Murder à la Mod might as well be titled 'superstar student film' as it has everything to appeal to the 60s film crowd. De Palma puts his core subject matter right up front with odd photo montages, a slasher murder and a series of softcore screen tests of young women being asked to take their clothes off, thus introducing his voyeuristic theme directly through the camera. The chances were that a New York film school was one of the few places where Michael Powell's Peeping Tom could be seen in 1966 and Murder à la Mod is filled with references to it.

As if suspended between film school and 42nd Street, De Palma is fascinated by slimy skin flick moviemaking. His leading character Christopher makes 'hot' nudie films and turns out to be a criminal with a Peeping Tom camera. His straightforward audition takes don't get the desired results, so he simply steals images of his seductions with his overhead spy camera. Just as Peeping Tom's secret film lab was the dirty secret file of its murderer-hero's warped brain, Christopher's upstairs office contains his two 'other selves,' a ruthless smut producer (Murder à la Mod's real producer Ken Burrows) and an infantile prankster, William Finley.

Brian De Palma puts all of his energy into how his story is told, as most of the events depicted could be covered in a twenty-minute short. The script takes a page from Kubrick's The Killing by slicing up the same hour or so of real time into four or five overlapping viewpoints. A savage murder is seen from the point of view of the victim (with important moments carefully skipped over), and then a superimposed time reference tells us that we've wound back the back by half an hour to see the same events observed by another character, and so forth. The puzzle established has us looking for the clues that will make the crazy events gel into a comprehensible whole. Oddly enough, the distancing effect, plus a scene where a character carefully dons black gloves, make Murder à la Mod resemble later Dario Argento murder mystery giallos from Italy.

De Palma also encourages us to enjoy his film as a big cinematic joke. William Finley's absurd character cannot discern the difference between real and unreal, introducing an element of comic instability. The actual murder hinges on a pair of ice picks, one a real weapon and the other a harmless trick prop with a collapsing pick. As Finley plays with the picks, De Palma ridicules our desire to keep the two items straight by superimposing titles that identify which pick is which. De Palma also transitions between his various points of view with teasing freeze frames and other tricks. To initiate one new viewpoint, a watch dial is thrust before the camera instead of an identifying title.

The overlapping timeline technique would eventually lead De Palma to use split screens to create a literal sense of simultaneity; in Murder à la Mod his re-staging results in some glaring continuity errors, especially with those ice picks. This 'cinema playtime' tomfoolery was part of the charm of early De Palma right up through the bloody horror show Sisters. When it later became evident that De Palma wanted us to take his voyeuristic fantasies seriously, his films stopped being funny or serious.

The borrowed structures from Hitchcock, Powell and Kubrick may now seem dishonest, but in1967 they were a breath of fresh air. We didn't consider it stealing back then, but an homage; De Palma's early movies thrilled film students because he was there first and got a lot of attention. By 1970 Murder à la Mod was already a mostly unviewable legend, just the kind of thing a director needs to build a desirable aura of genius.

Murder à la Mod is indeed clever and fun to watch. DePalma piles on tension devices large and small -- a potential parking ticket, purloined riches from a bank vault (as in Psycho), the tracking of a mystery steamer trunk. The Manhattan locations now seem nostalgic. The soundtrack makes room for a join-the-army jingle ("If you're good enough!") and disconnected dialogue from a TV soap opera that happens to be identical to Christopher's whining excuse that Karen should cooperate with him because "he needs the money to divorce his wife." De Palma uses directorial tricks to tell 80% of his story, leaving Margo Norton's concerned Karen to provide a sympathetic heroine.

One of the best moments comes right at the top, when Jennifer Salt appears as one of the girls being tricked into undressing on camera. It's a fine little performance. Brian De Palma helped launch a lot of influential talent, like Jill Clayburgh and Robert de Niro.

The flawless print of Murder à la Mod will make this minor treasure a must-have for Brian De Palma's legions of fans. Both sound and picture are sharp and clear. The show at first looks as though it was meant to be cropped, but many compositions require the entire 1:37 frame.