Behind the Scenes With My Favorite Actors: Nancy Allen in Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill

***All these shots are taken from MGM's fabulous special edition DVD of Dressed to Kill, one of the best DVDs I have ever had the pleasure of owning.***

Vintage Viewings

I've been trying to catch up on some recent films lately that I have missed so this Vintage Viewings post will be a bit short. I've also been watching a lot of TV surprisingly with reruns of Lou Grant on American Life, a new season of Mary McCormack in In Plain Sight and the very funny Parks and Recreation providing the biggest pleasures. I have had time for some older works though and here are some thoughts on the more recent that I've had in my player:

1. Born Innocent: Fascinating 1974-television film starring a tremendous Linda Blair. Surprisingly rough in spots, the film will be extremely interesting to fans of The Exorcist as this was the first picture Linda shot after it. Keep an eye out for Janit Baldwin, seen here the same year she shot Gator Bait with Claudia Jennings!

2. The Rocker: Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott: I’ve been listening to a lot of Thin Lizzy lately, and in no way is that a bad thing. This engrossing 60 minute documentary on their legendary founder is filled with killer clips of live Lizzy, vintage interviews as well as insightful commentary from the surviving band members, peers, family and friends.

3. Murder Obsession: The final film from important Italian director Riccardo Freda is a fairly flawed affair at best. Featuring lovely Laura Gemser as well as Anita Strindberg and John Richardson, Murder Obsession is a confused late period Giallo that never really comes together. It has its moments and includes an interesting score from Franco Mannino, but it is nowhere near Freda’s better works.

4. Return of the Ewok: An odd little documentary shot during the making of the thrilling Return of the Jedi featuring Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher (in her Jedi bikini gear), Mark Hammill as well as some other familiar faces from the original Star Wars saga. Nowhere near as embarrassing as the infamous Star Wars Holiday Special, I found this short little film sort of sweet and it would make a nice bonus feature to a future Jedi DVD release.

5. Smile Jenny You’re Dead: The best thing about this boring 1974 TV film starring David Janssen is getting to see a young Jodie Foster together with Barbara Leigh in a couple of scenes. Otherwise this Harry-O mystery is pretty limp stuff although anything with both Zalman King and Victor Argo on hand isn’t all a bad thing.

6. Super Fly TNT: I’ve wanted to see this sequel to one of my favorite films from the seventies for years, but unfortunately it is about as bad as its reputation suggests. Despite being scripted by none other than Alex Hailey, Super Fly TNT is just bad throughout. Ron O’Neal was an incredibly talented actor but his direction here is flat at best. A solid cast is wasted and this film film deserves to be just a footnote to Gordon Park Jr’s landmark work.

7. The Buddy System: A fairly dreadful 1984 film starring Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Sarandon and Nancy Allen from director Glenn Jordan. I admittedly just watched it for Allen, who is wasted in a supporting role.

The Great Video Store in the Sky (Blow Out)

***I recently have gained access to some folders containing scans of thousands of different old import VHS covers, posters and lobby cards. I thought it might be cool to build some new series' here to show off some favorites. Enjoy...***

Missing Man In The Middle

There was something surreal about seeing Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola give Martin Scorsese his long overdue Oscar the other night. While I am not a huge Lucas or Spielberg fan there is no denying their monumental importance to film and seeing this group together again was pretty inspiring. I felt it was pretty obvious that Scorsese was going to win when those three walked out on the stage; so upon their introduction where Lucas joked that that he was the only one who hadn't won an oscar I found myself thinking about a photograph I had seen years before and about a guy who has never even been nominated for an Academy Award.
I have never been able to comprehend peoples disdain for Brian De Palma. De Palma's films along with Scorseses and Coppolas shaped my youth as no other American filmmaker did, and yet many people continue to have an overwhelming hatred for De Palma's body of work.
The complaints against De Palma have almost always been the same and have almost always been unsatisfactory to me. The biggest one is the misogynistic claim that has constantly been thrown at him. I have always had the hardest time swallowing this one as it is hard to think of another modern American director who has continually worked with such strong women in his films. De Palma's 'golden' age between Sisters and Scarface presented us with some of the most effective work by actresses in that incredible period. From Margot Kidder in Sisters through Michelle Pfeiffer in Scarface De Palma had an amazing skill at photographing, directing and bringing out the best of his leading ladies. Sissy Spacek remains the most famous De Palma heroine in Carrie but one shouldn't overlook the work of Amy Irving and Nancy Allen in these films. I would hold Amy Irving's work in The Fury among the great performances of the seventies and Nancy Allen brought such an immeasurable presence to De Palma's cinema that it is impossible to imagine these films without her.
The other criticisms have always been the same: too violent, too stylized, too Hitchcockian....too much. I honestly think that many 'film' lovers are actually scared of cinema, and the possibilities of it. De Palma is one of the most cinematic of all directors, this man loves film and he loves what he can do with it. More than any of his peers De Palma has been able to create a body of work that is itself in love with cinema, but it is also a body of work that has an emotional resonance that many continue to deny. For all of the audacious camera work, split screens, slow motion, deep focus and long tracking shots many of my favorite De Palma moments are more intensely personal shots. Travolta in the last scene of Blow-Out, Pacino standing in the rain in Carlito's Way watching Penelope Ann Miller through the window, the look on Amy Irving's face right before the climax of The Fury. De Palma isn't afraid to be as human as he is stylish, and it is the emotional weight that his greatest films carry, along with his undeniably power as a technician, that allows these films to endure more and more year after year.
I plan on writing more in the future on De Palma, I can't imagine my life as a movie lover without his films. Also this man can still deliver, seeing Femme Fatale a few years back was one of the most invigorating, and emotional, experiences I have ever had in a theater.
Brian De Palma will probably never even get nominated for an Academy Award and I am sure it didn't cross anyone else's mind that he was missing from that group the other night. His critics have always tried to push him to the margins and yet his work continues to thrive. People keep discovering his films, gloating web-sites continue to appear and for people like me that have loved his work for so many years, we continue to find the answer as to why we love cinema in his greatest films.

Travolta In The Seventies: From Barbarino to Blow-Out

Next week will see the long awaited release of the first season of WELCOME BACK KOTTER, a series fondly remembered by many people my age and the series that made John Travolta one of the biggest stars of the seventies.
Travolta had been doing television work since the early seventies and had a small part in the intriguing Robert Fuest film THE DEVIL'S RAIN before his role as the lovably dumb Vinnie Barbarino would catapult him into a major television star. Barbarino is one of the great characters of seventies sitcoms and Travolta's strutting and stuttering performance as the punk everybody loves landed him a role in Brian De Palma's CARRIE as well as a record deal.

Travolta's record deal would produce two albums of typically harmless seventies pop. LET HER IN actually hit the top ten and Travolta did some tv appearances promoting the song but thankfully it was his film career that would take off instead of his music.
Travolta's role as Billy Nolan, who connives with Nancy Allen's Chris to ruin Carrie White's shining moment, was small but brought an undeniable force to CARRIE and he's impossible to take your eyes off of. Whatever that mysterious thing is that makes a star a star, Travolta has it multiplied by ten.
Also released, along with CARRIE, in 1976 is the much loved television movie THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE. For all of the tv-movie trappings it falls into, THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE actually contains one of Travolta's finest performances. Here, for the first time, we can see all of the vulnerability and little boy frustration that Travolta can project so well. THE BOY IN THE PLASTIC BUBBLE is a sweet and well made little film that is majorly important in the evolution of John Travolta as an actor.

WELCOME BACK KOTTER might have made John Travolta a star but nobody, least of all Travolta himself, could have been prepared for the worldwide fame his next role would bring. It is often forgotten just how serious and rough the film SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER is. The film, and its astonishing Bee-Gees soundtrack, has saturated so completely into popular culture that actually sitting down and watching the film can prove a jolting experience. The original hard R version of the film, before it was cut down to a PG version that many people grew up with, is an angry, profane and tough film featuring a lead character that at times is despicable in his actions.
Tony Manero in any one else's hands would have just come across as a racist and overwhelmingly sexist punk but with John Travolta playing him the audience not only comes to understand but finally love him. Travolta is incredible in the role, bringing levels of humanity and hurt to Tony that few actors would have even thought to attempt. The tragic loss of Travolta's real life girlfriend, Diana Hyland, to cancer during the films shooting probably led Travolta into much darker places than he would have otherwise travelled in the role.

Travolta would receive a well deserved Oscar nomination for his role as Tony and the character and film would go onto to influence an entire generation of actors and filmmakers. One of my favorite tributes is Paul Thomas Anderson's shot of Dirk Diggler's bedroom in BOOGIE NIGHTS, a direct reference to SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER and just how much impact the film had in the seventies.
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER should have launched John Travolta's career as a serious actor but the one thread that runs throughout his career to this day is one of not taking risks. Travolta has always played it too safe, it is his biggest downfall. It is no coincidence that his best roles, SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, BLOW-OUT, PULP FICTION, are all risk taking roles. A perfect example of Travolta's mistake of not pushing himself into darker terrains is his quitting AMERICAN GIGOLO in 1979. The role, which made Richard Gere a major star, would have changed the tragic direction that Travolta's career went to in the eighties.

So instead of following SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER with another hard hitting role Travolta delivered GREASE and MOMENT BY MOMENT. GREASE remains an incredibly alive and fun film, and one of the best musicals of the seventies. Most of the films strength comes from the blazing hot chemistry between Travolta and his costar, the lovely and talented OLivia Newton-John. GREASE would make Travolta even a bigger star and was one of the biggest hits of 1978.
MOMENT BY MOMENT was Travolta's first real slip up and an omen for some of the terrible decisions he would make in the next decade. Jane Wagner's painfully sappy and cringe inducing film stars Travolta along with Lily Tomlin. Take all the chemistry that Travolta had with Newton-John and put a negative sign in front of it and you've got him and Tomlin. MOMENT BY MOMENT was a huge bomb and it hurt Travolta's career. He wouldn't make another film for two years.
Travolta returned to the screen with URBAN COWBOY in 1980. It is a fun little film made better than it is because of a smouldering young Debra Winger and an undeniably great soundtrack. Travolta is good in it but he seems to be holding back. The film would make a lot of money but it seemed a long way from Tony Manero.
I often forget that BLOW-OUT is a film from the eighties. It seems so steeped as one of the greatest paranoid thrillers of the seventies that I often think of it, even more than RAGING BULL, as the decade's last scream of greatness before the ugly Reagan dominated eighties kicked into full gear.
Travolta's performance as sound man Jack in De Palma's film is his greatest and most complex role. Travolta goes for broke here and it is a haunting and mesmerizing turn that still resonates. Again working with the great Nancy Allen, Travolta delivers a turn that should have re-established him as a one of America's great actors and yet for some reason in the summer of 1981 very few people liked or even saw BLOW-OUT.
As many times as Pauline Kael's reviews would irritate and anger me, sometimes she would knock one out of the park and her writing on BLOW-OUT is dead on. She seemed to be the one critic who understood this was a major film and a great American masterpiece. It is one of her finest reviews and is well worth searching out. BLOW-OUT remains one of the most undervalued films of the eighties and contains the best work that John Travolta ever did.
The failure of BLOW-OUT sent Travolta's career into a major downward spiral and it would take him almost 15 years to recover. Starting with the regrettably bad SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER follow up STAYING ALIVE in 1983 Travolta's career would become a sad cartoon of bad films and poor choices. The period of 1983 to 1993 is one of the worst runs for a major actor and star in Hollywood history.
Quentin Tarantino was 18 when BLOW-OUT came out and I have always pictured him alone in a theater watching it and thinking, "that's the guy." Much has been written about Travolta as Vincent Vega in PULP FICTION and I don't have much to offer to the discussion. It is an incredible performance and it started a really incredible comeback for John even if he would inevitably start to play it safe again as soon as he wrapped Tarantino's film.
Ironically John Travolta is in yet another slump. His films are making money but looking at his resume from the past few years and his upcoming projects is truly depressing.
John Travolta is one of my favorite actors, even if it is mostly for work that he did in a very short period of time 30 years ago. I hope the guy pushes himself at least once more before everyone, including himself, forgets just how powerful he can be.

Images From My All Time Favorite Films: Brian De Palma's Blow Out (1981)

"Forever an Extra, Never a Star"

In honor of Brian De Palma's birthday here is a repost of my article on one of his most undervalued films.

***This article is my contribution to Cinema Viewfinder's terrific Brian De Palma Blog-A-Thon. Thanks so much to Tony at Cinema Viewfinder for inviting me to contribute.***



It’s one of the most breathtaking shots in Brian De Palma’s entire canon. Nancy Allen, at her loveliest, walks through a doorway in slow motion towards a visibly stunned Keith Gordon, who is frantically pounding away at some mashed potatoes. Pino Donnagio’s score grows more and more lush and dramatic as the luminous Allen walks straight towards the camera, as if some unseen force is inviting her. This classic De Palma moment isn’t from Dressed to Kill, or Blow Out, or any of the other classic films that he shot with his (then wife) Allen in the late seventies and early eighties. It is from the almost totally forgotten 1980 release Home Movies, and the unseen force inviting Allen to come closer is us, the audience.




The magnificent introduction of Nancy Allen in Home Movies is just the kind of moment that critics loved, and continue to love, to pick on De Palma about. Instead of recognizing it as an enduring ode to not only his lovely new bride, and a tip of his hat to the kind of glamour that Hollywood had all but abandoned by the seventies, De Palma was vilified as a director who objectified women as purely sexual objects.




The charge against De Palma as being a cinematic misogynist is absolutely bogus, as were most of the charges railed against him by most of the critics of the day who failed to see the significance of now classic films like Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Body Double. Equally false is the accusation that De Palma was simply a Hitchcock rip-off, because the work of rip-off artists might provide momentary thrills but the don't survive, and the films of Brian De Palma have done just that, and the best of them resonate far more in our post Pulp Fiction cinematic world than perhaps even his most adoring fans would have even hoped.




While we are celebrating the bona-fide classic works of Brian De Palma let us not forget the smaller films that have slipped through the cracks of cinema history, such as the hard to find Home Movies, a film that returned De Palma to the savage satiric tone of his early works like Greetings and Hi Mom!.




Of course, De Palma had never totally abandoned the comedy that was found in his early films as all of his thrillers had a sharp wit to them, even though the humor was sometimes so subtle that it was hard to even notice. The comedic touches found in otherwise deadly serious works like Sisters, Carrie and Dressed to Kill were so easy to overlook that by the time of Wise Guys in 1985 everyone seemed totally surprised that De Palma was releasing an out and out comedy, an ironic state for one of modern cinema’s most clever satirists.



Starting out as an extremely low budget attempt by De Palma to help his students at Sarah Lawrence College shoot their own film, Home Movies quickly turned into a freewheeling production directed almost exclusively by De Palma with his students working as the crew. A wet dream of sorts for De Palma enthusiasts, the film stars a number of the most recognizable faces from his work in the seventies and it is filled with humorous nods to not only his own work, but also his life as a director and the critics who were so quick to vilify him. Also, like all great satires, there is a real anger running underneath every moment in Home Movies that helps make it one of the key, if little seen, works by De Palma.




Attempting any sort of clear-cut plot description of Home Movies would be more than a little frustrating and pointless. Let’s just say that it concerns a young student whose life is being filmed by a college film teacher named “The Maestro”. At the same time another film crew is filming The Maestro’s day-to-day life and, on top of that, De Palma’s crew is filming the documentary crew filming The Maestro who is filming the young student. Got it?




Home Movies is an easy work to criticize as it is technically (but deliberately) all over the place, but it’s a wonderfully self reflective and knowing film that works as both a very funny comedy, as well as a tribute to the many styles of filmmaking De Palma had mastered during the seventies. Hardcore De Palma fans will have a blast spotting all the different references to films like Hi Mom!, Get to Know Your Rabbit, Sisters, Carrie and The Fury, while casual fans will get a kick out of such a famous director willing to go out on a limb with such a loose knit and near anarchic production.





From the hilarious and incredibly smart opening credit sequence in which everything from a house to a doctor’s fingers take on a sharp and leering voyeuristic viewpoint, to the idea that everyone can be the star of their own film (an idea that might have seemed like a novelty in 1980, but has become a terrifying reality in our modern world), Home Movies is one of De Palma’s most intelligent productions. If some of his thrillers had paid homage to the Italian Giallos from the likes of Dario Argento (a director, much more than Hitchcock, that De Palma should be aligned with) then Home Movies owes more than a passing debt to the many Italian sex comedies of the seventies. Even the wild and audacious score by the ever present Pino Donnagio sounds like it could be the soundtrack to any number of Laura Antonelli or Gloria Guida productions. Home Movies is much more than just a silly slapstick farce as De Palma, and his young crew, use the film as an audacious platform to combine all of his trademark touches into a sort of greatest hits work (every De Palma trademark is here with the exception of the split-screen montage). The film also works, much like Scorsese’s later After Hours, as a much needed back to basics work by an physically and emotionally exhausted filmmaker. The ‘break’ paid off as De Palma’s next two films, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out, proved to be arguably the finest of his now near five-decade career.






De Palma fans not familiar with Home Movies will not only be surprised by the number of odes to his past films but will be shocked by the iconic cast on hand, which stands as a who’s who of De Palma players from the seventies. Nancy Allen, who is so wonderfully funny and utterly charming here, appears alongside Keith Gordon, and the two of them successfully capture the chemistry that played such an important, if often unnoticed role, in Dressed to Kill. Other familiar faces include Kirk Douglas, fresh from The Fury, in hilarious form as the egomaniacal Maestro, as well the incredibly gifted Gerrit Graham who parodies his famous role as “Beef” in Phantom of the Paradise brilliantly. Many more appear as well and its hard not to be overwhelmed on first viewing by all the familiar faces from De Palma’s past works, who are all clearly having a good time simultaneously paying tribute to and gently mocking their past work.




De Palma doesn’t allow his actors to be alone in the self-parodying department as he delights in poking fun of himself throughout the film. It is De Palma’s own ability to laugh at himself though that makes Home Movies finally one of his most profound works. While the character of The Maestro is De Palma’s comment on the soulless and ego-driven director that so many critics accused of him of being, it is Gordon’s role as the good natured student cast in his own film as an extra that says more about the real Brian De Palma than the caricature of The Maestro. It’s as though De Palma recognizes his place as a bit of the 'lost man' amongst his peers and friends (Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas and Spielberg) who had all achieved both the acclaim and respect that had eluded the deserving De Palma throughout the seventies. The reoccurring image of the dejected and frustrated Gordon alone in a train station is a telling one for De Palma, a director so many have tried to push to the sidelines of modern American cinema.












Home Movies stands as a wonderful tribute to the versatility of Brian De Palma as a filmmaker, as well as a sharp reminder that he is at his best when he is allowed to work with people he is most at home with. De Palma’s films before he was forced into a director for hire role in the mid eighties were very much family affairs and Home Movies feels today a bit like a missing section of what has become an enduring and quite distinctive legacy. It’s also a sweet tribute to the team of De Palma and Allen, a wonderful combination that was broken up by the unfair and often savage criticism thrown at both of them after Dressed to Kill.






Home Movies can technically be labeled as a minor Brian De Palma film, but it is worth much more than the footnote status it is often given. Briefly available on VHS and laserdic in the eighties, the film has been out of print in The United States for nearly two decades. Out on DVD in Europe the film, sometimes known as The Maestro, is more than deserving of a re-release in America. Nearly universally ignored at the time of its brief theatrical release and rarely mentioned even by die-hard De Palma fans, Home Movies is a lost little treasure from one of America’s most important directors.

-Jeremy Richey-