The protagonist of Body Double – we can’t say hero – is Jake Scully (Craig Wasson), a claustrophobic actor who can’t hold on to his role, and a man who can’t hold on to his women. Building his great edifice of metaphor, Brian De Palma plays several variations on the theme of audition as sexual evaluation, before finally merging the two, plunging Scully into the pornographic underworld, the mirror-image of the proper film industry. The film-within-a-film porno-shoot scene has Scully entering a wholly studio-bound new-wave erotic cabaret to the tune of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s Relax, before coupling with Holly Body (Melanie Griffith).
I would say that this, an example of total cinema on the level of Vincente Minnelli’s Girl Hunt number in The Band Wagon (1953) or Powell and Pressburger’s The Tales of Hoffmann (1951), is Body Double’s identifiable high point, but the plain fact is that the film is a range of towering peaks. Its centrepiece is a nearly wordless double pursuit that lasts for over 20 minutes of screen time, leading from the Hollywood Hills to a Rodeo Drive mall to a beachfront motel, and featuring our protagonist discreetly filching a pair of discarded panties along the way, like a common pervert. This moment is funny and human and indicting in the discomfort it induces, a perfect example of how De Palma can be at once drolly ironic about sex and sincerely, powerfully romantic. For not long after pocketing those panties Scully will be embracing their owner, and this moment, captured with carousel-like 360-degree camerawork and blatantly artificial rear-projection, is like something from Murnau’s Sunrise (1927).
Entirely of its porno-chic moment, Body Double is both sex farce and tragedy – halves not at odds with one another but functioning at the same time. Like practically every other film De Palma has made, Body Double, about a man who falls in love with a dead woman who may not actually be dead at all, owes a debt to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). A title from another of Hitch’s films, Stage Fright (1949), would work perfectly well for it. Or, better yet: Performance Anxiety.

Nick Pinkerton, “Sight and Sound”, no. 23, November 2013