Reevaluating the provocative and stylish — but often overlooked — Brian De Palma

Brian De Palma with John Travolta and Nancy Allen in 1981, promoting the De Palma-directed “Blow Out.”

Brian De Palma is having a moment. At last.

The Newark-born director hasn’t made a film since the barely seen, direct-to-video misfire “Domino,” in 2019. (Wikipedia’s section on his professional history concludes, brutally, “1998-present: Career slump.”) Meanwhile his contemporaries — Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese — not only continue to debut new work, but are hailed as living legends.

The director of classics like “Carrie,” “Dressed to Kill,” “The Untouchables” and “Scarface”? Not so much.

Yet De Palma — who turns 84 on Sept. 11 — has been the subject of a slowly growing, respectful reappreciation.

In 2015, two young directors — Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow — saluted him in their documentary “De Palma.” This May, film critic Glenn Kenny devoted an entire book, “The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface,” to one film. And author Laurent Bouzereau focuses on the director’s ’70s and early ’80s work in “The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens,” published today.

So why has De Palma been so frequently overlooked?

The cover of Laurent Bouzereau’s book, “The De Palma Decade: Redefining Cinema with Doubles, Voyeurs, and Psychic Teens.”

“He made very provocative movies,” says Bouzereau. “The reviews would always call him a Hitchcock copycat. Maybe that perception stayed. When I was growing up in France and discovered him in the ’70s and became literally obsessed, he was kind of a pariah already.”

Acceptance seems to have come only gradually.

“I was always a fan, but I thought I understood his shortcomings as a creative and a craftsman,” Kenny says. “Now, though, a lot of the things that I thought were flaws in ‘Dressed to Kill’ and ‘Body Double’ and ‘Blow Out’ … I don’t see them that way anymore. I see more clearly what he was doing, and what he was trying to do.”

Perhaps the difficulty some people had with appreciating De Palma is that his own interests have always been so varied, so mercurial — and so personal.

A self-described science fair nerd, De Palma entered Columbia University as a physics major. But he had already fallen in love with moviemaking as a teen, carrying around a camera, mostly (foreshadowing!) to spy on his adulterous father. He then got a master’s degree in drama at Sarah Lawrence University, where, in 1963, he cowrote and codirected his first movie, “The Wedding Party,” a farce starring unknowns Jill Clayburgh and Robert De Niro (so unknown, his name was spelled “DeNero” in the credits).

After graduation, De Palma’s indie pictures would become far more provocative. “Murder a la Mod.” “Dionysus in ’69.” “Greetings.” “Hi, Mom!” Inspired by radical politics and off-Broadway theater (and perhaps his own family disfunction), they reveled in voyeurism and violence. Interviewed at the time, the brash auteur announced his goal was to become “the American Godard.”

The cover of Glenn Kenny’s book, “The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface.”

But De Palma’s work remained largely underground, and underseen. And it nagged at him.

“He said, ‘OK, I made “Greetings” and “Hi, Mom!” and these movies saying we needed to blow everything up and change society, and nobody cared,’ ” Kenny recounts. “And he told me, you know, as a working director, your professional ego is based a lot on doing projects that are self-generated, that speak to your passions. But also you need to exercise your craft.”

And after a disastrous attempt to bring his passions to a Hollywood film — the Tommy Smothers comedy “Get to Know Your Rabbit,” so reviled by star and studio it sat unreleased for years — De Palma realized that if he was going to continue exercising his craft, he needed a course correction.

Goodbye, Godard. Hello, Hitch.

Starting in 1972 with “Sisters” and continuing for another dozen years, De Palma focused almost exclusively on murder mysteries and horror films — “Phantom of the Paradise,” “Carrie,” “The Fury,” “Obsession,” “Dressed to Kill,” “Blow Out,” “Body Double.” The first two features, “Sisters” and “Phantom of the Paradise,” were loaded — sometimes overloaded — with the director’s smirky sense of satire. But the rest were more straightforward, and all were shockingly stylish, with split-screens and swirling cameras.

“Once De Palma locked into the genre of thrillers and horror, he really became the master of the macabre,” Bouzereau says. “And I think it was very much a passing of the baton. De Palma inherited all this visual grammar from Hitchcock, but then he made it his own.”

But was it an inheritance or an embezzlement? That has always been the debate about De Palma’s horror films and slasher mysteries. Is it an affectionate nod to Hitchcock when a few notes from “Psycho” show up in the score to “Carrie,” or a shameless theft? Is it a knowing homage when “Body Double” or “Obsession” uses plot twists from “Rear Window” or “Vertigo,” or just a lack of imagination?

There is no single, correct answer.

Sissy Spacek in Brian De Palma’s “Carrie.”

But it is true that De Palma’s works, like Hitchcock’s, are regularly underestimated because he is working in an often-disrespected genre. And it should be pointed out that if De Palma was content to merely turn out photocopied knockoffs, he wouldn’t break so dramatically with his chief inspiration’s most singular trait.

After all, Hitchcock was all about the unrelenting, godlike power of montage — building a scene, shot by shot, to completely control the sequence and the audience’s reaction. De Palma, however, adores the visual conversation of split-screens — multiple images appearing simultaneously, constantly forcing the audience to choose a point of view.

It’s not just a different look. It’s a completely different aesthetic philosophy.

De Palma was also more willing than Hitchcock to take on different genres. After making “Dressed to Kill” and “Blow Out” back-to-back, De Palma’s next film was 1983’s modern gangster epic “Scarface.” In some ways, it was a smart, commercial move — Universal needed a director for a movie Al Pacino wanted to make, and De Palma needed a job after the commercial disaster of “Blow Out.”

But the old provocateur was still eager to provoke.

“Nowadays you see crass, endlessly sadistic movies that go out of their way to create these ‘I dare you to watch’ moments, and it’s distressing and depressing,” Kenny says. “But in 1983, in ‘Scarface,’ when they’re in that bathroom and someone gets out a chainsaw, it was kind of exhilarating … A lot of people couldn’t see past that violence. A lot of people were appalled. But it’s part of the relentless, headlong, operatic quality that defines the film, and Pacino’s performance. The movie’s a compelling watch, even if it’s a sometimes-sour watch.”

Kevin Costner in Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables.”

In some ways, “Scarface” seemed liberating for De Palma, artistically. Since then, his work has been far more diverse, encompassing crime movies (“The Untouchables,” “Carlito’s Way”), thrillers (“Raising Cain,” “Femme Fatale”), sci-fi (“Mission to Mars”), social dramas (“The Bonfire of the Vanities”), and angry exposés of military violence (“Casualties of War,” “Redacted”). He even oversaw the first installment of a major movie franchise, “Mission: Impossible.”

But very few of those films were financially successful and one, “Bonfire,” was a legendary disaster. And while most of his contemporaries — Scorsese, Coppola, Spielberg and, of course, George Lucas — went on to build producing careers, and even their own companies, De Palma remained an outsider. (He has not had a studio release since “The Black Dahlia,” in 2006.)

“Judging by the critical response to my films,” De Palma told Bouzereau, “I’ve always either been ahead of my time or hopelessly behind it. Few were embraced when they came out … and in recent years, it’s gotten even worse.”

Even this flurry of recent attention may not fully rescue his reputation.

“I talk to young people who want to become filmmakers and it’s really scary how little many of them know,” Bouzereau says. “You mention De Palma, Lumet, Ashby … they don’t know them. Bogdanovich? ‘Isn’t he that actor who was on “The Sopranos”?’ ”

But the films remain. The art remains.

And every time you jump at Carrie’s hand rising from the grave, or grow giddy with the revolving camera in “Body Double,” or even just grin a little at seeing a shot from “Battleship Potemkin” cockily copied for “The Untouchables” … you know that De Palma’s achievements live on as well.