The Fury (1978)
Brian De Palma has always had noteworthy advocates over the years (most prominently Pauline Kael) but there is a portion of the population, even among the cinephiles, who find his charms elusive. (Ironically the De Palma picture that seems to have broken through with the general public with the most force is one of his more problematic, the Scarface remake). People partially resent De Palma for refusing, in many of his most famous pictures, to distinguish the funny from the serious, but you knew that already; some are perversely unwilling to accept that it’s all a joke, and all serious, all at once. There’s something else though – it’s De Palma’s daredevil’s spirit, his commitment to the rhapsody of his pictures – he finds the heart of a cliché, flips it inside-out, and still commits fully to that cliché. Almost all of De Palma’s great pictures have bad or inadequate or even laughable scenes, but they don’t shatter the mood – they heighten it – De Palma’s bad scenes are indicative as to why he’s a great director. No director working in the thriller form today has De Palma’s courage – today our pranksters are too afraid of alienating the critics, or too afraid of leaving the audience behind – they avoid the issue by quote marking it, congratulating the audience for congratulating itself.
I’m assuming The Fury was a paycheck picture, it kinda deals with telekinesis (like De Palma’s prior film, Carrie) and it was De Palma’s largest budget at the time (something like six million). Those who reject the cheesier passages of Dressed to Kill or Blow-Out or Carrie will probably find The Fury unwatchable, and, this time, those people aren’t entirely off-base. John Farris’s script, based on his novel, is unimaginative and insufficient for De Palma’s gifts – it’s one of those bad 1970s sci-fi pictures in which the characters wait ninety-some minutes for the climax to arrive, exchanging dialogue of increasing redundancy. I can’t imagine reading The Fury; but, revisiting the De Palma film, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. The picture grabs you from the opening: a matter-of-fact, presentational credits sequence reminiscent of David Cronenberg accompanied by one of John Williams’ finest scores (it’s unusually subtle and sensuous for Williams – it has that sex-danger that characterizes the mood of a more personal De Palma picture).
De Palma must have known what he was working with in The Fury, and he appears to have taken it as a personal challenge, he imbues the pages with something intangibly terrifying; a second, more perverse picture, a picture of hysteria and torture and apocalypse, appears to be playing out on the sidelines, just out of our reach. (This film does have a flaw that’s uncharacteristic of even most of De Palma’s “off” pictures – it’s asexual.) The Fury, more or less, concerns the efforts of Kirk Douglas, some sort of ex-secret agent, to retrieve his telekinetic son (Andrew Stevens) who has been kidnapped by John Cassavetes for the usual purpose of harnessing the young man’s power, probably for global domination. The Fury could’ve been Firestarter, or, at best, something impersonal and obvious (like the X-Men pictures), and it is; but De Palma also leaves little threads hanging that nag and titillate - and that are accentuated by the picture’s startling, painterly visual beauty. The Fury has a rapt, night-time intensity, and the ending is a sick-joke on par with classic De Palma (the picture ultimately reveals itself to be, like Carrie, another distorted fairy tale of self-actualization). De Palma presents Cassavetes’ experiments on Stevens, which could’ve been more mad scientist exposition, in vicious, surreal shards – depriving us of our bearings, and sealing our discomfort with Cassavetes’ peerless jackal’s grin (he’s one of the few slumming actors whose performances actually benefit from their obvious contempt for the material).
Kirk Douglas’ work here may be parody, I couldn’t quite tell – and if it’s straight (and there’s a 1960s studio post-coital pose at one point that has to be a joke), it’s obvious, but Douglas’ open, irony-free, approach ultimately works on you, he knows how to use his legend to his advantage. Stevens is a bland, attractive robot who doesn’t register at all (De Palma treats him with indifference – he’s a McGuffin); but Amy Irving, as his spiritual psychic twin (yes, it’s one of those) is shockingly strong, it may be more her picture than De Palma’s. Amy Irving is an intoxicatingly beautiful woman here, with big brown curls that appear to function as a security blanket, and she has a specific ability to look other-worldly and ordinary at once - a geek’s dream girl that the jock might have to go for too (precisely what she played in Carrie). Irving had the most thankless role in Carrie - the voice of conscience in an otherwise loony, operatic horror picture, but she registered anyway – she had a talent for making conviction look sexy amongst the more glamorous ultra-violent wreckage; and she lent Carrie’s stunt-ending pathos, whether it was intentional or not: the possibility of this girl’s prolonged misery is an unnerving thought to close that picture on. Irving is even better in The Fury - she’s so effective she makes you care for Stevens on her behalf, despite the fact that you just can’t help but not care for Andrew Stevens. Irving’s psychic moments, would should just underline the fact that De Palma and Williams are toying with sights and sounds familiar to fans of Vertigo, are authentically unsettling – you want this girl to have peace, and, if you’re familiar with De Palma’s work – you know that that’s not necessarily a given.
Carrie Snodgress, as Douglas’ lover and comrade, and Irving’s de facto guardian, is nearly as effective – this picture picks up in its second hour when it has the good sense to concentrate on these women (one should note, as others always have, how many rich female performances can actually be found in the De Palma canon). Snodgress essentially serves The Fury in the same fashion that Betty Buckley served Carrie – she’s the wounded, naïve do-gooder, destined to be hurt for entering a world that’s beyond her understanding. I find Buckley’s death hard to watch in Carrie, not for the gore, there are far worse murders to be found in that picture by those standards, but because De Palma’s staging of Buckley’s death is so purposefully, cruelly offhand. Snodgress’ demise here is similar – she’s discarded in a more beautiful but equally besides-the-point fashion, at the end of a tracking shot that may play as a parody of those old lovers-running-toward-one-another-on-the-beach commercials.
De Palma, curiously, undersells the deaths of two other prominent characters near the end of the picture, possibly to soften us for the big finale – so we figure the worst is behind us (similar to the ploys that end Carrie and Dressed to Kill). We respond to Cassavetes’ big death and Snodgress’ antic-climactic demise in the same way, and, while not obvious, for the same reason. We cheer for Cassavetes to get it, he’s a Snidely Whiplash after all, but his murder also signifies the perversion of poor Amy Irving; in the end, both deaths point toward the potential destruction of the only two yet-to-be-soiled characters in the movie. De Palma then abruptly cuts to the credits, there’s nothing left to matter. To paraphrase a Tarantino character played by a De Palma alum, this is a sell-out picture with a pulse.
