24. “The Wedding Party” (1969)
Independently produced, shot in 1963 and released six years later, it’s safe to say DePalma would rather have this film seen as a student movie instead of what is technically his feature debut (though that’s arguable, too: its credits list his drama teacher and renowned stage director Wilford Leach and the film’s producer Cynthia Munroe as co-directors, but it’s said Leach worked with actors and Munroe simply paid for it). Starring Robert De Niro (improperly listed as ”Denero”), Jill Clayburgh (both of whom he is credited with “discovering”) and Charles Pfluger, “The Wedding Party” is a dark farce set in Long Island, New York with a simple premise: a soon-to-be-groom interacts with his fiancée’s family and the members of his wedding party two days before he’s supposed to be married. This mostly amounts to the groom (Pfluger) conversing with his friends (one of which is De Niro) about various topical ‘60s issues such as the sexual revolution, Vietnam and black power, all while also discussing bachelorhood and impending marriage. High on enthusiasm, but low on focus, laughs or insight “The Wedding Party” is often improvised (it shows) and like all of his early work, has a goofy sheen to it. Notable for its use of jump cuts (De Palma was in love with the energy of the French New Wave at the time) and silent film techniques (title cards, sped up running around a la Keystone Kops), the director seems to spit techniques at the screen (still photography, voice-over) without much thought or arrangement. And often, said techniques feel like choices of necessity, circumstance or budget rather than creative ones. While an interesting curio, especially for De Niro and De Palma completists, “The Wedding Party” is more of an unpolished experiment in filmmaking rather than a proper De Palma film, and should be viewed as such.
23. “Dionysus In ’69” (1970)
An ultra-obscure sidebar to De Palma’s main career, and almost entirely unavailable for years (it’s now on YouTube, if you’re curious), “Dionysus In ’69” is a sort of documentary focusing on The Performance Group, an experimental New York City theater troupe that would later be known as The Wooster Group, as they perform the titular play, an adaptation of the ancient Greek theatrical piece “The Bacchae.” Shot, inventively, entirely in split-screen, and credited to De Palma and his cinematographers Robert Fiore and Bruce Rubin, it’s the director at his most experimental: showing a piece of theater closer to performance art than to traditional stage work, and doing so in a style that is hardly conventional either. It is not, it should be said, a film that has much appeal for anyone but serious De Palma heads: it’s almost punishingly boring for anyone but them or theater studies majors. But the obsessives will find much to enjoy here, both in the director’s burgeoning technique (it doesn’t feel like a coincidence that within a few years, he would switch gears entirely into thrillers), and in the sexual nature of the material. It’s a footnote, ultimately (and that’s why this capsule is relatively brief), but one that the superfans will find valuable at least.
22. “Murder A La Mod” (1968)
As far as debut features go, it’s hard to find one that’s more evocative of the filmmaker’s overarching career trajectory than “Murder a La Mod.” Released in one theater in New York City in 1968, the film was quickly forgotten and remained, for a while, one of the hidden corners of De Palma’s past. You can already feel the effects Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” was having on the director (as well as Michael Powell‘s “Peeping Tom” and, of course, Hitchcock), in this tale of murder set amongst the blurred territory between art and pornography. A number of later, better De Palma movies can claim their origin here too, along with his chief thematic obsessions: voyeurism and sexual violence. In fact, the movie is relatively entertaining, even though, at 80 minutes, it feels more like an art school thesis project rather than a bona fide feature film (and that theme song, written and sung by future “Phantom of the Paradise” icon William Finley, is kind of a hoot). The movie’s black-and-white aesthetic adds to its generally homemade quality, poised somewhere between experimentalism (already he was toying with jump cuts and POV shots) and amateurism (some scenes are just cut oddly, and it’s not for dramatic or artistic effect). The humor that would define De Palma’s best films is in short supply here, although some of the sequences are unintentionally hilarious. It’s like De Palma was unsure whether or not humor and horror could co-mingle, so he wanted to make sure the comedies he was making at the time were ultra wacky and things like “Murder a La Mod” were as told as straight-facedly as possible. Watching “Murder a La Mod” now, as part of the supplemental spread on the deluxe Criterion edition of “Blow Out,” is like uncovering a De Palma time capsule that predicts the future of his career. If only the movie was better.