Back in Fashion After 35 Years: The Return of "Dressed to Kill" | Features
De Palma did have his share of hits from time to time. "Carrie" was a horror smash that was not only popular with critics and audiences, but which also earned Oscar nominations for co-stars Sissy Spacek and Piper Laurie. De Palma's controversial 1983 remake of "Scarface," although not a hit at first, would eventually go on to become an enormous hit on home video and would earn a place of prominence as a key influence on hip-hop culture. In addition, his adaptations of the boob tube favorites "The Untouchables" and "Mission: Impossible" were the kind of blockbusters that put him, however briefly, into the same orbit as Spielberg, Lucas, et al. However, in these cases, De Palma was able to find properties conceived by other people that would allow him to explore his obsessions within frameworks with a more overt commercial appeal. In fact, it could be argued that there was only one point in time when De Palma's singular vision, pure and unfettered, found true favor in America, both critically and commercially, and that came with the release of his 13th feature film, the knockout suspense thriller "Dressed to Kill." An audacious blend of black humor, blood-red violence and pure cinematic skill, the film was a hugely controversial success when it was released in the summer of 1980 and, as a look at the new Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection confirms, the passage of time has not caused it to lose its ability to arouse, amuse, enrage and terrify viewers in even the slightest.
If nothing else, "Dressed to Kill" doesn't waste any time before getting down to the business of getting audiences all hot and bothered. In the very first sequence, the first of many to highlight Ralf Bode's exquisite, dream-like cinematography, upper-class New York housewife Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is in the shower fantasizing while watching her husband shaving himself with a straight razor on the other side of the curtain. The scene has the dreamy, languorous feel of a softcore photo shoot come to life (a sense accentuated by the fact that Victoria Johnson, the model serving as Dickinson's body double, had previously posed for "Penthouse"). But this is a shower scene, after all, and between the obvious connotations with the most famous scene from "Psycho" (which must have resonated even stronger than expected when first released since Alfred Hitchcock had passed away only a couple of months before, with its ads proclaiming De Palma as "The Modern Master Of Suspense") and the shower scenes that De Palma himself had previously staged for effects both comedic ("Phantom of the Paradise") and horrific ("Carrie") in tone, many viewers must have looked upon it with at least some degree of unease. Right on cue, the mood shifts from the erotic to the frightening as a barely-seen man comes up from behind and attacks her, grabbing her by the throat so that she cannot scream.
The whole thing is, of course, a dream—something cooked up by Kate in her mind to help distract her from the grim approximation of lovemaking that she is enduring with her clueless husband. (The news report on the radio playing in the room generates more erotic heat than he does.) As we soon discover, Kate's sense of alienation is not solely limited to her husband. She has a brainiac son, Peter (Keith Gordon), whom she clearly loves but whose obsession with building computers and other gadgets is something that she can barely understand on even the most basic of levels. She sees a psychiatrist, the eminent Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine), and he is crisp and professional to a fault. He is so professional, in fact, that when Kate flat-out propositions him, he turns her down without a single hesitation—he is her doctor and, more importantly, he has a wife and is unwilling to risk his marriage. By the time Kate leaves his office, she is even more frustrated than she was when she went in, and just one look at her shows that she is someone who is truly starving for affection and will now take it wherever she can find it.
