“First it was color. Then sound. Then 3D and CinemaScope. Now, the most exciting new storytelling technique in film history: anamorphic Duo-Vision – a new film experience.” So goes the theatrical trailer for Wicked, Wicked, a Psycho-inspired high-camp curio best known not for its content but its presentation. “Duo-Vision,” of course, is marketing speak for split-screen.
Released in June 1973, Wicked, Wicked is one of the first feature films to unfold (almost) entirely in split-screen. With its masked killer on one side and his oblivious victims on the other, the movie showcases thrills, spills and chills that, according to producer MGM, had absolutely no precedent. “You’ve never seen anything like it before,” the trailer concludes. Of course, that wasn’t true; filmmakers have been experimenting with split-screen since the beginning of cinema.
Edwin S. Porter used the technique to show a man’s thoughts in 1903’s Life Of An American Fireman. Lois Weber’s Suspense, from 1913, features a chic three-way triangular split. And Abel Gance’s 1927 epic, Napoléon, boasts a split triptych, dubbed “Polyvision,” that required three reels to be projected side by side, resulting in a whoppingly wide 4:1 aspect ratio.
Of the countless filmmakers to have played with the technique, though, none are more closely associated with it than Brian De Palma. His fifth feature, 1970’s Dionysus in ’69, is a recorded performance of the Ancient Greek play The Bacchae by an experimental New York theater troupe, shot entirely in split-screen. But the director’s later, more lurid 1970s movies, Sisters, Phantom of the Paradise, and Carrie, are credited with (re)popularizing split-screen throughout the decade. Not even De Palma, however, would commit to the bit quite like Robert L. Bare.
Wicked, Wicked’s writer and director, a veteran of TV who helmed many classic episodes of The Twilight Zone, was so smitten by the idea of a split picture that he even penned his screenplay to reflect it – it was written in landscape, with each side of the script corresponding to events on that respective side of the screen.
Part proto-slasher, part melodrama, Wicked, Wicked is set at a sprawling California hotel, where single blonde women seem to be checking in but not out. The manager insists the missing guests are nothing more than a coincidence. Security lead Rick Stewart (David Bailey) thinks otherwise. His investigation is complicated by the arrival of the hotel’s new resident entertainer, his ex-wife Lisa (Tiffany Bolling), who quickly catches the killer’s eye.
With its abundant innuendo and knowing nods to genre cinema, Wicked, Wicked might as well be called Wink, Wink. Its camp tone is exercised not just through performance but through form. Editor John F. Schreyer is having fun with Duo-Vision right from the opening attack. A woman checks in at the front desk; someone watches from the ceiling. She enters her room; he sharpens his knives. She undresses; he unlocks the door. The split-screen recedes as he attacks, stabbing her repeatedly, before resuming to deliver a macabre punchline: she lies bloodied in the bathtub; he makes a phone call. “Room service? Yes, the prime rib is very nice. How would you like it?” The killer tucks into his steak — medium-rare.
De Palma refers to this as “contrapuntal action” – one screen serving as a counterpoint to the other. “With split-screen, the audience has a chance to put two images together simultaneously and something happens in their head,” he says in the 2015 documentary De Palma. “You’re giving them a juxtaposition.”
Some of Schreyer’s split-screen editing is more utilitarian. But it’s in these dynamic, polyrhythmic juxtapositions, such as when the editor draws comparisons, makes jokes or deliberately upsets continuity, that Duo-Vision is at its most engaging. We see flashbacks play out alongside present-day events and fabrications undercut by cold, hard facts. As part of his inquiry, Stewart questions hotel employees on their whereabouts – on the left, a bellboy says he punched in the night before at “nine on the money”; on the right, the clock reads 9.15 pm. “Took a nap about five or six o’clock this morning?” asks Stewart. “Oh no, sir,” comes the reply, as we see him sleeping just across the screen divide.
With its stalk-and-slash narrative involving investigations, gendered violence, and a mixed-up murderer, Wicked, Wicked shares many superficial similarities with the works of De Palma, particularly Dressed to Kill, Blow Out and Body Double. More salient, though, are the shared themes of voyeurism. For De Palma, voyeurism is particularly cinematic. With the point-of-view shot, the director places us behind the eyes of a character – we see what they see when they see it, and become complicit in the peeping. The invisible camera operator, through whose lens we are watching, is complicit too. In split-screen, you can do it twice.
What could be better, then, for a director obsessed with voyeurism and the act of observance, than multiple screens on which to watch those being watched and those doing the watching? Wicked, Wicked’s commitment to split-screen allows the audience to inhabit the role of voyeur in totality, able to see through the killer’s eyes while also watching the killer doing the watching. If Gance’s triple-projection technique for Napoléon was christened “Polyvision,” you might call Wicked, Wicked – and the works of De Palma – “poly-voyeurism.” Twice the sleaze, twice the excitement. MGM’s marketing suggested audiences would experience “twice the tension, twice the shock,” too. For Harry and Michael Medved, however, it proved twice the disappointment.
Published in 1980, the brothers’ book, The Golden Turkey Awards: The Worst Achievements in Hollywood History, was a kind of proto-Razzies anti-celebration of cinematic mishaps and malpractice. It features such categories as “The Most Embarrassing Movie Debut of All Time,” “The Most Unerotic Concept in Pornography,” and “The Worst Performance by an Actor as Jesus Christ” (sorry, Ted Neeley). Wicked, Wicked’s nomination? “The Most Inane and Unwelcome ‘Technical Advance’ in Hollywood History.”
It didn’t win (lose?). That honor went to William Castle’s The Tingler and its wonderful “Percepto” system. In relegating Wicked, Wicked and its contemporaries to a joke, though, the Medveds come across as mirthless and mean-spirited, with no respect for that cornerstone of American exploitation and genre cinema: showmanship.
Referring to Duo-Vision as a “technical advance,” even ironically, is missing the point. These were genre pictures cranked out on the cheap, whose makers hoped to make enormous profits at the box office. The gimmicks were never meant to usher in new cinematic standards; they were meant to usher you to your seat. Still, the Medveds had a point. Critics were split on Wicked, Wicked at its release, with some praising its tone and others damning its acting. The most cutting – and most common – critique, though? That the double picture added nothing. Audiences largely agreed.
No matter. Many a genre film that failed at the box office would later build its legacy on home video. But Duo-Vision would be Wicked, Wicked’s undoing there as well. The movie arrived in an age before widescreen TVs, meaning its unique 2.65:1 aspect ratio couldn’t be squeezed into 4:3 without drastically reducing the picture size. Video was a no-go.
So is the concept of a film unfolding entirely in split-screen “inane”? No. But Wicked, Wicked isn’t the strongest argument for that. It’s too staid, too slow, and its script has scarcely enough material to sustain a single screen, never mind a second.
But its faults don’t lie with Duo-Vision. Were the screenplay better and the star power brighter, Wicked, Wicked could’ve been a fierce standard-bearer for full split-screen genre pictures. Instead, 50 years after its release, it remains little seen and little loved. Yes, Wicked, Wicked deserved better than The Golden Turkey Awards. But we probably deserved better than Wicked, Wicked. De Palma, meanwhile, has been nominated for six Razzies. Go figure.
Wicked, Wicked isn’t currently streaming, but you can fully commit and grab the DVD right here.
