The Fury (1978)

 

The Fury

(1978)

 

Brian De Palma's immediate follow-up to “Carrie” (1976) it shared a theme, teenagers with destructive Telekinetic powers (and in this case, also Telepathy) and it also carries over some of “Carrie’s” talented cast and crew. Of the many notable things about the movie was that despite this, it was distinctly its own film.

 

While “Carrie” concerned High School hazing and Domestic Abuse, “The Fury” embraced the Paranoias of country reeling from the ever-worsening revelations of the criminality and blood-thirstiness of America’s Intelligence Agencies demonstrated by the Watergate Scandal and subsequent Church Committee. Though solidly within the SF/Horror genre it actually shared more with Espionage films like “Three Days of the Condor” (1975) than any other SF/Horror I can think of, including others that combined the themes of Political Conspiracy and PSI powers like “Scanners” (1981).

 

Though an inferior film to “Carrie” it is still a remarkable demonstration of De Palma story-telling prowess, a prowess he often doesn’t commit the time and patience to exploit. It has a largish cast with six central characters, so two less central players than “Carrie,” and they’re not nearly as substantively developed as those in the previous film. This is largely because a there’s a hell of a lot of plot mechanics to lay out and only 118-minute-running-time. But it’s buoyed by an excellent cast, a ferocious forward momentum, and De Palma’s ability to communicate complex motivation through demonstration and inference rather than more developmental and expository scenes. Also, as always, De Palma creates exceptional set pieces, and I’d also argue that this would be the last instance where his set-pieces served narrative instead of the other way around until he stepped away from the Horror/Thriller genres years later (after the disastrous “Body Double” (1984)).

 

The first scene introduces three of the central characters:

 

Kirk Douglas plays Peter Sandza, a retired Feld-Op from some unnamed Intelligence Agency. He’s vacationing in the Middle East with his son, Robin, and his best friend and former boss, Ben. He’s giving his son, who’s socially awkward and insecure but also gifted in some then-unspecified manner, fatherly advice -- he wants Robin to attend a Boarding School that Ben has set up.

 

This conversation is interrupted by a speed-boat attack by machine gun-toting Terrorists. In quick succession Peter displays remarkable tactical skills for an old man (Douglas was in his sixties at the time), Ben manages to get Robin out of the fray, Robin thinks he sees his father die. In the film’s first big twist, it turns out that the Terrorists are in Ben’s employ; the attack was a cover for the assassination of Peter, so Ben could more easily control his son. Robin thinks Ben rescued him, but in fact he’s kidnapped him.

 

But Peter is not dead, and he knows he’s been betrayed, and the rest of the film he’s running from Ben’s army of agents and running towards Ben to rescue his son. It’s damned hard for Peter to find a safe hiding place the closer he gets to Robin.

 

Andrew Stevens plays Robin Sandza, who has incredible, but undeveloped, PSI powers. It will become a plot-point that Ben’s school, the Paragon Institute, is a front for another Intelligence Agency (we’re up to two-or-three now), the Multiphasic Operations Research Group (MORG}, that is unknown to Peter or even the President. Paragon’s main function is to sort out Psychics with only modest ability from those that can be weaponized by MORG. Robin’s powers are compared to an “atom bomb” but he’s showing increasing signs of emotional instability; this is because Ben is brain-washing him to hate Arabs (the staged Terrorist attack was part of this), but there deeper causes implied, that Robin was already on the razor’s edge of instability even before he fell into the clutches of Evil.

 

His father, though the films Hero and apparently a force for Good, is also a trained killer, and this must have led to a communication of a certain moral relativism to his sin, exceptionally dangerous in a Super Human starting to manifest narcissistic tendencies. Moreover, as a field agent, Peter was inevitably an absentee father and all the while it is obvious, though unstated, that Robin also lacks a mother. In that very first scene, Peter is trying to convince Robin, who we must conclude was raised by strangers, to go away to a Boarding School, even though Peter, now retired, should now have time for his near-adult son. Significantly, while Peter spends the bulk of the film in single-minded pursuit of his son’s rescue, he never speaks who this boy actually his, his life with him, or the absent mother.

 

But the film doesn’t heap the blame on Peter, but Ben. Ben wakes Robin completely dependent on him, so when Gillian appears, Robin becomes jealous that he might be replaced. Training Robin to become an assassin, he’s fed a steady stream of anti-Arab propaganda, and turns around and murders a could of innocent Arabs.

 

John Cassavetes plays Ben Childress, the Villain. Though Douglas clearly gave the film’s best performance, Cassavetes deserves special note because his character was the most difficult. Ben existed in defiance of all conventional Character development because in dialogue the Character reveals nothing; Ben is all façade, everything coming out of his mouth is self-serving, and 90% of it is lies (in the very last scene, Ben makes a big reveal, the last plot twist, except, can we even trust what he said was true?). Ben is only revealed through actions: he’s manipulative, devoid of love or loyalties, committed only to controlling the PSI powerful teens. At one point he gives a half-explanation as to why of this obsession, but had his statements on the subject been true, there would’ve been no need to betray Peter. Ben’s true obsession is that of absolute power, and his manipulation of the children must represent some deeply engrained jealously of power he didn’t have. In furtherance of that domination, he tried to kill Peter, a potentially completive influence for Robin’s soul, and he plotted to kill the parent of another power Psychic teen, though all of Ben’s machinations fall apart before the assassination is executed. As excellent as Cassavetes is, he seemed a bit annoyed with the role, at one point he told co-star Amy Adams that she probably felt she wasted her time in acting school to do parts like this.

 

Amy Irving plays Gillian Bellaver, whose story unfolds parallel to the one above. She’s the same age as Robin and shares with him tremendous PSI powers and an incomplete family unit (again an absent father) and she’s also sent to Paragon who alert MORG of her. But inference establishes that her family life was more stable than Robin’s, and even after Ben starts manipulating her, she doesn’t endure the same traumas and tortures, so ultimately doesn’t display the same instability. Her story is allowed to unfold in a leisurely manner, with a far more conventional Character development. More than half the film is structured so we have an action scene regarding Peter and Ben’s cat-and-mouse, then Robin displaying increasing instability, then Gillian slowly discovering she has powers, then back to Peter, then back to Gillian.

 

The main cast is rounded out with Carrie Snodgress as Hester and Fiona Lewis as Dr. Susan Charles. Hester is allied to, and manipulated by Peter; while Susan is allied to, and manipulated by Ben, so all three females leads as Victims of male-manipulation, though in Gillian, it’s barely stated when everything explodes. Both Carrie and Susan will suffer terrible fates because of their allegiances, but Susan, on the side of Evil, will suffer the worse, and it will be through her that we will see how depraved Robin has become.

 

The story of the Psychic teens has interest, but the real excitement is the Espionage/Chase Thriller focused on Peter. There’s a wonder set of sequences built around a few blocks in Chicago, starting with the Plymouth Hotel (which doesn’t exist anymore, but was made into America’s most famous flea-bag because of the numerous films it was featured in) and ending in a car chase on a night so foggy that the pursuers can’t see who they are chasing, that stands as some of the best action stuff of its decade. As Rivers of Grue described it, “This gifted craftsman keeps his voyeuristic lens constantly on the move and this creates a great sense of urgency to compensate for any lulls in the narrative.” To say nothing of how it smooths over the many holes in the plot.

 

It’s is based on the novel “The Fury” (1976) and was adapted to the screen by its Author, John Farris, though I suspect it may have undergone massive, uncredited, rewrites before production. I haven’t read the novel, but based on reviews, it focuses on Gillian far more than Peter, both Gillian and Peter are significantly younger, and the film is far more linear than the book. The film treats the PSI elements are regulated to how they serve the story, a MacGuffin like a secret formula in a Hitchcock espionage, while the novel spends a lot of time exploring metaphysics nowhere to be found on screen. A quarter-of-a-century later Farris would write three more sequels, each delving deeper and deeper into Metaphysical Horror, but there has been no attempt to adapt them.

 

The score was by John Williams, who had worked with Hitchcock on “Family Plot” (1976), and achieved fame for “Jaws” (1975), “Close Encounters of a Third Kind” and “Star Wars” (both 1977). It was highly praised, but I found it inferior to De Palma’s more frequent collaborator Pino Donaggio, and integrated into the film awkwardly. De Palma often slathers his scores onto his films like butter on toast, and this is a notable example. The rescue of Gillian from Paragon, which was also Hester’s death scene, was a remarkable execution of complex actions, De Palma at his best, but the inappropriate music made it almost comical.

 

The triumph of that same scene was the flawless Editing of Paul Hirsch, this film was the sixth of ten films he collaborated with De Palma. He is aided by Richard H. Kline’s cinematography which combines tracking shots and zoom lens with grand overhead sweeping shots to rather splendiferous effect.

 

There’s a fair amount of violence, but little gore until near the end. Conventional violence, with guns, is matter-of-fact, but PSI violence is extreme, with the Victim levitated and then spun so faster that the blood spews out from centrifugal force and then the body rips apart (beautifully icky, and anticipating “Scanners”)

 

SF films had a steady audience and support of some world-class directors in the 1920s through mid-30s, but then that cinema all but disappeared, likely the horrors of WWII made this kind of often polemical Fantasy seem distasteful. It came back with a vengeance in 1950, and never disappeared afterwards. The 50s also gave us TV, and movies on TV are probably why SF never disappeared again, kids grew up watching SF which had been true for earlier generations, and as those kids became filmmakers in the mid-60s, SF grew, and there was an attempt to bring great seriousness to it, an urge to prove it had matured.

 

Maturity proved to be an ambition that delivered diminishing returns. By the mid-1970s many of the SF films I loved the most were clearly not as smart or profound as they postured, they were. Then came “Star Wars” proving not only that purest escapism was more popular than handwringing about nuclear war or dystopian systems, but was actually a greater artistic achievement as well.

 

“The Fury” was perfectly timed for the post-“Star Wars” SF-boom, because it was almost as pulpy as “Star Wars,” but many times smart. True, it ditched the novel’s metaphysics. True, the themes of Government abuse were rather cookie-cutter. But the relationships were not, there was real thought and complexity there. It was exciting, suspenseful, fun … and darkly thoughtful.

 

No, it wasn’t as smart or compelling as the other SF/Espionage Thriller of the same year, “The Boys from Brazil” but it was still damned good and towered over all the “Star Wars” knock-offs.

 

Trailer:

The Fury (1978) Official Trailer #1 - Kirk Douglas Movie HD - YouTube