Screen Picks

Brian De Palma's Murder a la Mod and Warren Beatty's Reds

by Sam Adams

Murder a la Mod ($17.99 DVD) Based on the title and the year of its release (1968), you'd expect Murder a la Mod to be a brisk exploitation romp: bare breasts, flashing lights, perhaps a brief appearance by the Strawberry Alarm Clock. But that wasn't Brian De Palma's style, even in his rarely seen first feature. The movie opens with a low-angle shot of women jumping into the air in front of a photographer's backdrop, breaking up the rhythm of their rise and fall with brisk, stuttering cuts. De Palma then jumps to a shot of one model with her throat slit, making the analogy between one kind of cut and another explicit.

Mixing Peeping Tom and Blow-Up with a soupcon of Luc Moullet-style anarchy, Murder a la Mod kills time with weird digressions, like a woman's prickly conversation with an officious bank clerk, then leaps forward in undercranked spasms. A photographer's model is introduced, forgotten, then fatally stabbed with an ice pick, although not before being covered in ketchup. De Palma rewinds and replays the action from multiple points of view, although further "explanations" only amplify the absurdity, which eventually coalesces around a manic and possibly murderous stagehand played by Phantom of the Paradise's William Finley.

Although it clearly prefigures the false-bottom puzzle boxes of De Palmas to come, Murder a la Mod is exhausting and unrefined, a gas in stretches but a bummer on the whole. Still, there's one sequence you can't tear your eyes away from. Following the model's date with a straight razor and before the plot gets cooking, De Palma interpolates a series of screen tests for the central role, which generally come down to an off-camera De Palma urging buxom cuties to take off their tops. The girls, however, don't go quietly; one looks positively sick at the thought of disrobing, while another gripes about the low pay, her resistance turning to resignation as the director gets his way. It's not clear if the auditions are real or staged, and particularly if De Palma's crass cajoling is a put-on or the real McCoy. (One doubts these girls could act so convincingly if they were in on the gag, but you never know.) But it's worth noting that the sequence provides Murder with its only flash of the nudity that was all but essential for "art" films of the time, and that it's viewed through a viewfinder's crosshairs. Worth noting, too, that De Palma plays essentially the same role in The Black Dahlia, and that he was more convincing as an asshole director when he had less experience.

Reds ($19.99 DVD) Instead of a text crawl or a turning page, Warren Beatty opens Reds with a meditation on the elusiveness of memory. The "witnesses" whose testimony frames his biopic romance on the lives of John Reed (Beatty) and Louise Bryant (Diane Keaton) do their best to recall long-past events, but Beatty puts their fumbles and missteps up front — not to humiliate them, but to illustrate how mercurial history can be.

The rest of Reds, however, is full of plummy certainties, too swollen with self-importance to acknowledge the contradictory forces at play. Spanning the birth of American bohemianism and the Russian Revolution, which Reed chronicled in Ten Days That Shook the World, Reds has sweep but not heft, more successful at dramatizing the turbulent relationship of its star-crossed leads than the birth and death of a proletarian revolt. In the movie's climactic scene, Reed chides his Soviet comrades for stamping out individuality in the name of stability, a speech that doubles as Beatty's defense for the historical romance.

Paramount's DVD, held in abeyance for the film's 25th, tacks on an hour's worth of featurettes, though not nearly as much "witness" footage as one might have hoped. Keaton sits out the reminiscences, but Beatty lets slip a few pearls despite his mixed feelings about the medium, and Jack Nicholson is positively expansive on his turn as Eugene O'Neill.

(sam@citypaper.net)