The Fury

Of all the thrillers Brian De Palma made in the 70s and early 80s, The Fury holds the record for being the wackiest. Its loosey-goosey story involves youths with telepathy who are targeted by a secret government agency. The Fury has a terrific music score by John Williams. Williams’s music elevates the supreme goofiness of De Palma’s movie. (It was right around the time he was composing scores for Star Wars and Superman, and the influence is obvious, although the music is still distinct. It’s beautiful, emotionally big and evocative, and compelling.)

Kirk Douglas plays Peter Sandza, an ex-CIA agent whose son Robin (Andrew Stevens) has psychic abilities that the government wants to harness. So, they kidnap Robin after attempting to kill his dad while the two of them are vacationing somewhere in the Middle East. Then the film jumps a year ahead, to Chicago, where Amy Irving is strolling along Lake Michigan with her girlfriend, studying for an upcoming test. Irving’s character, Gillian, has the same kind of psychic powers as Robin, and a man—also possessive of these abilities—has procured her for the desperate Peter, who’s hoping Gillian can help him track down his son. 

Robin, it turns out, is being held by the afore-mentioned ominous government agency, pacified by a sexy psychiatrist (Fiona Lewis) while the government tries to exploit him. Gillian makes several psychic connections with Robin when she goes to stay at the Chicago-based Paragon Institute, a facility that reaches out to people with these kinds of gifts. It’s run by two apparently sincere scientists played by Charles Durning and Carol Rossen, who know Robin because he stayed there once too (briefly).

The government learns of Gillian’s powers just as Peter does, so that it becomes a race to see who can get to her first, and whether or not Peter can track down his son and rescue him from the manipulative clutches of the powers-that-be.

I took the time of explaining the oddball plot of The Fury to point out that Brian De Palma, perhaps more than any director working in his genre in the 1970s, was a filmmaker committed to a kind of madcap expressionism. The movie glides along to that wonderful John Williams score, soaking in the sights of Chicago, humming along with all its bizarre plot points, and as illogical, incredulous and half-baked as much of it is, the thing is a hell of an experience. It’s not as iconic as Carrie, nor as freaky as Dressed to Kill, but it’s alive with energy, and De Palma pulls sincere performances out of everyone in the cast. The movie falls apart in the end, but fans of such genre-tripping nuttiness should definitely give this freak-out of a horror film a try. It's wonderfully cynical and made with an exuberant love of the genre. There are also some bonkers special effects—especially at the end—featuring bodily explosions. (These youths have a lot of pent-up energy.)

With Carrie Snodgress, John Cassavetes, Joyce Easton, Rutanya Alda, and, in bit parts, Darryl Hannah and Dennis Franz. Screenplay by John Farris (adapted from his novel).  

True Confessions

True Confessions (1981) is a story about rot and how it taints institutions like the Church. It's also loosely based on the grisly Black Dahlia murder case. The film is set in Los Angeles in 1948, and the focus is on two brothers: one a priest (Robert De Niro) who schmoozes with wealthy laymen in order to get funding for church buildings, and the other a hardboiled detective (Robert Duvall), who's a cynic. He's seen the corruption of religious institutions first hand, and it's no different from the corruption of law enforcement or any other supposedly pure organization.

When Duvall's character confronts a big-time construction magnate (Charles Durning) who's been helping out the Church, he unflinchingly mocks the man's moral character, and he gets something of a kick out of doing it. He's overly pleased with calling people out, but then he has a right to be infuriated when the Church celebrates a man who frequents prostitutes. But he's a hypocrite, too. Near the beginning of the film, he does the Church a favor by removing the corpse of a priest who suffered a fatal heart attack while visiting a house of ill fame. It would be a nasty scandal for the Catholic Church and in particular his brother, so he takes care of things for them.

True Confessions, which was based on John Gregory Dunne's 1977 novel and adapted by Dunne and Joan Didion, seems to be reaching for profundity when it exposes the rot with which it is so consumed. But when the police are investigating the brutal murder of a young woman found in a vacant lot (she was cut in half and eviscerated), they treat the murder as though it were a routine, unremarkable event. There's no feeling for her or for the particularly horrifying circumstances of her death.

It's only later that Duvall's character develops a kind of sympathy for the murdered girl, as well as a compulsive desire for justice, which he finds is just as elusive as the mysterious girl herself. It's hard to buy his sudden transition from callousness to compassion, because Duvall's character is a grim, pasty, unfeeling cardboard cutout out of a detective character from the 1940s. He's Humphrey Bogart without the charm and fast-talking wit. He has a sense of humor, to be sure, but he doesn't talk in all the lovely double entendres Bogart did in The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep.

De Niro too seems embalmed in True Confessions, and he appears as though he had no idea of how to play the priest any other way. It's probably a fault of the writing, which vacillates clumsily from murder mystery to morality tale to family drama, never successfully getting across any concrete ideas about any of them. Instead it just pounds us over the head with its one crystallized theme: Rot. By the end of the movie, you certainly feel it spreading, and it makes you wish the whole experience were over sooner. (And, there's a wedding scene near the beginning that has echoes of The Godfather, as though they were trying to make a film about the Catholic Church on that level; it's merely a reminder of how pale a comparison True Confessions is.)

Directed by Ulu Grosbard. With Ed Flanders, Burgess Meredith, Kenneth McMillan, Cyril Cusack, Dan Hedaya, Jeanette Nolan, and Rose Gregario. 108 mins. ★★

Dog Day Afternoon

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) is a bank robbery movie that's so intense you start to feel stressed out for the hostages, as though you were a hostage too. Al Pacino, post-Godfather I and II, gives a smashing performance as Sonny, the Brooklyn bank robber who's trying to get enough money so his lover, Leon (Chris Sarandon), can get a sex-change operation. The question that hangs over the proceedings, as Sonny's robbery is stalled by the arrival of seemingly every cop and FBI officer in New York, is just how crazy is Sonny? And, how crazy is his partner, Sal (John Cazale), who seems like a grenade, waiting to explode.

What's so funny about this movie is how badly Sonny and Sal bungle their robbery, which, as the movie poster reads, should have lasted for a few minutes, but turned into a 12-hour ordeal, full of bullshit negotiations. Sonny's gullible though, and under too much pressure to think clearly (he has a considerably complicated home life, between his wife and kids, his demanding mother, and his obsession for Leon, who's trying to get away from him, to the point of several failed suicide attempts and subsequent hospitalization). And probably Leon is unknowingly hungry for the attention he receives throughout the day and into the night. And no bank robber ever had friendlier, more accommodating hostages. They like him, strange as that sounds, and they're not really that scared of him. They even criticize his lack of organization skills in carrying off the robbery. But the humor is mixed with a real sense of tense fear, and the looming dread of the inevitable showdown between the robbers and the police. 

Director Sidney Lumet and screenwriter Frank Pierson have fun exploring what kind of a circus a drawn-out bank robbery turns into when the media shows up, spectators flock to the scene, and the criminal becomes a sort of revolutionary, a hero standing up against the establishment. No one really even cares what, if anything, Sonny represents, other than rebellion. Even the hostages, for the most part, seem keen to like him, even if it's because they're under such extraordinary pressure. They seem to be having a good time, as though Sonny had involved them in a TV drama, not an actual robbery.

With Charles Durning as a detective, James Broderick as an FBI agent, Lance Henriksen as the agent driving the getaway car, and Penelope Allen, Sully Boyar, and Carol Kane among the bank employees being held hostage. It's loosely based on real events which occurred on August 22, 1972, from an article in Life Magazine written by P.F. Kluge and Thomas Moore, called, "The Boys in the Bank."