MURDER À LA MOD
(Something Weird Video, 1968)

By Nick Louras
 

The second feature directed by Brian De Palma, and the first to be released, Murder à la Mod is a brash, experimental comedy about murder and pornography that incorporates the youthful, irreverent tone of the director’s immediate follow-ups, Greetings and Hi, Mom!, as well as the fourth-wall-shattering focus on cinema and voyeurism that would carry through his entire career.

Murder à la Mod is essentially a very simple mystery obfuscated by a head-spinning multi-character POV. Margo Norton plays Karen, a young woman who learns her boyfriend is a porno-director. He tells her that his producer has him in an iron-clad contract and he needs money to go legit and divorce his wife. Seizing an opportunity to help, Karen steals a substantial sum from a friend and heads over to the porn studio, where she is stabbed to death, apparently by the unlikely stud in her boyfriend’s skin-flicks: a sadistic, hyperactive mute named Otto, played by De Palma regular William Finley (Phantom of the Paradise, Sisters, The Black Dahlia).

The plot unfolds in several segments, each one from a different character’s perspective. Individually, they tell part of the story, stopping short before the outcome is revealed, then the movie starts over again, giving the viewer a new, sometimes conflicting piece of the puzzle.

The result is rough but captivating and provides a priceless insight into the early artistic development of one of the most important American filmmakers of the last half century. Here is the first glimpse of Jean-Luc Godard’s influence on De Palma, one that would inform much of latter’s early career. Murder opens with a cameraman’s-view montage of young women getting interviewed and disrobing in a sequence evocative of similar (though somewhat more chaste) sequences in the French auteur’s films, Masculin Féminin and La Chinoise. Also, like Godard, De Palma here employs direct critical reference to other films. Thus, Murder also represents the beginning of De Palma’s long cinematic relationship with the works of Alfred Hitchcock through its numerous allusions to Psycho.

Though its low budget and unorthodox structure may put some viewers off, De Palma fans will treasure the opportunity to see this film, available now for the very first time since its original release, thanks to Something Weird Video who have packaged it as a double bill with the 1963 beatnik crime melodrama, The Moving Finger.