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The World Wasn’t Ready for Body Double
“Sometimes the style of the day is not the right way to appraise something innovative,” Brian De Palma says now.
A characteristic riff on Hitchcock classics such as Vertigo and Rear Window, it follows a claustrophobic out-of-work actor (Craig Wasson) who breaks up with his adulterous girlfriend and winds up house-sitting a fancy, space-age pad in the Hollywood Hills. The insanely gruesome series of events that follows pulls our hero deep into the 1980s porn industry (or at least a cartoonish version of it), where he then becomes infatuated with Holly Body (Melanie Griffith, in what might be her greatest role), a performer who may or may not have a connection to that woman in the window. To direct the film, De Palma first reached out to Wiederhorn, who had made a stylish 1981 slasher called Eyes of a Stranger, about two sisters (Lauren Tewes and Jennifer Jason Leigh), one of them blind and deaf, who discover that they’re living across the street from a serial killer.
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