Body Double (1984)

The previously reviewed Nighthawks was one of a few bargain bin DVDs that I recently purchased. Another was Body Double, which was directed by the master of Hitchcock rip-offs, Brian De Palma, and is basically Vertigo meets Rear Window, with a lot of T&A. It's all about a claustrophobic actor (Craig Wasson) who witnesses a murder while peeping on a neighbor. It was a pretty controversial film at the time, because of the levels of sexuality and violence – and because De Palma had originally hired a porn actress for the role that was eventually filled by Melanie Griffith – but it also serves as a reminder of how nudity used to be much more present in mainstream films. It's rare these days to see casual nudity in big budget movies; if there is any, a point is usually made of it.

I first saw Body Double some time in the nineties, and thought it was terrible. In fact, I thought it was the worst De Palma film I had seen at that point. (This was before he made Mission to Mars.) But it kind of stuck in my memory as something I ought to revisit at some point.

Watching it again, I now think it is a masterpiece. It's just a really uncompromising film: either you are on its wavelength or you aren't. There's a litmus test moment in the middle of the film when De Palma restages the swirling, 360˚ camera move that Hitchcock used in Vertigo for a very sinister, extended kissing scene between James Stewart and Kim Novak. De Palma pushes his version of the scene to a place way beyond camp, and you'll either laugh at it or laugh with it. In fact, the whole movie is a really good litmus test for your tolerance of Brian De Palma: pretty much all of his obsessions (voyeurism, psycho-sexuality, identity, autobiography) and all of his cinematic techniques (ambitious long takes, suspense set-pieces, meta-cinematic trickery) are present.

For me, I think the biggest difference in watching Body Double again is that I have since become a huge fan of giallo cinema – a genre of flamboyantly stylish Hitchcockian thrillers with a distinctly European flavor that were popular in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. There are a only handful of American movies that I can think of that have the look, feel and attitude of the giallo film. Basic Instinct is one, as are a number of De Palma films, such as Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double and Femme Fatale. Most of the innovations of the Italian giallo film only made it into American cinema, in diluted form, as slasher movies. De Palma was often accused of making slasher films himself, a charge he pokes a lot of fun at in both Blow Out (which opens by tricking audiences into thinking they are watching a crappy slasher film) and Body Double (in which Dennis Franz plays a caricature of De Palma as a hack horror director). It's a shame more American directors didn't work in the giallo format; horror cinema of the last twenty years might have been a lot more interesting.

Watermelon Man (1970)

I thought I'd start this blog off on the right foot with a review of a movie I recently watched for the first time: Melvin Van Peebles' first Hollywood movie, Watermelon Man.

Made a year before Van Peebles kick-started the blaxploitation era with Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the film is all about a middle-class white racist who, one morning, wakes up black. Van Peebles did not come up with the premise - it had been floating around Columbia Pictures for a while - but he made one crucial change. It had originally been conceived as a vehicle for someone like Alan Arkin or Jack Lemmon: i.e., a white actor who would play much of the film in blackface. Noting that the character is only white for about ten minutes of the movie, Van Peebles argued that he should be played by a black actor who would start the film in whiteface. Therein lies the genius of Watermelon Man: the whole film has Godfrey Cambridge (a black actor) presenting a merciless caricature of whiteness, whilst simultaneously growing into a figure of socially-conscious and militant blackness.

At first, I found van Peebles' direction a little off-putting, with it veering too much into broad farce for my liking. Then things started to get a little stranger, and closer to the discordant jazz style of Sweet Sweetback. I then realized that the farce was all a put-on, and that Van Peebles had been mocking the style of middle-class white suburban sitcoms – in much the same way Godfrey Cambridge's performance was satirizing middle-class whiteness. As the film progresses, Van Peebles increasingly interrupts the whitebread sitcom style with experimental use of jarring editing rhythms and a contrapuntal soundtrack that draws on African-American styles. These interruptions mirror the growing acceptance by the main character of his blackness, and his move towards direct action in the civil rights movement that he couldn't have cared less about at the start of the film.

Columbia Pictures apparently liked the movie, but Van Peebles walked away from them to make Sweet Sweetback independently. On the surface, Sweet Sweetback seems the far more uncompromising film – both aesthetically and politically – and it has had much more longevity and cultural impact as a result, but Watermelon Man should not be overlooked, and is in its own way just as subversive. I highly recommend it, preferably as a double feature with Putney Swope.