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Director: Brian De Palma

By Roderick Heath

Made four years after Phantom of the Paradise, The Fury is a radically different piece of filmmaking in many ways, and yet also vitally similar to its wayward predecessor. Phantom of the Paradise is De Palma’s swan song for laissez-faire youth; The Fury is a new master taking his final step toward becoming a big-budget director with a vast array of technical and financial resources at his command, big stars to work with, and a story that demanded his visualisations maintain a more traditional rhythm, though hardly free of freewheeling invention. In between, he had made Carrie and Obsession (both 1976), films where he revisited the Hitchcockian template he hit on with Sisters (1973), but also developed a more rigorous and coherent style and a richer, less insistently hip emotional palate that veers between the earnest and the ironic with often breakneck speed. They were still filled with his acerbic sense of humour and character, and maintained a socially critical vibe, but they were also rendered with a refreshed and deepened directorial sensibility, full of swooning, sensually loaded, mobile camerawork that often serves the purpose of binding together seemingly disparate events into textured wholes. In short, De Palma had grown up, and rather than seeming to be neutered by his full emergence as a mainstream filmmaker, he revelled in it, even if mainstream audiences and critics hardly always knew what to do with him.

The Fury was adapted from his own novel by John Farris, but it became in every sense a De Palma film, a coherent development of themes in Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise and Carrie that represents a dazzling dance of form and function that builds towards a crescendo that some critics have rightly likened to a cinematic orgasm. It’s also one of De Palma’s most oddly unappreciated movies from his career-defining run of amplified cinema made between the mid ’70s and mid ’80s. What’s specifically remarkable about The Fury is the way, as with Carrie, he turns pulpy material into pure and personal cinema invested with a sense of emotion far beyond the sources. De Palma invested Carrie with a romanticism that was spiritually little like Stephen King’s work in which Carrie herself was as noxious a scion as her persecutors. Like Carrie, too, The Fury revolves around psychokinetic powers in adolescents, redolent of all the supercharged passions of youth, but it offers two young psychics rather than one, whose eventual meeting, fusion, and reproduction are the logical narrative and biological pay-off, but one which is complicated in an impudently clever fashion.

Whereas Gillian Bellaver, played by Amy Irving (thus suggesting her character in Carrie) has inherited the gift/curse of psychic ability and has to face similar social ostracism once her peculiarity emerges in the mercilessly bitchy realm of high school, her male counterpart Robin (Andrew Stevens) is transformed into a pampered psychopath by dint of his extraordinary abilities. De Palma’s usual, sneaky political overtones enter right at the start as a terrorist attack on an Israeli seaside town proves to have been stage-managed by repellent American government agent Childress (John Cassavettes), who runs an organisation known as PSI, which collects and develops psychic talent as the next generation of game-changing weaponry. He betrays his friend Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) and claims his son Robin, whose gifts he wants untrammelled use of. Robin thinks Peter is killed when he tries to escape in a Zodiac and machine gun bullets causes the engine to explode. Robin is bustled away, but Peter crawls out of the ocean and sees Childress bossing about the killers; snatching up the gun of one slain attacker, Peter tries to shoot Childress, only succeeding in wounding him in the arm before fleeing and going underground. Two years later, Peter is in Chicago, close to where Childress is operating. He has hired greasy local psychic Raymond Dunwoodie (William Finley) to find Robin, a move Childress has anticipated.

Dunwoodie contacts Peter when he notices Gillian on a Lake Michigan beach, recognising her as a superior talent who could find Robin more easily. But Childress closes the net on Peter. Peter’s escape cues a lengthy, elaborate, funny sequence in which he dives out of a hotel window in just his underwear, and holes up in the apartment of a pair of loudmouths (Gordon Jump and Jane Lambert) who, in the design of the story, stand in for the most absurd components of Middle America, and a crotchety but sympathetic grandmother (Eleanor Merriam) who’s all too pleased when Peter’s arrival with a gun places her irritating daughter and son-in-law in her command. Peter then kidnaps two off-duty policemen (Dennis Franz and Michael O’Dwyer) and makes them drive him away from the goons on his tail, finally fooling one team of agents to gun down another and then crash themselves. Peter then contacts his new girlfriend, Hester (Carrie Snodgress), who works at an institute devoted to psychic research, a place through which many powerful young talents pass. Peter first met with her in the hope Robin may have been placed at the institute at some point, a well-founded assumption, as the institute’s director Dr. McKeever (Charles Durning) is, in spite of his misgivings, essentially a talent scout for Childress. When Gillian causes one of her obnoxious school friends (Hilary Thompson) to bleed spontaneously during a cafeteria argument, she decides to take refuge at the institute, accidentally putting herself in Childress’ hands, but also soon picking up traces of Robin’s presence and current whereabouts.

De Palma’s mature style always pulsates with a deeply corporeal sensibility in films that often become a tötentanz of blood, sex, and carnal excess, innately infused with an eroticised quality. That quality is apparent in this film’s very structuring, down to its offhand jokes, like building scenes that tweak casual sex gags into moments of narrative consequence—for example, Dunwoodie’s girl-watching, which creeps out Gillian and her friend, proving to be a different and even more invasive kind of cruising, or Hester receiving what seems to be an obscene call from a heavy breather who turns out to be Peter, freezing cold after his dip in the lake. De Palma’s feel for eruptions of violence that transfigure flesh and spirit is the key for all the narrative’s pivotal moments, as when Gillian accidentally grasps McKeever’s scarred hand, and has a psychic vision of Robin’s near-fatal attempt to escape the institute, with De Palma achieving one of the keenest moments of voyeuristic switchback by back-projecting Gillian in front of the action she’s “seeing.”

Later, Gillian hooks directly into Robin’s mind as he’s experiencing one of the experimental procedures Childress and his research team are inflicting on him, becoming the subject herself, a prone participant in an act of forced viewing of what he thinks was his father’s death: it’s as elaborately cruel as Swan’s videotaping of Winslow Leach in Phantom. Both moments are sparked by Gillian touching someone, and she causes the spontaneous bleeding that finally proves near-fatal for Dr. Ellen Lindstrom (Carol Rossen), McKeever’s number two and lover, who collapses in a bloody mess when Gillian finally returns from her trance. Gillian offers a similar take on the Typhoid Mary character to that of Rogue from the X-Men movies in that, as her gift becomes more pronounced, she becomes increasingly dangerous and unable to make simple human contact. Childress offers her the promise of control of her gifts, but, like the promise to polish Winslow Leach’s gifts, it’s a Faustian bargain of the worst kind, because Childress’ real programme is to turn his psychics not into warriors, which implies a personal sovereignty even in battle and bloodshed, but into weapons, malleable and directed.

De Palma, in his way, helped usher in the era of modern blockbuster filmmaking, defined by a string of elaborate wind-ups with punchy pay-offs, and yet his works finally end up at odds with that format. The Fury was often fiercely criticised when it was released, but like some other signal works of the Movie Brats, like Star Wars (1977)—much less adult than De Palma’s works, but in some ways just as sophisticated in relying on an audience to put together the drama in instinctive, visually associative fashion rather than via literary ways—it represents an evolution in the form that finally threw away the stage roots of the mainstream cinema model. De Palma’s overt worship of the likes of Hitchcock, Lean, and Leone is apparent in the way he constructs sequences in his mature films like symphonic movements, serving their own self-contained sense of grammar as much as an overall narrative.

Whilst De Palma is often thought of as a maven of raw cinematic values and not a dramatist, that reputation often ignores his ear for dialogue and touch with actors. Having stoked Oscar-nominated performances from Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie in Carrie—a miracle for a horror movie in the ’70s—here he gives Douglas one of his best roles of the decade and gets great stuff from the rest of the cast. Irving, a fascinating starlet with a hint of the leonine to her glam, is terrific as Gillian, the film’s pivotal figure as a girl who grows from object of ogling to empowered engine of wrath. De Palma is also keen to the offbeat magnificence of Snodgress, Oscar-nominated herself several years earlier for Diary of a Mad Housewife (1970) but little used afterwards, and Durning, who gets a marvellous mid-movie scene where, hurt and squirming under the weight of evil forces, he fends off Ellen’s solicitous invitations in wanting to remain alone and get drunk. It’s the sort of moment that contributes immeasurably to the texture of the film, and reveals an empathy for middle-aged compromise relatively rare in De Palma’s work, even if it doesn’t actually serve the story one iota.

De Palma constantly offers technically demanding shots, with the aid of cinematographer Richard H. Kline, that bind together multiple actions in single frames, and the editing by Paul Hirsch is something close to genius, in moments as seemingly minor as the test for psychic power Ellen and Hester hold at Gillian’s high school, her overpowering talent revealed as she sends an electric train run by mental power at a rocketing rate around a table, zipping past a chart, the clauses of which, the graduating levels of psychic power, are counted off one by one as Gillian’s power becomes clearer and clearer. Another is the shot towards the end where Gillian’s hand, trembling with new-found authority, fills the screen, Childress, with his withered hand redolent of secret impotence no matter how powerful he acts, in the background vibrating as vengeful energy is unleashed on him. The Fury is a tale of colliding and binding forces. The concurrent plotlines of Peter and Gillian are distinct, if destined to coincide, in their personal issues, ages, genders, sense of the world, and even rhythms of storytelling. Peter is already aware of the trap Gillian is walking into unawares, and the film’s deceptively action-thriller-toned first act segues into a quieter, sinister build-up as Gillian’s tale comes to the fore.

Hers is one of apparent homecoming, settling in at the institute where there’s an atmosphere of cheery fellowship and prodigious possibility: The Fury, in that sense, anticipates not only the X-Men films, but also the basic motif of the Harry Potter series, exploiting that atmosphere, and the attendant sense of longing that the exceptional and the outcast share in looking for good fellowship. But whereas in those films, the institutions are positive and offer refuge from harsh realities, as ever in De Palma here the institution is corrupt, the benign care a façade, albeit one that makes McKeever, Ellen, and Hester uneasy in sustaining. McKeever makes a weak attempt at rebelling against Childress by lying about Gillian’s talents, but Childress doesn’t have to share his charges psychic talents to spot he’s being bullshitted. De Palma builds his web of enmeshed parallels not only though crucial moments where Gillian accesses Robin’s mind and has flash visions of the future, but also in a teasing moment when Hester tells Gillian about her boyfriend, the younger woman unaware that she’s talking about the father of the boy she’s become psychically tethered to, describing him as a great dancer who’s only frustratingly difficult to get hold of.

When the two plot strands do finally meet, it comes in one of De Palma’s most ebulliently staged set pieces, as, at Peter’s insistence, Hester plans an escape for Gillian before Childress’s goons can take her out of the institute, going through an elaborately comic routine to arrange the crucial moment when Gillian can take off out the back door; she and Hester fly in a customary De Palma use of agonising slow motion where chains of cause and effect are identified in their components before they crash together and create chaos. John Williams’ largely Herrmann-esque score here offers for a few brief moments that would sound equally at home in E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) in conveying momentary, joyous liberation. Liberation, however, turns on a dime to desperation, as Hester accidentally knocks over an agent rushing to catch them, one moment of happenstance that gives them a clear run, and the pair converges on the taxi in which Peter waits, aiming a pistol at the pursuing car filled with more agents. But his excellent aim proves his undoing, for when he takes out the driver, the car swerves and strikes Hester, sending her crashing through a parked car’s window, a bloodied, instantly fatal demise.

Another agent charges out of the neighbouring park and grasps Gillian: Peter, horrified at the sight of Hester in and act he is unwittingly caused (another constantly recurring De Palma touch), turns and shoots down the agent with punitive fury; Gillian regards the gun-wielding stranger who is her “saviour” with bewildered terror. It’s not the most expansive of De Palma’s set pieces, but it is still one of his most ruthless and lucidly composed, not only in the way he physically binds actions together and pursues them with dark irony, but for its thematic intelligence in illustrating the notion that violent resistance always claims innocent lives no matter how good the cause. Like many of De Palma’s high career films, The Fury becomes a metaphorical tale of resistance to a corrupt order, with outsider heroes flailing in their attempts to penetrate the figurative (and sometimes literal) castles of their persecutors, who usually affect parental or romantic concern: such is true of Sisters, Phantom, Carrie, and Dressed to Kill (1980), Blow Out (1982), The Untouchables (1987), and Mission: Impossible (1996). Scarface (1983) and Femme Fatale (2002) would in differing fashions see the figures converge in epics of interior character conflict.

Cassavettes’ marvellously malevolent Childress is a perverter and corrupter in the guise of friend and guide; like Sisters’ villainous psychiatrist and Phantom’s Swan, his plots begin to give way under the strain of trying to maintain a façade, but tearing that façade down properly usually comes at a punishing cost. The Fury also works as another parable of how a society rewards and destroys talent, like Phantom, as Robin can easily be construed as simply an inflated version of any heroic young jock. He is rewarded by being treated “like a prince”, to the extent of being basically given his attractive supervising doctor, Susan Charles (Fiona Lewis), as concubine, even as his aggressive instincts are tweaked and his rage unleashed by the regimen Childress has prescribed, to make the best of his abilities. The chief target of his new licence is, then, his lover, whom he finally kills in the most hideous fashion. What is created is a monster in control of his powers but not his mind or emotions, a perfect end product of Childress’ philosophy. Even here, there’s a dark, erotic joke at work, as Robin’s fulminating frustration is based in how his level of psychic control is not matched by physical control, still messy in a young man’s fashion and unable to sexually please Susan.

The inevitable disintegration is signalled when Susan coaxes Childress into letting her take Robin out to a fun fair in a brief break from experiments, unaware that Robin has already become too crazed and immoral: seeing a group of Arab men accompanying a prince, reminding him of the (fake) killers on the beach, he sends the prince’s Ferris wheel spinning out of control, car flying off through the air and crashing through a window upon his retinue. Robin repeats the trick later when he tortures Susan to death, spinning her around until her blood is painting the walls of their ritzy apartment in the PSI’s mansion headquarters. And, of course, in Robin himself and Childress’ operation, the centre cannot hold. Thus, when Peter and Gillian finally reach the PSI mansion, Gillian’s presence enrages Robin, who sees her as someone brought in to replace him. He kills Susan and two of Childress’s goons, and when Childress finally sends Peter to calm him down, Robin instead causes his own death, driving himself and his father out through a window to dangle from a high parapet. His personality disintegrates at precisely the moment he becomes a virtual god, and he tries to hurt his father rather than save himsef., and Peter hurls himself over the same high parapet in grief. It’s the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy, but Childress doesn’t have any time for that: waving his hands disgustedly (“Go on, get ‘em outta my sight!”), he instead sets about seducing Gillian as the next candidate.

Many of De Palma’s heroes finally fail in their attempts to undo evil and are left traumatised, if not dead, but Gillian evolves into one of his most triumphant, if finally frightening, heroes. Having absorbed from Robin at the point of death his honed gifts, now blended with her still-present moral awareness, she turns on Childress in the most memorable and effective of revolts, first blinding him, his gore-dripping eyes recalling Roger Corman’s X: The Man the X-Ray Eyes (1963), and then giving him exactly what he wants, proof of an awesome new power, but not in the manner he intended. Reminiscent of the finale of Zabriskie Point (1970)—and, of course, De Palma would soon make a more overt tribute to Antonioni with Blow Out—Gillian blows Childress to pieces in a moment De Palma offers in distended instant replay, an orgasmic celebration of fury unleashed on the false father. It’s one of the great comeuppances in movie history, and not for the first or last time, De Palma proved that he was a bastard, but a magnificent kind of bastard.