Luchino Vicsonti: The surrealist director that inspired Brian De Palma
It’s been a long time since Brian De Palma was regarded as one of the industry’s best and brightest filmmakers, but at the peak of his powers, the director embarked on a run of form that was comparable to anything to have emerged in the last 50 years of cinema.
Little more than a decade after psychological thriller Obsession and seminal supernatural horror Carrie had released in 1976, De Palma would find critical and commercial success in a number of markedly different genres through controversial erotic thriller Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Scarface, Body Double, and The Untouchables to name just a small sampling of his top-tier output, while even earlier features such as Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise underwent reappraisal.
Unfortunately, the misses have drastically outweighed the hits ever since, with Carlito’s Way and Mission: Impossible the only two of his features since the turn of the 1990s that could genuinely be called runaway hits. His most recent movie, 2019’s crime thriller Domino, wasn’t even given a theatrical release to offer an indication of just how far his stock has gradually been plummeting.
At its apex, De Palma’s filmography was characterised by jarring violence, sexual provocation, voyeurism, and plenty of controversy. By extension, Luchino Visconti’s name appearing more than once in the list of guilty pleasure favourites listed to Film Comment shouldn’t come as a shock given the Italian icon’s own habit of raising eyebrows and causing the clutching of pearls.
Initially breaking through at the forefront of the neorealism movement, Visconti would ultimately pivot towards historical pieces dripping in decadence that would mercilessly skewer the societal elite. 1969’s The Damned was slapped with an X-rating by the Motion Picture Association of America and proved similarly infuriating to certification boards across the world, who were left aghast by its graphic depictions of and allusions to homosexuality, rape and incest, amongst other things.
Nonetheless, De Palma found it “unbelievable”, particularly as it related to the aforementioned taboos: “That scene where Helmut Berger sleeps with his mother – she completely destroys him, and he completely destroys her,” he said. “Totally perverse people. A totally corrosive family.” That’s putting it lightly, but it does offer a hint of where his own boundary-pushing sensibilities came from.
1973’s Ludwig was even whittled down without its director’s consent to be made more palatable mainstream audiences, with the four-hour runtime shortened to under three by the film’s distributors when Visconti was laid up by a stroke suffered during filming and left unable to protest.
At least four different versions exist, too, making it unclear which one De Palma deemed as “fabulous”. An opulent biopic of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, it appealed to De Palma as someone who has “always been interested in the characters who create their own reality, and when you have a lot of money you have Ludwig.”
Comparing him to Howard Hughes in the way that “your eccentricities can be constructed into anything you like and you get the most bizarre extensions of your madness” provided that access to a “tremendous amount of money” is at hand, the similarities between many of the director’s high-flying and hard-living characters – including Al Pacino’s Tony Montana and Robert De Niro’s Al Capone – are there for all to see.
