It's an established part of the Star Wars legend that when George Lucas showed a rough cut of the original movie to some of his Hollywood friends--this was before the special effects had even been inserted in some crucial places--Brian De Palma was merciless with the ridicule he expressed, sheer laughter right there in Lucas's face. I've never seen exactly what De Palma saw that night--hopefully I never will--but whatever it is, it couldn't have been any worse than Body Double, if in entirely different ways.
As for Body Double--I don't know why I've never seen it till now; I'm just glad I finally did. It does for (or to) Hitchcock's Rear Window and Vertigo what Body Heat did for (or to) Wilder's Double Indemnity. (And why did both these '80s homages have to begin with the word body? It's one of those mysteries, I guess.) But I'm glad I saw it, because I liked it. I'm not going to claim that I liked it beyond the criteria of camp, because I didn't, but I really dug the cheesy porn scene set to the performance of the '80s anthem "Relax," and I dug the famous power-drill scene (you've never seen blood come through a celing like that), and I dug all the shamelessly overt Hitchcock references, and I dug the quintessential Melanie Griffith performance from before such a thing had been established, and I dug the proto-Boogie Nights scene of a porn star hiding his money shot where the camera couldn't possibly see it and thereby exasperating his directors, and I dug, perhaps more than any of it, the glorious views we get--interior and exterior alike--of that strange and beautiful and haunted L.A. home, the Chemosphere. A murder had taken place there, just eight years before the movie's release, but like Body Double itself, the crimes perpetrated on its grounds can only enhance its strange dark beauty.
Somewhere, George Lucas must have been laughing, but he must have known that Brian De Palma was laughing right along with him.
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