Body Double

Film buffs and aficionados of B-grade fare will enjoy Brian DePalma’s no-holds-barred homage to Alfred Hitchcock and low budget studio film-making.  Less-informed audiences will probably wish that they had chosen to watch a good movie.  

Craig Wasson, an actor you probably won’t recognize, plays an unemployed L A actor named Jake who Rear Window-like watches a scantily-clad woman, Gloria (Deborah Shelton), cavort in her house across the way. He suspects that she may be in danger and begins to follow her. Sure enough, he sees her attacked and runs to save her but is too late. Then one night when watching a porn channel on cable TV he recognizes the woman’s same dance being performed by a porn actress (Melanie Griffith) and realizes that he’s been set up so sets about discovering by whom.

From the get-go with an opening shot of a crew making a schlocky vampire movie, De Palma makes it be known that the recurring theme here is going to be deception. He rubs our nose in it by following shots of trompe l’oeil scenery and back-projected traffic. Little happens in the first half of the film which is largely given over to Jake’s growing fixation with Gloria and which culminates in an over-the-top first pash between the two complete with a 360 degree pan and soap-opera-ish underscoring. 

In the second half of the film the action ramps up as Jake find himself involved in the world of pornographic film-making. De Palma jazzes things up with Frankie Goes To Hollywood performing their hit “Relax” whilst Melanie Griffith’s none-too-bright porn star is the best turn of its type only bettered by Mira Sorvino’s call-girl in Mighty Aphrodite (1995).  Finally, the film closes with an amusingly educational demonstration of the way that body doubles are used to deceive audiences.

One can’t enumerate all the directorial quotations and stylistic devices that De Palma employs with tongue-in-cheek glee in his niftily-plotted film.  Clearly he had a lot of fun with it and if you like B grade films, chances are that you will too.

 

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