Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Suspense/ Horror/ Comedy/ Science Fiction
Director: Brian De Palma
Year: 1978
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA ESSENTIAL MOVIE
I have to admit, I was taken aback at how well The Fury plays, 30 years after it was first released. Brian De Palma’s visuals are as beautiful as ever. For example, take the scene in which Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving), a young girl with psychic powers, instinctively grasps the hand of Dr. McKeever (Charles Durning) when she slips on the stairs. She has a vision, which plays out in front of her, as if she had momentarily stepped out of time. The effect is stunningly poetic, even now.
Another aspect of The Fury, which I fully expected to date badly, has also held up very well, and that’s the humor. The Fury is a full-throated melodrama, but it finds time for comic interludes. That’s a very tricky tonal balance to pull off, but DePalma aces it. Two comic highlights: some karmic payback for Arabs visiting the Windy City (when The Fury was made, the Arab Oil Embargo was still fresh in the public’s mind); and a benign home invasion by Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas), who immediately hits it off with the elderly Mother Nuckells (Eleanor Merriam).
There’s surprisingly little action in The Fury. DePalma usually substitutes suspense and dread, which is a rather refreshing change of pace considering the attention deficit filmmaking all too common these days.
As our story starts out, Peter Sandza (Kirk Douglas) is about to send his telekinetic teenage son Robin (Andrew Stevens) to a Chicago school for paranormal teens, with his longtime intelligence agency comrade Ben Childress (John Cassavetes) keeping an eye out for Robin’s welfare. But Childress has different plans, like developing Robin into a military weapon.
Once Sandza realizes what Childress is up to, he comes looking for Robin, recruiting another psychic teen, Gillian Bellaver (Amy Irving) in the search.
The teens, played by Andrew Stevens and Amy Irving, are just adequate, but the older actors, like Charles Durning and Kirk Douglas, are terrific. Best of all is John Cassavetes, who plays the ruthless Ben Childress with a smirk as black and bitter as burnt coffee.
I’ve got to give some kudos to a terrific score by John Williams, one of his last great ones after Star Wars. It’s subtle and insinuating, emotional and rousing, just where it needs to be, with one exception, which I’ll get to in a minute.
Brian De Palma makes all sorts of daring choices in The Fury, and rarely steps wrong. At one point, a car plunges off a high place, crashes and burns, but De Palma doesn’t follow the car. Instead, he stays on the characters on the road above. Amazingly, the choice works. There’s only two spots where his judgment is a little off, really. In one, he allows his latent misogynism to peek out. In the other, he allows the explosive climax of the film to last about 4 seconds too long. You’ll know what I mean when you see it — it’s overkill. The same can be said for John Williams’ score behind the images involved in the climax. De Palma films the scene like the end of one of Beethoven’s symphonies — it just refuses to end.
Aside from overplaying the climax, which costs the movie 1/2 star in my review, The Fury is pretty much a blast from start to finish.
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