Dressed To Kill [DVD]

A typical day in New York City. Psychiatrist Dr Elliot (Michael Caine) listens to Kate (Angie Dickinson) outlining her marital problems before she wanders off to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and picks up a mysterious stranger. Meanwhile, disturbed cross-dresser Bobby is ringing Dr Elliot and threatening to carve up his patients. And an uptown hooker (Nancy Allen) is turning tricks to fund her investment portfolio.

Brian de Palma's glossy and gratuitous cult classic is an unashamed homage to Alfred Hitchcock - not just one shower scene, but two - and has some marvellous set pieces. Especially the minor ones - check out the accusing looks of the little girl in the elevator when Kate heads home from her afternoon tryst with a lover.

A word of warning on the DVD available in the UK though. Unfortunately, this DVD has no screen set-up extras to allow you to choose the viewing format (though there are 5 language options and scene-selection). It is made to be viewed on a widescreen TV. It plays at 16:9 ratio on a standard TV, but this is not a pan-and-scan version, so you miss bits from the edge. It only REALLY interferes with a couple of scenes, when you get half the face of a character talking, but is an obvious flaw, not to mention a distraction, if you are a fan of the film. It comes with the original theatrical trailer.

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The story is simple. Psychiatrist, Micheal Cain's patients and female acquaintances are being staked by a black gloved cross dressing killer. The performances are all pretty good. Cain is at his subdued best. Nancy Allen is very appealing as the witness to a murder and the intended next victim. And Kieth Gordon is ahead of his time as a youthful techno nerd.

Although, Dressed to Kill clearly owes a debt to Psycho the execution is actually very different. Hitchcock's film used extreme close-ups, odd angles, sharp staccato editing and a near atonal score to create an oppressive atmosphere. DePalma's movie is a dreamlike ballet of gliding camera work and lush , romantic, music, that acts more as a counterpoint to the suspense than as another means or reinforcing it. It's a very fluid film, with a deliberately artificial surface sheen. The gallery stalking of Angie Dickinson is a standout, mixing the crass with the beautiful, tinging a romantic fantasy with a tawdry reality. It's been criticised for cruelty and misogyny, but to me this scene is about need and isolation. Ultimately Dickinson is sympathetic as a middle aged woman who wants more than a drab marriage to a boring selfish man. Her fate is sad, not deserved.

Dressed to Kill came out at the height of the slasher boom, but is neither a slasher film or a conventional crime drama. It's is, however, a strikingly sinuous giallo like thriller from one of America's supreme visual stylist.

Plot:

Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is an unfulfilled housewife. Her son (Peter Miller) is something of a genius who she loved very much, but her husband does not satisfy her sexually. She confides in her psychiatrist, Dr Robert Elliot (Michael Caine), about her desire for an affair even propositioning him before she embarks on an erotic adventure with a stranger she plays cat and mouse with an art museum. Meanwhile after hearing a disturbing message on his answering machine, Elliot fears one of his patients might be dangerous. A horrific murder soon follows, involving a mysterious blonde-haired women and a prostitute witness, Liz Blake (Nancy Allen)...

Review:

"Dressed to Kill" is far from Brian De Palmer's greatest work. Some have called it an evolution in his work and perhaps the slowly widening camera angles and overblown musical scores hint towards what would make "Scarface" (1983) and "The Untouchables" (1987) such a great mainstream pictures later, but it does seem to be a big step back from his earlier film "Carrie" (1976) the other true example of his brilliance as a director. If "Dressed to Kill" is the watershed point of his career then it could be evidence for the old cliché one has to move backwards in order to move forwards.

The style of the film is a peculiar and disjointed mixture of design concepts. Never one to blush at imitating other director's ideas, "Dressed to Kill" seems like something of a collage of his past ideas and those of other directors. The result is a film that seems highly stylized in some respects and yet also feels like a TV movie. This latter aspect might come from the fact that transfers of this film don't seem to be very good, but unfortunately I put it more down to the way the scenes are strung together - for example there is an utterly pointless extended aftermath played mainly for effect that does not perform nearly as well as when he did with "Carrie". With the exception of Michael Caine - who puts in a rather uncharacteristic understated performance here - the acting is moderate to poor. This might have something to do with the material, as both De Palmer regular Nancy Allen and Angie Dickinson have worked to a far higher standard in other films.

At face value it seems to be Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" taken to the big city and with a new twist. Transvestite killer is updated, if you like, to transsexual killer and the film is bookended with shower references. They are the obvious tributes to Hitchcock. Then there is the misdirection for the first quarter of the film with very little in the way of forewarning the events to come. Of course, this was another distinguishing feature of "Psycho". However, "Dressed to Kill" cannot resist giving us a slight taster of the nature of the film during its rather erotic opening shower sequence. Incidentally the nude shots in this scene are performed by a body double. One could argue this scene and the lengthy piece of erotic fantasy fiction that are unnecessary, but at the same time I feel it serves as part of the misdirection - and no, I doubt it will spoil it for you. The whole first quarter seems like something of an extension on what he did with "Carrie", another film that began with a shower sequence (although I think we can lay that one at Stephen King's door, even if De Palmer clearly eroticizes it).

I think perhaps the biggest problem that today's first time viewers might have with the film is that it is clearly very dated. What made it controversial in 1980 - the sex, the transgender issues and violence - seems very tame by 21st century standards. Unfortunately they seem a little exploitative now. I have made my case for the eroticizing and nudity - and it does serve as a plot device - but one can understand why transsexuals might have been offended at the time. It would be an issue revisited in blatant slasher pics like "Nightmare Vacation" (aka "Sleepaway Camp") and only really put into context by "Silence of the Lambs" when Jody Foster's character tells us that transsexuals are normally placid by nature. Violence, another staple of De Palmer's films, also seems moderate compared to the films that would immediately follow in the 1980s and beyond. In fact, they are quite reserved (if hacking someone to death with a straight razor could ever be called reserved) compared to many exploitation movies of the '70s.
So is the film an effective thriller? I have say, yes it is. I didn't see the twist coming and it made sense when it did. The decision to misdirect was a good one and De Palmer executed it well. The decision to have a lengthy aftermath sequence was understandable, otherwise the film would have just felt like an x-rated episode of "Murder, She Wrote", but it just was the wrong ending. It is an entertaining film even if the scenes seem to be blocky and the editing could have been a bit tighter. Caine and Dickinson's characters are interesting, but Dennis Franz's cop is very one dimensional, Nancy Allen's tart with a heart is by far not one of her best roles and the young Keith Gordon's avenging genius teenager fails to engage. It seems odd to say, but De Palmer seems to handle copying Alfred Hitchcock pretty well. He just doesn't seem to be very good at copying himself. An evolution in style perhaps, but I would liken this more to a metamorphosis with this being the chrysalis stage.