That’s Hollywood - mass-marketed magic - but DE PALMA has always been just as realistic about cinema’s voyeurism. And the idea of the magician, deceiving through his little mechanisms, runs both ways.

Fortunately, the fate of the production doesn’t seem to have yielded results too estranged from the shaggy-dog feel of the comedies that landed DE PALMA the gig, like GREETINGS(1968) and HI MOM (1970).

SMOTHERS’s gullible deadpan, the way he holds back as if he’ll deliver a wisecrack, and then doesn’t - a delayed technique of missed expectations that seems so mannered elsewhere - really fits this story.

RABBIT also gives us two hallmarks of DE PALMA’s comic style: a scene of bedroom intrusion, maybe sexually dubious, here skewing a little towards MONTY PYTHON; and an also sexually dubious bit character, whose drive is both perverse and burlesquely comic.

In an early scene, a routine-bound piano tuner interrupts Donald and his wife (dressed identically to another housewife in a flat visible in a picture window) one morning as they’re waking up. The fellow, finding there’s no piano, barely knows what to do with himself, but immediately keys into their marital tension and somehow contrives to serve them breakfast - thereby making up, and prolonging, his intrusion.

Later on, when Donald has moved to a bare-bones room for rent, a leering cigar-chomper barges in and drags him to a six-day party, a creepily silent affair as crowded and lurid as a German Expressionist painting. The guy loudly maintains that the woman Donald picks up there is some sack artist, but himself turns out to be an obsessive brassiere salesman who wants to find her a perfect fit.

The strength of the scenario is its loopy consistency; the three make up eventually, the guy apologizes for his temper, and he leaves muttering that he just wants to find a woman who appreciates a good, mid-range bra.

Similarly, when Donald has returned to the company his ex-boss has rebuilt, the movie neatly brings back ROSS from his traveling-magician days - and she's still expecting him to show up at a gig for a welder's association.

And his anxious ex-boss is treated as an executive just searching for his habitat - a desk set!

GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT ends as many DE PALMA movies would - at its beginning - with Donald seated, at least momentarily, at a desk once again. (The company is called Tap Dancing Magician - TDM (tedium?) - the umpteenth IBM-ethic reference of the period).

This is such an original piece of work that one can see why DE PALMA, working from the material, or creating and building on it more, got fired towards the end of production: one can scarcely believe that a studio like Warner Brothers bankrolled or OKed what this movie is - which is an insane and kind of jolly satire on happiness versus the existential dilemma.