Before he got hung up on Hitchcock, Brian De Palma seemed to want to launch an American nouvelle vague. This freewheeling satire may be the most '1968' of all the films made that year, following three long-haired drop-outs through various contemporary obsessions: sexual liberation, political paranoia, Vietnam.
Even before hitting on the thriller as his preferred genre, De Palma is fascinated by the mechanics of voyeurism, with a young Robert De Niro as a camera freak unsure whether he is an artist or a pervert, and Gerritt Graham as the snooper into the Kennedy assassination who finds himself in a sniper's crosshairs.