Splattering Psychics

THE MARQUIS DE SADE should be alive today. DePalma and DeSade would make a brilliant director-screenwriter team. In Brian DePalma's latest thriller, The Fury, Fiona Lewis plays a high-class, whorish British bitch-doctor whose titillating, condescending blue eyes make you want to punch her in the nose. Hitchcock would have let Cary Grant do just that--assuming that we in the audience are all voyeurs--and in his later days would have sent her to his legendary shower. DePalma, characteristically, goes further. In one of many representative sequences in The Fury, Robin (Andrew Stevens), Lewis's jealous lover, a telekinetic teenager who makes people bleed at will, mentally jerks her into the air, blood pouring from her eyes, nose, and mouth, and as she moans and gurgles begins to spin her around, whirling her faster and faster until her sprays of blood spatter the walls and lampshades. If Hitchcock assumes our voyeurism, DePalma must assume our psychosis and sado-masochism.

Whether or not DePalma's perversities appeal to you, and you have nothing to be ashamed of if they don't, you must at least concede that he's flamboyant, like his protagonist in The Phantom of Paradise a virtuoso gone ga-ga, which puts him far ahead of literal-minded bores like Richard Donner and Michael Crichton. His last film, Carrie, was a gory, silly, outrageous, and incredibly beautiful piece of movie-making--far more structured, spare, and cohesive than The Fury, and unfortunately, a far more satisfying movie.

The Fury should have been DePalma's goony epic. The ingredients include a pair of telekinetic teenagers (double Carrie's load), nefarious international spy organizations, a dastardly Bond-style villain, a goofily bloated score by John Williams, a delightfully eccentric group of players, and a mammoth budget--courtesy of schlock-producer Frank Yablans. The movie fails not because it's so gory, and not even because DePalma cruelly lingers over the deaths of our favorite characters (although this is annoying), but because the storyline is so slack. Screenwriter John Farris has plotted the film with routine situations that are unworthy of the marvelous ingredients, and although DePalma has structured several dazzling sequences, loaded with bursts of subjective camerawork and rhythmically perfect editing, there are too many dead spots for the suspense to build properly.

The film brings together assorted plot strands, the principal one involving Kirk Douglas as a former intelligence man, whose son, Robin, has been abducted by his former organization, presumably to be used as some kind of secret weapon (he makes foreign presidents' noses bleed--just kidding; actually, he can marshall quite a fury when mad). Douglas must elude the network of agents controlled by John Cassavetes, whose arm he crippled during the terrorist raid that begins the film, in which Robin is captured. Enter Gillian (Amy Irving), another telekinetic whom Cassavetes is grooming at a parapsychic institute to join Robin. She experiences flashes of telepathy with Robin, and when Douglas learns of her existence he resolves to rescue her from the institute so that she may lead him to his son.

DE PALMA HAS CAST the film magnificently, with a keen satirical eye. Giving the lead roles to Kirk Douglas and Carrie Snodgrass must be his audacious reply to those who would put all-American zombies like Gregory Peck and Lee Remick in similar roles. Kirk Douglas's face has never seemed longer, and that dimple never more defiant. With the stature and angry leer of a depraved baboon (perfect for a DePalma hero), and a cuddly, newfound warmth, Douglas looks like a MAD magazine caricature of himself, and that is somehow very appropriate. Carrie Snodgrass, in her first appearance since Diary of a Mad Housewife, walks off with the movie, and if she can bring this much warmth and humanity to The Fury, with those drawn cheekbones and kitty-cat voice, then she stands to regain her former stature as one of our most promising cinematic actresses.

John Cassavetes' villain, whose crippled arm rests in a black sling, rarely raises his voice, and what recent villains have had this much sepulchral charm? His end morever, can only be compared to the finale of the 1812 Overture, and provides the one great, cathartic moment in the film.

Amy Irving is a delightful heroine; she's not as spacey as Sissy, but then, who is? Charles Durning, who bears a startling resemblance to W.C. Fields, fulfills none of his potential to make the head doctor of the parapsychic institute a triumphant parody, but one William Finley as a commercial spiritualist is a hilariously spastic, buck-toothed jab at the Amazing Kreskin.

DePalma uses familiar devices for familiar effects. He considerably subdues his revolving camera here, although when it arcs slowly around Douglas during the first scene, taking in the surrounding beach area, it conveys with great subtlety the oncoming danger. DePalma stages the most powerful action sequence, the escape of Gillian from the parapsychic institute, in slowmotion, lingering over all the deaths. He characterizes his performers by how beautifully they bleed; a little snit in Gillian's school has blood dribble from her nose all over her lunch, but Carrie Snodgrass' blood splashes lovingly, lyrically over a windshield. Clearly, the more DePalma relishes his characters, the more he puts into their deaths. It would be nice to know something about his childhood and psychological background; perhaps it would give us a clue as to why he unleashes so much fury on his characters. He's so perverse and sadistic that he really is endearing--he probably sleeps on a rack. The Fury is a startlingly pure film: 100 per cent id.