looking blue screen and rear projection work. It has no name stars, filling its cast with TV faces. It copies a number of Hitchc*ckian shots and scenes, most notably from "Rear Window" and "Vertigo". It seems to be unrelentingly violent towards women. And with its neon and synthesizers, it looks and sounds like a commercial for the 80s.

Yet all of those aspects gel nicely, into De Palma's most confident 'personal' work between "Dressed to Kill" and "Femme Fatale". Released in 1984, Brian De Palma made this immediately following "Scarface" (there's even a cameo by Steven Bauer). Freed from that film's reportedly tough shoot, he made a relatively small, tight thriller that expresses everything he knew about film in general and his own career in particular.

The film takes place in Los Angeles and follows actor Jake Scully (Craig Wasson). As the film opens he's laying in a coffin, filming a scene in a vampire movie - only he can't move when the film's director (Dennis Franz, in his fourth and final De Palma movie) calls action - he feels too claustrophobic in the tight space to act. He's sent home early, only to find his girlfriend in bed with another guy. He takes it lying down - literally, on a friend's couch - until he meets Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry), an oily, be-scarfed fellow actor.

Sam's in a position to help Jake out. He's house sitting in a futuristic (and architecturally unlikely) pad overlooking the Hollywood Hills, but he has a 5-week gig in Seattle. So if he's willing to water the plants, Jake can crash there while Sam is away. As a bonus, every night like clockwork, a beautiful woman does a sexy dance-slash-masturbation routine alone at the nouveau mansion across the way, which Jake can watch through a telescope Sam helpfully shows him how to use.

Jake becomes hooked immediately, watching her every night. But as he's watching her, he sees someone else watching her, a creepy looking "Indian" (quotes because if Jake hadn't referred to him as an Indian, I wouldn't have necessarily thought of him as one. He's just a scary lookin' dude). Jake is also fired from the vampire movie, and with all the extra time on his hands, begins to follow the woman around (her character's name is Gloria Revelle, and she's played by Deborah Shelton).

I can't in good conscience reveal what happens next, except to say that Jake looks guilty of murder, and his curiosity and need to clear himself leads him into the L.A. pornography underground, where he meets porn star Holly Boddy (Melanie Griffith).

What I am willing to tell you - and which, in true Web fashion requires a spoiler warning, so consider yourself warned - is that near the end of the film, Jake is given a chance to 'act', to make a decision and do something important that comes from him - and at this moment, the movie cuts back to the opening scene of the movie, with Jake as the vampire freezing up inside the coffin. The film crew pulls him out again, but he stops, gets all c*cky and gets back in the coffin, ready to do the scene right this time. Franz-the-auteur calls action, and we jump back to the scene in the narrative proper, where Jake 'acts' toward a real life goal. And, after this goal is accomplished, we cut again to the movie set, and Jake has been re-hired, and Griffith the porn star is apparently his girlfriend. We never find out how the main story got wrapped up. This is the boldest instance of movie trickery De Palma's ever used - moving away from its plot to focus on the main character's dilemma, risking the audience's detachment. And it works, because we're with Jake the whole way. Every time I see it, I am more interested in Jake getting his courage than I am in the final solution of the mystery plot.

All of this is conveyed in some amazing physical production. The camerawork is very sure-footed - it was as if he was saying, "Yeah, I rip off Hitchc*ck, I rip off my earlier movies. You want a piece of me?" The Hitch-riffs in "Body Double" are very creative - in the first telescope sequence, De Palma does "Rear Window" one better by having the camera focus in and out, like someone would operating an actual telescope. There's an lengthy chase scene in the middle of the movie, beginning in a mall, and continuing through beach condos, a sandy beach scattered with striped cloth tents, over a pier, and down a tunnel, ending in a 360-degree pan around two of the characters that is supremely controlled. The film's depiction of Jake's claustrophobia uses hypnotic camera work that dollies and focuses in and out, leaving us as woozy as Jake.

Maybe most impressive, with "Body Double" De Palma tightened up his visual style, using fewer shots, especially establishing shots, so that every composition has a specific 'job' of conveying particular information and tone in a particular way. There's really no evidence of typically second-unit city and building shots, nor any second camera coverage. Actually, one of my favorite shots in the movie is one of the most mundane - as Jake drives up the home he shares with his girlfriend, De Palma shoots it wide so we can see Jake as he parks the car, gets out of it, locks it, walks up the door of the house, walks in, and can be seen through a giant window putting down groceries and looking through mail on the kitchen counter, all in one shot. Shooting each of those individual actions could take a whole day. And it looks so perfect it might have taken most of a day anyway. But De Palma is hooked on the single image with the most impact. This concision continues to serve De Palma's work today.

De Palma's films always have a sure sense of place, from the coked-out Miami of "Scarface" to Prohibition-Era Chicago's wet dream of itself in "The Untouchables", to the grey France of "Femme Fatale". "Body Double" was the first film of eight collaborations with D.P. Stephen Burum, and together they drench L.A. in colors even brighter than those in "Scarface", with lots of warm yellow sunlight, and a charming, deliberate fakeness in the movie's several rear-projected scenes. A scene supposedly from a porno movie looks improbably like a music video (it actually features Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who I'm guessing an actual porn production could not afford). During this 'porno' scene, there's an intentional reflection of the camera crew in a mirror, breaking the spell between two characters and reminding us that movies aren't, and can't be, real. It's all to create a sexy/tacky façade that contrasts both with Jake's earnestness and the deceit of the other characters - good and bad facing off in the town where reality is manufactured.

The cast is great, and fresh to audiences in 1984 - odd for an A-List director, De Palma frequently casts non-stars for his films (When the "The Untouchables" was released, Kevin Costner was mostly unknown).

Wasson, as Jake Scully, has taken an unfair rap over the years, of being too low-key or miscast, a stain on this movie. I think he's perfect in this part. He's not the everyman character who's so often the center of a thriller - he's every-actor. He looks like a guy you'd see doing guest spots on TV shows, which is who Jake Scully is and who Wasson was at the time. He projects an effortless decency, and sports the hangdog demeanor of a thesp who's bombed too many auditions lately. It's almost as if De Palma started with the lead character of a 'life of the struggling actor' comedy and dropped him into a sex thriller. Wasson brings all the confusion to the role that approach would suggest, and the disconnect between his personality and the rest of the movie elevates Jake's voyeuristic tendencies. The movie knows of Wasson's blandness and uses it as an advantage - at one point, when he needs to impersonate a slimeball producer, he's so unimaginative he just copies Henry's mannerisms, since Sam is the most recent slimeball he's met. Wasson has a slight lilt to his voice that suggests an upbringing somewhere in the upper South, like so many actors who've come from all over the country to try their hand at stardom, and end up living job to job. He's probably playing himself. I'll nominate him for one of the best leads in De Palma's filmography, up there with Pacino in "Scarface", Travolta in "Blow Out", and Sissy Spacek in "Carrie".

Gregg Henry plays Sam Bouchard to the hilt as an oily cheeseball. He also believably portrays a working actor - he has a self-centric way of carrying himself, as if he's convinced his jokes are the funniest, his opinions are the most correct, as if his receding hairline is in fact a full lustrous mane. Henry's a De Palma veteran, but this was his best, meatiest role.

Deborah Shelton is given little to do as the stalked Gloria Revelle, yet does everything the role calls for as conceived, which, because of her looks, paints her as a bad actress.

She's stunning and perfect in that constricted high-class 80s way, as if she was just whisked in from the set of "Dallas" (which she was on during this same period). Interestingly, she's the only character in the film that doesn't seem to have another side to her personality.

Shelton's work is contrasted against Griffith's work as Holly Boddy. She's the smartest and most honest character in the whole film. She's not a porn star with a heart of gold, but with unobstructed vision, her cynicism guiding her soundly through her life experience. Her cynical toughness contrasts with her baby doll voice effectively, creating a person who maybe became tough as a survival reflex. Along with "Something Wild", this film put her on the map, and deservedly so.

The film's music score is by frequent De Palma collaborator Pino Donaggio. It uses several separate synthesizer cues. The synthesizer is given lots of critical sh*t, but used well, it's as valid as any other musical instrument. His music during the big chase is very creepy, using a slow droning cue for a fast-paced scene. It's another of the film's defining assets.

We've got bupkes except for the film's trailer, which refreshingly features no footage from the actual film, and some brilliantly cheesy narration: "He thought he was trespassing - but he was invited!"

You can't talk about "Body Double" without talking about its extreme violence, all of it directed at female characters. Fed up with the MPAA after "Scarface", De Palma's reported to have said, "They want an X? I'll give 'em a real X!" But the violence is filmed in outrageous ways that showcase De Palma's sadistic sense of humor - not to make us laugh, more to make us squirm. And squirm I do. A murder via electric drill is interrupted when the killer accidentally pulls the drill's plug out of the wall, and the eventual murder is filmed so it looks like a sexual assault. And that's nothing compared to the film's final image, of the making of the vampire movie within "Body Double". Wasson, in costume as the vampire, bites into the neck of an actress, and the film cuts to a shot of her below the neck (we are shown that this is in fact a body double) and blood from the bite gushes over her naked breasts. I'd argue that both of these images are too extreme to take seriously, as awful as they are, and that De Palma is sitting next to camera, almost narrating, "No, I DON'T mean this, and I dare you to say otherwise." Check it out, and see if you agree with his detractors.