2 Films | Monday, October 10th
It isn’t unusual for a director to cite Alfred Hitchcock as one of their biggest influences, but few filmmakers have taken their admiration to heights of Brian De Palma, whose career has been riddled with direct nods to Hitchcock’s body of work.
The connections can be drawn throughout De Palma’s filmography, whether you’re taking the line from Psycho (1960) to Dressed to Kill (1980), or even Rear Window (1954) to Body Double (1984). Again and again, De Palma has returned to the Master of Suspense to help craft his own thrillers, with themes of intense fascination often recurring in his work.
Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) is not mentioned as often as his other films like North by Northwest (1959) or The Birds (1963), but it remains one of the most interesting entries into his canon. Throughout the 1940s, the director experimented with long takes, starting with Rebecca (1940), which includes several sequences that hold shots for two or three minutes. He’d return to the long take a number of times in the decade to come, perhaps most significantly in an extended, sensual telephone scene with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946). The director’s propensity for the long take, in these earlier examples, was always tempered with the fast-cutting montage style the director is known for popularizing. Later in Notorious, quick shots help to build the suspense as Grant and Bergman search a wine cellar.
Rope, though, was the culmination of Hitchcock’s interest in the long take. The film consists of just ten shots, the longest of which lasts over ten minutes. There appears to be even less shots in the finished film, with the camera maneuvering behind characters’ backs to mask the cuts. The film takes place in real time, and the use of extended takes lends to a tense atmosphere.
In the movie, John Dall and Farley Granger play murderers. The film actually starts with the killing itself, which they purport to be the “perfect murder.” They hide the body in a large chest and have a group of friends over for dinner, including an old prep school chum portrayed by James Stewart. As the murderous pair begins to act increasingly more suspicious throughout the evening, particularly the nervous Granger, Stewart begins to suspect something is up.
Based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, the inspiration for the story came from the real-life crime of Richard Albert Loeb and Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr., who murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks. They said their crime was to prove that, with their superior intellect, they could pull off “the perfect murder.”
In the play, the fictional characters are shown as having a homosexual relationship. The movie could not explicitly do this due to the Production Code, but subtle hints tip off the nature of the pair’s connection. Significantly, Granger and Arthur Laurents, who adapted the screenplay, were gay. While he never officially came out, historians believe that Dall, too, was gay.
Obsession, in this case with committing the perfect murder, is prevalent in Rope, and some 27 years later De Palma would make a movie with that literal title, perhaps the director’s most direct homage to Hitchcock.
Obsession (1976) concerns a husband and father, played by Cliff Robertson, whose wife and daughter are kidnapped and later die in a tragic incident for which Robertson blames himself. Sixteen years later, Robertson meets a woman who appears to be a double for his late wife, and he becomes obsessed with molding her in his wife’s image and marrying her. But then she, too, is abducted, leading to a shocking final act full of twists and turns.
The most direct comparison for Obsession is Vertigo (1958), another film that deals with lookalikes. In that movie James Stewart loses Kim Novak, only to find another woman who looks exactly like her, who he then transforms into the woman he lost. In both Obsessionand Vertigo, all is not as it seems.
De Palma’s own obsession with Hitchcock’s work extended beyond narrative themes, and he hired the Master’s most-frequent composer, Bernard Herrmann, to pen the musical score for the film. Herrmann’s work with Hitchcock had yielded some of the most popular scores in movie history, including Vertigo, and the composer believed that Obsession was the best work of his career.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences agreed, honoring Herrmann with an Oscar nomination. This was one of his five nominations, and one of two that the composer received posthumously. He died suddenly at age 64 at the end of 1975, just after completing his also-Oscar nominated score for Taxi Driver (1976), which was his last completed film. Herrmann had won an Academy Award for his work in 1941’s The Devil and Daniel Webster (aka All That Money Can Buy, 1941). His first credit had been none other than the seminal classic Citizen Kane (1941). In 2005, the American Film Institute named its 25 greatest film scores, ranking Herrmann’s work for Psycho #4 and Vertigo #12.
Obsession was not a smooth production, with its writer Paul Schrader and De Palma coming to blows over the deletion of the film’s third act, which extended the story ten years into the future. De Palma and Herrmann felt this part didn’t work, Schrader disagreed. When De Palma cut the section, Schrader largely disavowed the final product.
The movie would mark a turn in De Palma’s career, becoming a surprise box office hit and his first mainstream breakout. Soon after he would direct the popular Carrie (1976) and officially establish himself as a kind of 1970s version of Hitchcock, who ironically would make his last film, Family Plot (1976), right around this time.
As De Palma’s career continued, his movies took less direct notes from Hitchcock, though one could draw parallels between his Mission: Impossible (1996) and Hitchcock’s thrillers North by Northwest and The 39 Steps (1935), but no director has made more obvious winks to another filmmaker’s career in his work. Obsession is perhaps De Palma’s most earnest love letter to his mentor.
In a review for De Palma’s Femme Fatale in 2002, Roger Ebert wrote, “It’s not just the [De Palma] sometimes works in the style of Hitchcock, but that he has the nerve to.”
