This is not to say that the film is bad or unwatchable. The Wedding Party is the kind of cute farce that students from the Sixties would make primarily for an audience of their peers. Having been an NYU film student at the end of the decade, I speak from experience. De Palma's taste for satire and sight gags would be developed in future films. The rich white people teased gently here would be treated more savagely in films like Greetings and Hi, Mom. Some of the visual humor is inspired, if not by silent films, then second-hand by Godard, Truffaut and quite probably, Richard Lester.

De Palma has become something of the Rodney Dangerfield among the so-called Film Generation directors. Instead of giving his films fair evaluations, De Palma has too frequently been written off for imitating Alfred Hitchcock. I have to wonder why Claude Chabrol is not held to the same standard, especially as his films have become increasingly formulaic. More than any other filmmaker from the Nouvelle Vague, Chabrol has made films that are similar to the French "Cinema of Quality" that Cahiers du Cinema had rebelled against fifty years ago. De Palma, at his best, including the maligned Femme Fatale, still manages to take his narrative into unexpected places, often with startling images. While Chabrol sometimes is too refined for his own good, De Palma is unafraid to shock, jolt and above all, entertain.