Body Double *** (1984, Craig Wasson, Melanie Griffith, Gregg Henry) – Classic Movie Review 2931

Co-writer/producer/director Brian De Palma’s 1984 soft-core Alfred Hitchcock-style crime mystery suspense thriller focuses on a resting actor called Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), just dumped from a grotty horror movie, who then comes home to find his girlfriend with another man.

He is offered a Hollywood pad to stay in by absent co-performer Sam Bouchard (Gregg Henry), a fellow actor who needs a house sitter, and soon Jake is spying with a telescope on a strip-teasing porn star Gloria Revelle (Deborah Shelton), Rear Window-style. Naturally murder soon follows his obsession with her.

There is a lot of sex and violence, but only some style and mystery, and it pushes its obsessions uncomfortably far what with the voyeurism, the incestuous homages and the general seedy tackiness. Young Melanie Griffith (daughter of Hitchcock’s protégée Tippi Hedren) scores strongly as the porn star’s friend Holly Body, a grungy-looking porn-player body double for Shelton’s Gloria. Guy Boyd plays Detective Jim McLean and Dennis Franz is Rubin the director.

De Palma makes it sweaty-palm tense, obsessive and frenzied, but visually it looks very murky and dated in Stephen H Burum’s cinematography, while its Hitchcock antecedents Vertigo and Rear Window simply look better and better as time goes by. But it is intriguing and Pino Donaggio’s score is a definite asset.

Also in the cast are David Haskell, Rebecca Stanley, Al Israel, Douglas Warhit, B J Jones, Russ Marin, Lane Davies, Monte Marin, Barbara Crampton and Linda Shaw.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2931

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