"But the sex and the silly serendipity are inextricable. De Palma turns visual pleasure—the luxurious vision of water pouring out of the bathtub; split screen shots showing the same scene from multiple angles so it becomes a cubist abstraction; the camera swooping up to look down into an interrogation room; the extreme close up of Laure’s eyes; multiple explicit sex scenes—into isolated fragments of anti-plot, which direct your gaze to a here that goes both everywhere and nowhere. Instead of trying to master visual pleasure with narrative, Femme Fatale revels in the way the femme fatale releases the film from sequence, logic, and ultimately even from misogyny. De Palma, that most faithful of Hitchcock disciples, tosses away narrative mastery, and with it the master's paranoia. What he's left with is a pleasure that, despite all the sex, feels so innocent you almost have to call it joy."

Here's a portion from the beginning of Berlatsky's essay:

Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale (2002) is a kind of inverse body double of his earlier film Body Double (1984). Both movies are obsessed with undermining, or castrating, the male gaze. Where Body Double frames the male viewer as impotent and frozen outside the narrative, though, Femme Fatale instead constructs a female viewer whose usurpation of the male position causes the film narrative to fragment into an eroticized stasis of fantasy and dream.

The movie is ostensibly a noir in the tradition of Double Indemnity, which our seductress Laure (Rebecca Romijn) is watching (nude, her image superimposed on the screen within a screen) in the first scene. Laure is point person for a heist in which she is supposed to steal diamonds worn (or mostly not worn) by model Veronica (Rie Rasmussen) at a Cannes premiere. However, Laure double crosses her partners. Then things get odd.

Femme fatales in Hollywood cinema traditionally challenge the male dominance of look and plot. In her classic essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey argues that Hollywood films link male viewer and male protagonist as masterful gazers, whose look drives and orders the story arc. Women, in contrast, connote "to-be-looked-at-ness" they are "displayed as sexual object" and "erotic spectacle." The gaze possesses woman, which allows the (male) gazer in the theater the illusion of mastery. At the same time, though the spectacle of woman tends "to freeze the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation." Woman is thus the prize of narrative mastery and a sensuous ice pick (or prick) in the eye of that same mastery. She is the prize that empowers narrative thrust and the twinkling treasure that leads the gaze (and other bits) off course.

Classic Hollywood films like Double Indemnity use the femme fatale to take advantage of this doubled gaze to heighten both impotence and empowerment. The erotic spectacle of Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) hijacks the male gaze and the male driven plot so that good guy Walter (Fred MacMurray) is diverted from the straight and narrow. Instead of his gaze driving the plot, her gazed-at-ness takes the wheel, steering him towards perversion, iniquity, and ultimately death. The film becomes a battle between the erotic distraction of the femme fatale and the righteous vision of the male. When Walter shakes off the glamour and does the right thing (by killing Phyllis) he reasserts his potency—though at the cost of his own life. That's the price of getting bogged down in the venus of spectacle.

Femme Fatale sort of reiterates this narrative tension, sort of parodies it, and sort of blows it up. Laure is an erotic spectacle which seizes control of the plot in numerous ways—first of all by literally seducing Veronica and ravishing her in the bathroom, pulling off her diamonds so her accomplice can slip substitutes under the stall. It's a flamboyantly queer literalization of the way that the femme fatale queers cinematic narratives.

Politicized by the counterculture movement and Vietnam, working within the studio system, yet largely freed of producer control, directors like Arthur Penn, Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, Michael Cimino, Brian De Palma and William Friedkin expressed a brutality and energy not seen on screen before. It is no coincidence that many classics of the American New Wave were crafted with the sensibility and skill of Greenberg.

Greenberg himself might defer any such attribution to Dede Allen, ACE, the legendary editor who arguably broke the mold when creating the era’s seminal movie, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Greenberg, then 31, had known Allen for five years since being invited to be her apprentice cutting Elia Kazan’s America America.

“By ‘67 Dede and I had become close friends,” relates Greenberg. “Because of some time constraints on the finishing of [Bonnie and Clyde] and the political entanglements that wracked Arthur Penn and Warren Beatty (star and producer) I was given the task of editing a couple of the shootout scenes, including the last ‘dancing’ shootout. I worked closely with Penn on them, and he re-edited them with Dede.”

The final ambush in which the duo are gunned down, lasts less than a minute and contains more than 50 cuts. Greenberg employed slow motion at some points and faster speed at others, creating a tense and violent conclusion.

“Dede knew how to cut faster than anyone I know – and make it work. In the days of the Moviola you could sense not only what was going on in that other person’s mind, but how their fingers work, how their body works; you got it all.”

Greenberg’s career began in his native New York in 1960 in an industry that consisted mostly of TV production, commercials and small 16mm-documentary companies.

“The music edited and supplied to these companies came from contractors who leased music libraries from various publishers,” he recalls. “They were willing to take a chance on hiring someone who had no formal music training, or industry experience.”

Greenberg learned how to edit music (physically, splicing ¼-inch tape, and 35mm striped sound film), but as importantly, the function (and dysfunction) of background music, its grammar and importance in motion pictures. He also learned to use the gear for editing; the Moviola, splicers, synchronizers and recorders.

“I was hooked. I confided this desire to a good friend, who was a sound effects editor, and he told me he was going to be working on a feature being edited by Dede, (America America) and would I be interested in being her apprentice? As corny as it sounds, my life had begun.”

A year after the massive success of Bonnie and Clyde, Greenberg cut his first feature as solo editor, the caper, Bye Bye Braverman, for Sidney Lumet and in 1971 won the Academy® Award and BAFTA® for editing highly influential, cops-and-narcotics thriller The French Connection.

“This was the perfect storm of passive collaboration,” describes Greenberg. “The passion and energy of Billy Friedkin, the patience and understanding grace of [producer] Phil D’Antoni, the courage and reflexes of Owen Roizman, ASC, and the obsessive command of Gene Hackman. A lifetime of those dailies is the ultimate definition of happiness.”

The breathtaking car chase featuring Hackman’s pugnacious detective racing to catch a hit man aboard a Brooklyn D-train has been dissected at film schools ever since. Shot, like the rest of the film, documentary-style on location using handheld cameras and one strapped to the Pontiac’s bumper, the action is intercut with extraordinary verve.

“In a visual picture editors have a greater responsibility to carry it off than in a dialog-driven film,” says Greenberg. “We used imagery to illuminate the obsessions of the characters by studying how their faces react to a situation. Billy allowed it to develop with the actors in the shooting and later in the cutting room. It has compactness to it.”

Both Roizman and Greenberg went on to work with director Joseph Sargent on another gritty crime classic, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (1974), structured entirely around the tense standoff between a hijacked running metro train and the NYPD.

Arthur Penn recalled Greenberg for The Missouri Breaks (1976) which paired acting titans Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando in a western tale of cattle rustlers and land owners.

“When an actor can no longer remember lines, or want to, and requires cue cards to fill their eyelines just because they are revered as one of the best actors on earth, it should give editors (and producers and directors) fits,” recalls Greenberg. “That said, it may not be enough to make Brando less then the best actor on earth. It was not a good picture, but the acting was the least of the reasons for that.”

Greenberg would work on another Brando performance two years later as one of four credited editors on Apocalypse Now.

Coppola’s antiwar epic had been largely assembled on location in the Philippines by Evan Lottman (credited as additional editor on the film’s release). It was Lottman who asked Greenberg, then residing in San Franscico, to assist him on the project, with three other editors (Richard Marks, ACE; Walter Murch, ACE; Lisa Fruchtman) also taking over segments of the film.

The project was Greenberg’s life for 18 months from early 1978. “I’d seen the rest of the film assembled and I thought, even then, it was a phenomenal document. It was a very happy experience for me but politically it was not easy. Francis did not know me and had never met me although he knew me by reputation.”

Among the scenes Greenberg cut was the high-octane aerial battle for a Vietnamese village, a sequence which appears perfectly timed to Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries which the Air Cavalry plays over loudspeakers to frighten the enemy.

“I enjoy blending music with images but I’m wary of any editing timed purely to music,” he says. “To me, that’s denigrating the art of editing to a cartoon. It’s Mickey Mouse editing. That was never the case here. The music was actually used as a weapon to intimdate the enemy and was always intended to be used in this scene so to that extent the scene is truthful. If there was any Mickey Mouse timing it was not intentional.”

Greenberg was also responsible for editing the French plantation scene, restored to print by Walter Murch for the extended Redux version in 2001.

“It was a scene that intentionally took your mind away from all the calamity – that you could have something as serene going on amid all the horror. But I was the first to suggest that it should be removed from the original.”

After the intensity of Apocalypse Now, Greenberg’s next project couldn’t have been more different. The urban drama of a middle-brow Manhattan couple battling for custody of their son swept the board at the 1980 Academy Awards ® winning Best Picture and garnering Greenberg a second editing nomination.

“How did I switch from something which has very broad political implications to doing this very intimate, sentimental story? I think that the ability to transition in this way should be in the toolbox of every editor. You may enjoy working on one end of the spectrum but studios and directors are buying your ability to understand all situations. They are buying your mind.”

Perhaps surprisingly Greenberg says he’s always enjoyed movies with a sentimental and sweet aspect. However, there is a fine line between sweet and saccharine which Greenberg confronted on Kramer vs. Kramer.

“I abhor treacly sentimentality,” he says. “That’s a red flag for me. When I’m working on a film like Kramer, which has a ton of sentiment, I want to impart that but I’m not going to spoon feed it to you.”

While he enjoyed every minute on Kramer, he wasn’t entirely comfortable either. “There was a lot of tension that happened around the cameras that crept over into the cutting room. Since [director Robert Benton] worked very hard on the editing he would sometimes share with me the problems he was having between [producer] Stanley Jaffe and [actor Dustin Hoffman, who was encouraged to direct the performance of child actor Justin Henry]. To be fair to Bob he did as much as he could to keep it out.

“Most films don’t allow the audience to make up their minds about characters and instead manipulate people to feel a certain way. Most producers go for that because that’s what they think a sentimental movie should do. I think you have to deny an audience that easy route. The way Kramer was shot it could have been edited to be a lot more sugary – and keeping it dry was a wonderful problem to have.”

Greenberg doesn’t use ‘manipulation’ pejoratively. Movies are, after all, constructed to reveal only what the filmmakers want us to see of a particular story. The past master of this was Alfred Hitchcock. Among the director’s latter day apostles is Brian De Palma with whom Greenberg has had a defining relationship.

“My aim was never to belong to somebody else. I didn’t want to think of myself as some director’s artist. I took the jobs because the scripts sounded like they needed a good editor. In other words, an editor to take that mass of ideas and make it critical. I found that instinct immediately with Brian De Palma.”

Greenberg had had a strong early association with William Friedkin, not only for The French Connection but in editing The Boys in theBand (1970). “I was supposed to do the next one for him too (The Exorcist) but there was some delay and I needed the work. I had a family to support and I took another job in the interim. That was a slap in the face to Billy. We had an argument over that and we never worked together again. So here was a case where a director thought an editor’s loyalty was worth more than anything else in that editor’s life. I never felt I did the wrong thing.

By 1979 De Palma had made several movies including Hi, Mom! and Obsession with Paul Hirsch, ACE. When Hirsch found himself unable to commit to De Palma’s next project, Dressed to Kill, he recommended Greenberg.

“I liked Brian but I didn’t particularly like his movies,” admits Greenberg. “I liked his comedies more than, say Carrie, because I found them too strident, sort of pretentious and openly derivative.”

Although De Palma kept sending script rewrites, Greenberg kept turning him down. De Palma was persistent. “This was the first time in my life someone had not taken no for an answer.” Greenberg eventually agreed to meet in De Palma’s office on Fifth Avenue which the editor recalls as a small dining room with 3” x 5” file cards filled with stick drawings and stuck by Scotch Tape to the mirrored walls.

“While we’re talking I’m looking at the walls and these crude storyboards of planned shots and it excited me. It convinced me to do the movie because I could see in this mosaic of cards the essence of the film and what he wanted to achieve. Brian was a visualist and this excited me more than anything.”

In short order they made Dressed to Kill, Body Double, Scarface, Wise Guys, The Untouchables, each containing some of the most memorable sequences ever put on screen. The homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, reset to 1920s Chicago on the steps of Union Station in The Untouchables is one of them.

“This was not about doing a line-for-line copy of Potemkin but a Brian De Palma expression of thank you to Eisenstein for giving us the language of montage,” he says. “I wanted to get on screen what he himself wanted before he even drew those stick drawings. Brian was the consummate filmmaker and I was becoming part of his thinking. Usually in the editing process the first look by a director is a most auspicious moment. On Scarface, Brian came in to see the first cut which I’d done by about the last day of shooting. He looked at it and just said, ‘Ship it.’ I don’t want to analyze it too much but he trusted me and we got along very well.”

Greenberg adds: “Editing is one of the most beautiful crafts in the visual arts. It has this ability to move you out of your neighborhood theater and into an opera house and De Palma was quite brilliant at being able to do that.”

In high school, once I had read Carrie, I had to see the movie. I watched it with my best friend Kristen at, of course, a sleepover, and the split-screen moments in the prom scene were my first real “cinema!” moments, when the combination of image, sound, and rhythm grabs you with visceral, recognizable power. Prior to this, what I loved about movies like Scream and Clueless was the writing; I was somewhat unconscious to the ways they moved and looked and felt. But Brian De Palma will never let the audience forget for a second that the most important way a movie speaks is through the image, and its construction in time and space.

I became obsessed with Carrie. Obsessed with the line readings, especially anything that came out of Piper Laurie’s mouth – and especially the line, “I can see your dirty pillows” (my friend Gena embroidered a pillow with the phrase for one of my late 20s birthdays). I was obsessed with the ‘70s gym shorts and high socks, and P.J. Soles’ hat and the way Miss Collins wallops Chris across the face. Obsessed with the hazy cinematography and editing, the split screen and split diopter shots, the camera whirling around and around Tommy and Carrie as they dance at the prom. The extreme closeups of Nancy Allen’s mouth with her crowded front teeth as she licks her lips, tugging on the rope attached to the bucket of blood; the long, long, long slow-motion shot as Sue discovers the rope. I was obsessed with the way Carrie, covered in blood, whipped around in a crouch, her hands locked in stiff claws, and the camera rapidly jump-cutting in on her pupil as she sends the car flipping over and over itself. I was obsessed with recognizing a visual parallel in Margaret White’s crucifixion and the creepy Jesus figurine.

My senior year of high school, I decided to go as Carrie for Halloween. I found a cheap pink satin gown at a thrift shop and wore it all day at school, carrying a bouquet, wearing a tiara. That night, at a Halloween party, I made everyone gather in the driveway for my ceremonial blood drenching. I handed my friend Joanna a sauce jar filled with corn syrup and red food coloring as I had heard the Carrie blood was made of, and instructed her to pour it over my head. All I remember is that the drenching felt neverending. Not a shocking splash but a steady stream as she slowly poured it over me. I changed into gym shorts and a t-shirt, but the red corn syrup remained on my skin. My friend Andrew, who I’d known my whole life, licked my arm and was surprised it was sweet. A week later, he died in a drunk driving accident. That night was the last time I saw him.

If this all seems extra personal, it feels important to talk about why I connected with Carrie so much as a teenager, and its influence. What King and Brian De Palma understand and convey so beautifully is that high school is hard. It’s filled with blood, and sex, and death, all while fumbling through the figuring out of yourself and others, and yourself in opposition to others, including your parents. Plus, everyone hates gym class. All of that is amplified in King’s book, written just a few years out of high school himself, and working as a teacher. It’s a story about a bullied, abused girl with supernatural powers that’s grounded in a recognizable and terrifying reality, because King knows how terrifying high school can be. De Palma, on screen, makes it erotic, operatic, funny, scary, and tragic, every emotion deeply felt and deeply real. The movie is camp, but sincere.

I’ve seen Carrie dozens of times on VHS and DVD, my copy traveling with me during the ten or so times I’ve moved around the country since college, but the first time I saw it on the big screen was last year, at the American Cinematheque, in a screening series of Argento/DePalma double features put on by Cinematic Void. Even though I knew I would love it, it had been several years since I’d watched it in earnest. I was hoping I wouldn’t see something that I’d recognize now as problematic or exploitative.

This time around, nearly 20 years removed from being a teenage girl, I found it profoundly moving. Margaret White isn’t just a crazy, homicidal religious nut, she’s a deeply traumatized woman who has turned to fanaticism as a coping mechanism to deal with her repressed sexual trauma. Chris is trapped in a psychosexual abusive relationship with Billy and lashing out at those around her. Miss Collins is an imperfect ally because she doesn’t trust anyone, and Carrie, well Carrie shows what happens when pathological shame, abuse, and psychological torture combust, but in small moments, she owns her own power, her own sexuality. “It’s me, mama,” she pleads with her mother, who declares her remarkable gift the work of Satan. Even the infamous line I giggled at in high school took on a new tenor. “Breasts, mama,” she says, “they’re called breasts, every woman has them,” gently asserting her right to her own sexuality. The locker room slo-mo shot isn’t just a brazen display of the male gaze, it’s a comment on the male gaze, a sly bait-and-switch from sensual to savage.

The tragedy of Carrie, which both King and De Palma treat with the gravity that it deserves, is the idea that in high school, the worst thing to happen to someone is shame, embarrassment and rejection. It taps into our most primal desire to be loved and accepted by the tribe, which translates into safety and nourishment. Carrie is denied that, again and again. She never receives the comfort that she’s craving, except in small doses, and conditionally, from Miss Collins, her gym teacher (played by the great Betty Buckley). In the opening shower sequence, she reaches out, vulnerable, for help. Blood is coming out of her body, she doesn’t know why, and she’s scared for her own safety. The girls turn to savagery in response to her off-putting plea, pelting her with sanitary napkins. When she pleads with her mother, “Why didn’t you tell me?” looking for some comfort, she’s hit with a book and lectured that her body is sinful. After the massacre at the prom, when Carrie returns home and seeks solace in the arms of her abusive mother, she says, “they laughed at me.” The trauma she experienced is not the blood or violence or fire she inflicted, but that they laughed at her, that they rejected her. Carrie is a heartbreaking and tragic victim who turns into a monster as her self-preservation instincts morph into total annihilation.

Watching the film now, I can see that what moved me when I was in high school, whether I knew it then or not (I didn’t), was that this was a film about the inner lives of women, who are allowed to be everything in this instance: the villains and the victims, the empowered and the disempowered, complex characters, with whom you can simultaneously empathize and condemn. Grappling with the film 20 years later, I realize that what Carrie articulated for me is that, yes, teenage girls, sometimes we are monsters–but we usually have a damn good reason to be.

The scene of the kidnapping of the two cops very quickly turns into a car chase and you don't feel very comfortable filming it.

Because I hate that. We've seen hundreds of them and it's very boring to watch. The best chase ever filmed is in William Friedkin's French Connection. If you don't have a better idea, it really isn't worth bothering to film a new one. I'm not like James Cameron, I don't enjoy filming endless chases with trucks, on bridges, it's not my style. It was my first time filming a car chase in The Fury. I took it as a challenge but quickly hated it. So I placed it in the fog to stylize it as much as possible. Because filming in a car, there is nothing more boring. What are you going to show? A guy moving the steering wheel, reflections on the windshield. There aren't many solutions to make it interesting.

Margolis had appeared in De Palma's 1980 film Dressed To Kill, walking past a nurse as a patient at Bellvue Hospital in the film's final dream sequence.

Talking about Scarface with The New York Observer's Drew Grant in 2012, Margolis said, “The thing about Al was that you didn’t know when he was going to start being Tony. We’d be sitting in the car, and he’d just start in about how ugly all of us were—how between the four of us, we’d be able to make one good-looking guy.”

On The SitDown with Yesenia De Avila in 2016, Margolis was asked about working on Scarface:

They had a rehearsal in, I think, November of ’82, where they brought everybody out to L.A. for a week, and we were in one room. It was the only time I was ever around Michelle Pfeiffer – I had no scenes with her.

Did you ever imagine the iconic film it would become?

No, no one did. In fact, when the film opened, it bombed. Are you aware of that?

Yeah…

The critics said it was a piece of garbage. It was ahead of its time, in some ways. If it had come out in ’87, maybe it would have done better. It picked up a big following in the later eighties on video, when people started watching it on video. And then the whole hip-hop crowd got into it big time. They can’t get enough of it, and that really made it the biggest thing in the world.

Here's a portion of the New York Times obit posted yesterday by Alex Williams:

Mr. Margolis notched more than 160 credits in movies and on television, gaining particular notice with memorable roles in Brian De Palma’s “Scarface” (1983), playing opposite Al Pacino as a cocaine-syndicate henchman, and in the Jim Carrey comedy “Ace Ventura: Pet Detective” (1994), in which he played Ventura’s aggrieved landlord with delicious malevolence.

He also became a go-to actor for the director Darren Aronofsky, appearing in his films “Pi” (1998), “Requiem for a Dream” (2000), “The Fountain” (2006), “The Wrestler” (2008), “Black Swan” (2010) and “Noah” (2014).

But no role made him as instantly recognizable to millions of viewers as Hector in Vince Gilligan’s critically acclaimed series “Breaking Bad,” which ran for five seasons on AMC, starting in 2008, starring Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul and Anna Gunn, and in its prequel, “Better Call Saul,” which ran for six seasons starting in 2015, starring Bob Odenkirk and Giancarlo Esposito — two of the many actors who appeared in both shows — as well as Rhea Seehorn.

The role, in “Breaking Bad,” brought Mr. Margolis an Emmy nomination in 2012 for outstanding guest actor in a dramatic series.

An aging former drug cartel don from Mexico, Hector, also known as Tio, had come to live in a New Mexico nursing home, unable to speak or walk following a stroke but still firmly in control of his power as a rival to Walter White (Mr. Cranston), a mild-mannered high school chemistry teacher who evolves into a coldhearted kingpin in the crystal methedrine trade.

Despite his lack of dialogue in “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Margolis proved a scene stealer from his wheelchair, his eyes bulging, his face trembling with rage, despite the nasal cannula pumping oxygen up his nose and his palm furiously banging his bell, taped to an arm of the chair, whenever he needed attention.

“Everybody says, ‘My God it must be difficult to work without words,’” he said in a 2012 interview with Fast Company. “My joke is, ‘No. I’m already grounded in the fact that I’ve been acting without hair for years, and that’s not a problem. So, now I’m acting without words.’”

As a young actor, he added, he had trained to communicate emotions without dialogue. He also borrowed mannerisms, including a tobacco-chewing motion with the side of his mouth, from his mother-in-law, who had been confined to a Florida nursing home after a stroke.

As viewers discovered in “Better Call Saul,” which featured Mr. Margolis as an ambulatory and verbose Hector, the character had wound up in a wheelchair after a defector in his organization switched his medication to incapacitate him, leading to the stroke.

Despite the character’s broken moral compass and hair-trigger rage, Mr. Margolis managed to evoke Hector’s complexity — his humanity, even.

“You don’t play villains like they are villains,” he said in a 2012 interview with The Forward, the Jewish newspaper. “You play them like you know exactly where they are coming from. Which hopefully you do.”

Mark Margolis was born on Nov. 26, 1939, in Philadelphia to Isidore and Fanya (Fried) Margolis. He attended Temple University briefly before moving to New York, where at 19 he got a job as a personal assistant to the method acting guru Stella Adler. He also took a class with Lee Strasberg at his famed Actors Studio.

After making brief appearances on television shows like “Kojak” and in movies like the Dudley Moore comedy “Arthur” and Mr. De Palma’s “Dressed to Kill” (both from 1981), Mr. Margolis got his first taste of renown in “Scarface,” playing Alberto the Shadow, a bodyguard and hit man for Alejandro Sosa (Paul Shenar), the Bolivian drug boss who shows Mr. Pacino’s Tony the ropes in the cocaine business.

In one slyly comic moment in “Breaking Bad,” Hector is seen watching on television a famous scene from “Scarface” in which Tony spontaneously shoots Alberto in the head when he learns that Alberto’s planned car-bomb murder of a nosy journalist would also kill the journalist’s wife and children.

Despite his turns as a Latin heavy, Mr. Margolis, who was Jewish, did not speak Spanish, a point that earned him no shortage of derision from native speakers.

“I’ve lived in Mexico,” he said in 2016 interview with Vulture, New York magazine’s culture site. “I know enough of the grammar of it, and I’m pretty good with the accent of it. If I get a good tutor, I can lock into it pretty quickly.”

In addition to his son, he is survived by his wife of 61 years, Jacqueline Margolis; a brother, Jerome; and three grandchildren.

In the years between “Scarface” and “Breaking Bad,” Mr. Margolis’s prodigious output made him a known actor, if not a famous one. “People will often come up to me and say, ‘You’re that wonderful character actor,’” he told The Forward, apparently half seriously. “But I’m not a character actor. I’m a weird-looking romantic lead.”

Unlike most romantic leads, though, Mr. Margolis struggled at times to make a living. Fans, he told The New York Observer in 2012, “think that I’m some sort of rich guy, that everyone in the movies is making the kind of money Angelina Jolie is making.”

He and his wife had lived in the same apartment in Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood since 1975. At least his turn as Hector provided him with a dash of supplemental income at the show’s peak, after a messaging app called Dingbel appropriated Hector’s simplest bell command — one ding for yes, two for no. Dingbel hired him as a spokesman.

As Mr. Margolis told Vulture: “I tell people I’m the second-most famous bell ringer after Quasimodo.”

Obsession consciously creates a ghostly dialogue with Vertigo, constructing a similar labyrinth of deception, desire and derangement. Like Hitchcock’s film, it is an ambivalent interrogation of haunted memories and male fantasy, exploring an almost necrophilic love through its increasingly unstable lead, with its psychological traumas lashed to a far-fetched mystery plot. Despite ostensibly realistic settings (in San Francisco and New Orleans respectively), both films require viewers to immerse themselves in their rich, dreamlike atmosphere. Their narratives are driven more by recurring images and repeating patterns than by objective logic, building a maelstrom of uncertain identities and uncanny echoes.

The opening of Obsession serves to establish the tone and visual motifs of the film. If Saul Bass’s celebrated title sequence for Vertigo emphasises the perfidious qualities of speech and visual perception, focussing on a female mouth and eye before spiralling into the depths of her pupil, Obsession highlights the unreliability of recollection, while preparing us for the slippery notions of time and fate that will define the story.

Various snapshots slide into the frame alongside the credits. Weathered and a little blurred, they fill only a small portion of the dark screen; like memories, the images are partial and incomplete. Interspersed with the photographs is a full-screen view of a grand Italian-style church, the camera drawing ominously towards its densely geometric exterior as if it were a carefully designed trap. The church also appears in the snapshots, creating a jarring effect that undermines any attempt to understand when the different images are from and how they are related – they share a location, but do not seem to belong in the same timeframe. We are given no context or identification for the pictures until a hand-written note appears in the final one: Florence, 1948. Yet as soon as the date seems settled, we move elsewhere, gradually creeping towards a mansion whose windows lighten and darken rhythmically. As we realise that the occupants are watching the very slideshow we have just been viewing, onscreen text identifies the year as 1959 and the place as New Orleans, a world away from Romanesque churches and post-war Europe. Less than three minutes have passed, but already our sense of time and destination have deliberately been confused, and not for the last time.

The prominence of the church in the opening credits alerts us that it will be important to the story (much like Vertigo’s Mission San Juan Bautista), but the way in which we next see it is both revealing and unexpected. The slides we saw depicted Michael and Elizabeth in Florence at the start of their relationship, with the church (San Miniato al Monte) the venue of their first meeting. Following the loss of his wife and daughter, Michael builds a reproduction of the church front as their tomb. The ‘San Miniato’ we now see is a replica located in Louisiana, forcibly enshrining the past in the present, no matter how out of place. Tellingly, as the finished memorial is revealed to us, a further onscreen title abruptly moves the date forward from 1959 to 1975, blurring period and location yet again: like the eternally grieving Michael, we are becoming unmoored, struggling to stay afloat in a stream of visual repetitions and sudden shifts in time. The false landmark also illuminates the story’s core themes of deceptive appearance and flawed resurrection. While undoubtedly a sincere tribute, the façade is not the original (perhaps also suggesting a self-referential wink towards inevitable criticisms of the film itself). The morbidly grandiose monument symbolises Michael’s almost religious faith in his romantic memories while hinting that such fervent belief may be fallible and unhealthy, blinding him to reality and the passing of time.

Inevitably, Michael’s 1975 trip to Florence leads him back to the real San Miniato for his first encounter with his wife’s doppelganger, Sandra. She is helping to restore a 14th century painting of the Madonna – an idealised supernatural vision of femininity that mirrors the sanctified role his own late wife has assumed in Michael’s mind. When Sandra explains the dilemma faced by the preservation authorities, her words also serve to neatly summarise the emotional conundrum posed by the film. Damaged by moisture, the paint has begun to peel, revealing an older, cruder image underneath; should they investigate this new finding, or “should they restore the original, but never know for sure what lies beneath it?” Michael favours the latter option, once again declaring the preference for romanticised perfection that is the cause of his torments, choosing to overlook uglier truths until it is too late.

The recurring spiral motif central to Vertigo is recreated in Obsession by the revolving paddle of the riverboat in the ransom scenes. Its bright red wheel relentlessly churns the murky water as the tension ratchets up, a visual warning of the dangerous depths to come. As in Hitchcock’s film, the camera encircles the characters in several key scenes, creating a dizzying sense that events are spinning out of control. The roving camerawork also creates a powerful sense of symmetry between the opening and closing sequences, as if the end were also the beginning. During the first scene, we waltz around Michael and Elizabeth as they dance at their anniversary party. For the finale, we loop round and round a final embrace, with the use of slow motion giving every movement a choreographed grace as though, once again, we were dancing.

Vilmos Zsigmond’s diffused cinematography lends the film a slippery, soft-focus edge, perhaps best utilised in two quietly stunning 360⁰ panning shots marking apparent shifts in time. The first is a literal move forward in chronology, drifting around the construction site of Elizabeth and Amy’s tomb in 1959 to return to the finished article in 1975, with a barely noticeable cut covering the transition in scenes. The second, which occurs when Sandra unlocks the sealed bedroom and discovers Elizabeth’s diaries, suggests a psychological step back through the years, prowling round the room as she begins her apparent regression in time to ‘become’ Michael’s late wife. Meanwhile, Sandra’s eventual breakdown recalls the opening slideshow to ingenious effect. She moves along a corridor of bright windows broken by intervals of thick darkness, with each alteration in lighting mimicking a changing slide and marking a further descent into her past thanks to Zsigmond’s photography and Paul Hirsch’s brilliant editing.