Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74322 in DVD
• Released on: 2001-06-26
• Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 98 minutes

Amazon.com
Though he had made comedies with Robert De Niro (Hi Mom, Greetings!), a horror movie (Sisters), and a rock musical (Phantom of the Paradise), it wasn't until this 1976 film that Brian De Palma truly announced himself as the heir to Alfred Hitchcock. Written by Paul Schrader, this film is an homage to Vertigo, with its own stylish twists and turns. Cliff Robertson plays a businessman who, while traveling in Italy, meets a young woman (Genevieve Bujold) who is a dead ringer for his late wife, who had been killed in a kidnapping years earlier. As he woos and wins her, the vibes get creepier and creepier because, well, something's not right about this woman. Interestingly, this film came out the same year as De Palma's Carrie, a much more successful movie at the box office. But it was this movie that, for all its flaws, proclaimed De Palma as a stylist with a sure-handed command of visual storytelling. --Marshall Fine

Customer Reviews

NOISSESBO
Another excellent De Palma thriller, this time without the sex and violence. Even if you don't like his other movies like BODY DOUBLE, if you want an interesting and atmospheric thriller, get this. It is a much more subtle film some of ones that followed, partly a love story, partly a mystery and all class. I won't explain the story as it has already been explained here and elsewhere a million times, so on to the DVD.

The picture is a bit grainy(some parts look better than others), but although I hadn't seen the film before I have read that it has always looked grainy and washed out ever since it was first released. Still apart from the grain the picture is still sharp. You get 5.1, 2 channel and mono english sound tracks and they sounded good to me.

Also included on the disc is an excellent 35 minute documentary and a trailer(plus trailers of two other films).

DePalma - The Greatest of the Film School Brats
Brian DePalma directed a string of truly inspired films in the 1970s, from SISTERS to CARRIE, from the campy, baroque glam of PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE, to the decade-ending double shots of DRESSED TO KILL and BLOW OUT. In the middle, he directed OBSESSION, which upped the ante of perversity, beauty and lurid unpleasantness of Hitchcock's VERTIGO (with a dash of DIAL 'M' for good measure). What people dismiss as second-hand aping, I see as respectful homage, an updating of Hitchcock's perspective for the post-Vietnam, post-Beatles age. He was, after all, one of the leaders of the "film school brats" of the late 1960s (all members of which blatantly copied the masters of the previous generation), and, to my mind, was the most brilliant (at least technically), the most mature, and the most sensitive of his peers. Give me the twisted emotional and visual depths of OBSESSION over a malfunctioning mechanical shark or a juvenile "creature cantina" any day!

PALI(-N)MPS(-C)EST
Based on a very smart screenplay directly written for the screen by Paul Schrader and Brian De Palma, OBSESSION is, in my opinion, the masterpiece of the director of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE. The movie can be read at several different levels but is primarily an excellent thriller treating of the guiltiness felt by a man who failed to rescue his wife and his daughter when kidnapped in New orleans.

The key of OBSESSION lies in the scene of the first encounter between Courtland and Sandra, in the medieval church in which the hero married his first wife. Sandra is trying to restore old paintings that happen to have been themselves painted over older paintings. Asked by Courtland if the new paintings will be erased, Sandra answers that it's not useful to destroy them in order to bring into light the original ones.

So OBSESSION is clearly an homage to Alfred Hitchcock's VERTIGO but is also a movie of its own who deserves credit. I remember that the sumptuous travellings of De Palma's camera were, in the seventies, rather unusual in the american production and generated numerous critics. One can only observe, 25 years later, that De Palma new aesthetics has inspired a whole generation of american filmmakers, like Steven Spielberg for instance, who has understood that a camera movement could produce emotions in the viewer's heart.

Among the bonus features of this DVD, there is a very interesting featurette with recent interviews of the cast.

A DVD zone your library.