Obsession (Yellowbird Productions, Columbia, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I turned on Turner Classic Movies for what turned out to be two films in a night-long tribute to director Brian De Palma (by the way, that’s how his name is spelled: the “De” is capltalized and there’s a space between it and the “Palma”) centered around a podcast TCM is sponsoring based on a 1991 book by Julie Salomon called The Devil’s Candy: “The Bonfire of the Vanities” Goes to Hollywood. The book was about the making of The Bonfire of the Vanities, De Palma’s 1990 film based on Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel of that title about the deeds and misdeeds of people involved in Wall Street, and in addition to showing The Bonfire of the Vanities itself (one of those legendary financial failures in Hollywood history; it cost $47 million to make but only grossed $15 million in the U.S.) but a whole program of other movies by De Palma, of which I watched two: Obsession (1976) and Sisters (1972). De Palma made these movies at a time when he was routinely being accused of ripping off Alfred Hitchcock – he copied both Rear Window and Psycho in Sisters, both Vertigo and Rebecca in Obsession, and Psycho again in his 1980 film Dressed to Kill. The De Palma borrowings from Hitchcock were so widely ridiculed that Saturday Night Live once did a mock film trailer for Brian De Palma’s latest movie, The Clams, presented as a ripoff of The Birds and featuring a copy of Hitchcock’s famous scene of the birds massing on the monkey bars of a children’s playground, ready to attack … only with clams.

At least part of the commonality between De Palma and Hitchcock is that De Palma hired Bernard Herrmann, who had scored a lot of the Hitchcock movies from the second The Man Who Knew Too Much in 1956 until Marnie in 1964 (after which he and Hitchcock had a falling-out because Hitchcock wanted scores that would generate popular hit songs that would promote the movies, and though Herrmann fashioned quite a beautiful ballad from his main theme for Marnie, by the time Nat “King” Cole’s record of it was released the film was already out of theatres and Nat “King” Cole was dead). Obsession was immediately denounced by most film critics as a ripoff of Hitchcock’s Vertigo – which it was to some extent, though as I watched it I was wondering whether it was Herrmann’s score, quite similar to his music for Vertigo (down to copying Wagner’s trick in Tristan und Isolde by stacking chromatic chords on top of each other to symbolize a doomed love affair), that made the two films seem so close. Plot-wise there are similarities but also key differences; whereas Vertigo takes place in a continuous time sequence and features James Stewart as a detective tricked into helping a friend of his (Tom Helmore) kill his wife by taking advantage of the fact that his wife and his mistress (both played by Kim Novak) look like each other,

Obsession starts out with a prologue set in New Orleans in 1959 in which Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson), a land developer, is about to build a huge project on a parcel near Lake Pontchartrain when his plans are derailed by the kidnapping of his wife (Geneviève Bujold) and their daughter (Wanda Blackman). Michael wants to pay the $500,000 ransom demand even though that means he won’t have the cash on hand to close the deal on the Pontchartrain property. His business partner Robert Lasalle (John Lithgow in his film debut) offers to cover him, but Michael lets police inspector Brie (Stanley J. Reyes, speaking with one of the worst phony French accents I’ve ever heard in a movie) talk him out of delivering real money. Instead the briefcase he throws off a paddle-wheel steamer called the Cotton Blossom (also the name of the show boat in Edna Ferber’s Show Boat and the classic Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein II musical based on it) is filled with cut-up strips of paper the size of genuine U.S. currency – they don’t even take the usual precaution of putting real money on the top and bottom of the bundles so at first glance the kidnappers would think it was the real deal. (Never trust a cop who has the same name as a cheese!) The kidnappers discover the trick almost immediately but Brie’s cops are onto them (they hid a radio transmitter in the briefcase so they could track the crooks) and there’s a shoot-out in which one of the kidnappers waves the fake bills in the daughter’s face and says, “See? That’s what your father thinks you’re worth!” As the kidnappers escape over the Pontchartrain bridge and the cops try to follow them, an oil truck gets in the way, the kidnappers’ car crashes into the truck, both vehicles explode and Michael’s wife and daughter are presumed dead.

The film then flashes forward to the 1976 present, and Michael has never remarried or even, apparently, dated. He’s continued his partnership with Lasalle, but Lasalle is getting antsy because instead of building on the Pontchartrain property Michael has turned it into a park in the memory of his late wife, and the only thing he’s built on it is an elaborate tomb for her (even though her remains were never recovered). Michael goes on a business trip to Florence, Italy – where he met his wife years earlier when he was a U.S. servicemember in the occupation force after World War II – and in a Florence church he meets Sandra Portinari (Geneviève Bujold), a young woman who’s the spitting image of his late wife. He starts dating her and eventually takes her back to the U.S. intending to marry her – and the film shifts from ripping off Vertigo to ripping off Rebecca as his new wife has a hard time adjusting to Michael’s elaborate home in New Orleans and the Black maid (Sylvia “Kuumba” Williams – this was after the rise of Black nationalism in the 1960’s had led some African-Americans to take on either original African names or bits of gibberish that at least looked African) who takes care of the place. The film takes a quick turn into Bluebeard’s Castle territory as Sandra notices a door that is kept locked and to which only MIchael has the key – though she gets the key from his belongings and lets herself in. It’s the master bedroom from which Michael’s first wife and daughter were kidnapped 17 years before, and of course Michael has kept it undisturbed as a virtual shrine.

Michael and Sandra elope after Michael decides to back out of the big church wedding he had planned, only just as they’re returning home from the wedding Sandra disappears and Michael spies a kidnap note, almost identical to the one he was left 17 years earlier, in the same place on one of the posts of his big four-poster bed. Once again Michael has to go to Lasalle for the ransom money, and Lasalle agrees to pay it but demands that Michael sell him his share of the business in exchange – only [spoiler alert!] Lasalle was really behind both kidnappings and substitutes a briefcase filled with worthless paper (again!) for the one he’d offered Michael containing actual cash. It gets even weirder – De Palma worked out the story for the film with Paul Schrader, with both getting credit for the basic plot, Schrader for the screenplay and De Palma for the direction – as it turns out that Michael’s daughter didn’t die after all: Lasalle spirited her away to Italy and had her raised by an Italian foster mother, then when she came of age took Michael back there and arranged for them to meet, hoping Michael would find her the spitting image of his late wife and fall in love with her without realizing that the reason she looked so much like his wife was she was in fact their daughter. In a rage, Michael kills Lasalle and tries to flee by boarding a plane from New Orleans to Rome, only the cops are behind him and the film ends ambiguously with Michael hugging his daughter (a scene De Palma shoots in an uncertain way that doesn’t definitively establish whether it’s just an appropriate fatherly hug or an incestuous one) and leaving us uncertain whether he’ll be able to get on the plane before the police arrest him. As for Sandra, she was at first a willing participant in Lasalle’s plot and was supposed to get $50,000 for leading Michael on – only she had an attack of conscience, rejected the money and tried to stab herself in the airplane’s rest room, forcing the plane to turn back and giving Michael the chance to escape on it.

Obsession is actually a pretty good movie, though it would probably work better for you if you didn’t already know Vertigo (which a lot of viewers at the time didn’t; after its financial failure in 1958 Hitchcock sat on the film, allowing it only one TV showing in 1972, and then no one had a chance to see it until 1984, four years after Hitchcock’s death, when his daughter Patricia reissued it and the other four films Hitchcock owned outright and Vertigo was hailed as a masterpiece, ultimately winning the Sight and Sound magazine poll as the greatest film ever made), and the business of the man haunted by his first wife who tries to find happiness with another woman but the spirit of her predecessor still haunts them was probably considered hackneyed back in the 19th century when Edgar Allan Poe published “Ligeia.” One also wonders how Cliff Robertson’s character managed to keep a business career going when he spent so much time and mental energy obsessing about the details of his past – Lasalle’s justification for doing him out of his money is that somebody needs to keep control of the fortune he’s made and also put that land into productive use instead of “wasting” it as a park and a mausoleum. Obsession is the last film for which Bernard Herrmann wrote an original score – he died in December 1975, before the film was released – though he has some more recent composer credits on imdb.com representing films for which his existing music was re-used, and his expansive neo-Wagnerisms would probably make an excellent soundtrack album. Herrmann had worked on Vertigo and had actually suggested to Hitchcock that it be set in New Orleans instead of San Francisco (one wonders whether that was the inspiration for De Palma and/or Schrader to set Obsession largely in New Orleans) and Herrmann also told Hitchcock he should use Charles Boyer instead of James Stewart for Vertigo’s male lead.

There are a few outright quotes from Vertigo in De Palma’s direction and Vilmos Zsigmond’s cinematography, including two scenes copying the famous shot in which Hitchcock and his cinematographer, Robert Burks, had whirled the camera around the heads of James Stewart and Kim Novak during their first kiss. Schrader also wanted to make considerably more of the incestuous relationship that develops between Robertson and Bujold’s second incarnation, but he and De Palma got push-back from the film’s producer, George Litto, who wanted it softened (so there’s a typical Production Code-era tease as to whether the Robertson character did or didn’t have sex with the woman who turned out to be his daughter, though in the actual Code era no producer or studio would have been allowed to go near this situation; the closest example I can think of is That Hagen Girl, a 1947 film co-starring Ronald Reagan and Shirley Temple in which for most of the film the gossiping townspeople think Temple is Reagan’s daughter, only it turns out she isn’t and she and Reagan get together at the end – which had preview audiences gasping in disgust and Reagan tried to get director Peter Godfrey to change it, which Godfrey wouldn’t). Obsession was actually produced and financed by Litto’s company, Yellowbird Pictures, and it was only after it was finished that Columbia Pictures purchased the distribution rights – which meant that Cliff Robertson was shocked when he got a tax form indicating that he’d made money from them on it. Robertson had signed with Litto’s company to do the movie, had negotiated his salary and been paid by them, so he queried the tax form – and thus unraveled an elaborate scheme by which Columbia studio head David Begelman had been making phony invoices out to talent, ostensibly paying them (and sending word to the Internal Revenue Service that he had paid them) while in fact keeping the money for himself and thus effectively embezzling from the studio. Ironically, when the plot was exposed Begelman was protected by the Columbia board of directors – they ultimately let him go but he immediately got a similar job at MGM – while Robertson found himself blacklisted for several years for his temerity in exposing Begelman’s fraud.