DE PALMA'S FOLLOWUP TO 'CARRIE' OPENED ON THIS DAY IN 1978
Brian De Palma's The Fury opened in U.S. theaters on March 10, 1978. Following the success of Carrie in 1976, De Palma worked with producer Frank Yablans on a larger-scale picture with the biggest budget of his career at that point. Yablans had helped finance De Palma's Greetings and Hi, Mom!, and De Palma included several of his regular players within the large cast (during filming, De Palma began to realize early on that there were too many characters and asked screenwriter John Farris, author of the original novel, to condense where possible). In the shot above is Charles Durning, who had played the landlord in Hi, Mom! (and, of course, had also appeared in De Palma's Sisters). Below is a shot near the beginning of the film, where Amy Irving, fresh off of her role as Sue Snell in Carrie, walks a Chicago beach front with Melody Thomas (who had, incidentally, played the child version of Tippi Hedren in Alfred Hitchcock's Marnie). Stalking them is De Palma's old friend William Finley as the psychic Raymond Dunwoody, a character who ended up with less lines and scenes than originally written, via the aforementioned cuts De Palma had asked for from Farris.
And then there is Rutanya Alda (below), who had been in both Greetings and Hi, Mom! (and who was about to work with Robert De Niro again in Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter)...
Before he had made Carrie, De Palma had pleaded in vain to direct the film version of Robert Stone's Vietnam/counterculture novel Dog Soldiers. That film ended up being directed by Karel Reisz, with the title changed to Who'll Stop The Rain. Even though that film arrived in theaters a few months after De Palma's The Fury, cinematographer Richard Kline had already finished shooting it before De Palma asked around about him and hired him for The Fury. De Palma explained to Paul Mandell at Filmmakers Newsletter that he had liked the way Kline had lit some of the films he'd worked on. "So we sat down, looked at the book, decided what kind of filming style we wanted to use, and then did it. And we worked together quite well."
See also:
SYFYWire: Brian De Palma's The Fury at 40
Updated: Sunday, March 11, 2018 2:13 AM CST
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