dressed to kill (spine 770)

Dressed to Kill
Directed by: Brian De Palma
1980
Spine #770

Frequent Pop contributor Joe Frankel is the biggest Brian De Palma fan/expert I know. We recently rewatched Dressed to Kill together, and I post this piece knowing that he almost certainly could have written something ten times more insightful.

Watching Brian De Palma’s early thrillers is almost like experiencing a director working in a cinematic language that no longer exists. Plenty of other filmmakers have exhibited a self-consciousness in terms of the camera’s existence… but in De Palma’s case, it’s almost like a physical extension of himself; assimilated, like some Cronenberg-style body horror, on an organic level - a next-level fusion of flesh and lens.

Dressed to Kill is arguably the best of De Palma’s lurid exercises in cinematic suspense (at worst it’s a coin flip between it and Blow Out). The director’s Hitchcockian influences are so well-documented (and this film, in particular, is such a transparent spiritual successor to Psycho), it’s easy to overlook the fact that the picture remains arguably the most successful attempt to incorporate the DNA of the Italian giallo subgenre popularized throughout the 70s into an American slasher. It’s clear that De Palma has no interest in anything outside of the artificial constructs of the movie’s own heightened reality - a world where dream bleeds into nightmare, and nightmare into dream. As was the case with Psycho, we spend the first third of the film following a character who’s not actually the protagonist - Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), who has a teenage egghead son named Peter (Keith Gordon) and a not-particularly-gratifying sex life with her second husband… a fact she confides to her therapist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine, a quintessential portrait of cerebral, poker-faced calm).

Kate eventually ends up at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she engages in a flirtation with a mysterious stranger… the two of them wordlessly stalking one another to Pino Donaggio’s evocative score as the camera tracks through the cavernous galleries, De Palma allowing a vague undercurrent of danger to dig its nails into the scene’s underbelly. Eventually this leads to a sexual tryst, and just when you believe the tension’s been defused (or misdirected, rather, thanks to a darkly comic reveal in the mystery man’s apartment), Kate meets an unfortunate demise in the building’s elevator. De Palma stages her murder with maximum ghoulish bravado. The set piece is teased out with such a deliberate and stylistic gusto, one can almost picture him immediately off-screen, directing like a frenzied conductor, demanding more crescendoing thunder from the timpani drums. The end result frankly rivals anything Argento, Bava, Fulci, Dallamano, or Martino ever produced. 

The killer is a transsexual named “Bobbi” - a former patient of Dr. Elliott’s who, enraged over his refusal to authorize her sexual reassignment surgery, has stolen his straight razor and makes it clear she intends to do nefarious things with it. The idea of a film from 1980 - in the hands of any director, let alone one with a distinct flair for the salacious, such as De Palma - dealing with a transsexual killer sets off nervous alarm bells. But while the film doesn’t necessarily pass the smell test in 2023 (trans people, understandably, are queasy over anything that links their community to sexual violence and mental illness), the depiction isn’t quite as retrograde as you might think (the portrayal of some Black street toughs on the subway is arguably far more cringeworthy). De Palma, interestingly, includes footage of Phil Donohue’s real-life interview with trans woman Nancy Hunt at one point… and his outlook is one of clinical detachment, rather than judgment. Transsexuality is mainly utilized for the sake of providing the film, like Psycho, with a Freudian subtext. It’s a tool entirely in service of the story’s pulp thriller conventions - like the cheap paperback suspense melodramas with their trademark yellow covers from which the giallo subgenre derives its name.   

The second half of the movie follows Peter, as he tries to track down Bobbi with the help of Liz (Nancy Allen), the high-class prostitute who witnessed Kate’s murder (Dennis Franz, meanwhile, hams it up as a New York detective who’s all gold chains, cheap cologne and spearmint gum). The climax is a suspense masterclass (even if you know exactly where the plot is going, it hardly matters - such is the audacious, high-wire spell the film casts), the movie taking on a dreamlike terror and elegance as its denouement unfolds. De Palma detractors might argue that the film exists solely for the sake of its own inflated showmanship, but that does a disservice to the director’s rigorous technique. Dressed to Kill doesn’t just wear its stylistic influences on its sleeve - it completely envelops itself in them, like an expensive mink coat, and preens about unapologetically… yet it would be a mistake to regard any perceived lack of subtly as a drawback. The end result is magnetic theater. We go to the movies to be dazzled, transported, to be held rapt - and De Palma puts on a hell of a show.