Review: Dressed to Kill

The film’s funk of hedonism is only as pungent as a perfume sample in a department store catalogue ad.

Dressed to Kill
Photo: Filmways Pictures

It isn’t only because one of the first shots of (the unrated director’s cut of) Dressed to Kill is of Angie Dickinson’s body double lathering her private parts that the cackling spirit of Pauline Kael is resurrected whenever anyone wants to score a few cheap points at the expense of Brian De Palma’s reputation. It’s also because Kael was one of the only contemporary critics who accurately described what wavelengths De Palma’s movies were working on.

For instance, Kael was one of the few who actually used the term “comedy” to describe the obviously riotous Dressed to Kill, which anyone who really listens closely to that Black cleaning woman’s (Amalie Collier) screams after the film’s centerpiece elevator scene could tell you is absolutely accurate. Dressed to Kill is the quintessential erotic horror-comedy of the grindhouse heyday; the film’s luxurious, almost eerily plastique elegance just barely disguises its unapologetic presentation of fetish iconography. It’s a pearled sex toy next to the rough lays that mark the genre, and like all sex toys, it’s remarkably focused on servicing the solitary consumer.

Because fetishizing requires the dislocation and amplification of objects from their surroundings, a quick rundown of the formal dildos and vibrating bullets on De Palma’s kink counter: creamy, coordinated couture, complete with sonically active jewelry and heels; razor fixation (reminiscent of Dario Argento, though predating the astonishing moment when blaze meets bulb in Tenebre); manhole steam illuminated by porn shops’ marquee lights; the sighs of a masturbating woman merging with the prurient bloom of Pino Donaggio’s best score (even if you get the sense that De Palma probably wanted something closer to his and Alfred Hitchcock’s former collaborator Bernard Herrmann’s score from Taxi Driver); the choreography of the Phil Donohue split-screen, with exactingly timed parallel turns; a room-filling gadget that only carries and holds up to 20 binary digits inside a film that functions primarily like a machine; “What’s the going rate on running red lights?”; a jerry-rigged time-lapse camera hidden in a shoebox; a sex worker comfortable strutting along Wall Street and launching over subway turnstiles; the way the cross-dressing psycho’s name, Bobbi, is spelled; the fact that Dressed to Kill the only one of De Palma’s “red period” films whose color palette is overwhelmingly blue.

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Dressed to Kill certainly belongs in the rich company of Noo Yawk, Rotten Apple, post-disco, post-feminist, post-Stonewall, post-Son of Sam urban-nightmare films that seemed to emerge from the faded balconies of the slightly more upscale grindhouse venues on and around 42nd Street. Though the current cultural climate around gender identity has turned De Palma’s film into a far more politically disreputable property, Dressed to Kill’s funk of hedonism is only as pungent as a perfume sample in a department store’s monthly catalog.

The film glides in stark contrast to the thick grime of its shrieking cinematic sisters: Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45, William Lustig’s Maniac, and William Friedkin’s Cruising. The latter film was a project De Palma himself wanted to make initially and had written a screenplay for as early as 1974. He ultimately passed the project over to Friedkin, who crafted a provocative, troubling masterpiece of his own to complement De Palma’s much-protested hit. That’s probably just as well, since De Palma’s original script reportedly spent far more time creating an erotic fantasy life for a character who had little to do with Cruising’s central plot about the psychosexual role-playing kinship between undercover cops and fisting-happy sex pigs.

No, what we have here is the work of a director who saw the charred aftermath of the sexual revolution’s late-’70s bust and thought, “I should cast my wife as a hooker again. A real Park Avenue whore.” Who, instead of taking a gritty, hard-on look at the twisted bi-curious ground shared by Ms. 45 or Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz, inflates paperback-pulp psychology into something only abstractly resembling a plot, all the better to demonstrate that filmmaking is an inherently visual storytelling. Who is justifiably confident enough in his craft that he can limit himself to two schools of dialogue: soap-operatic exposition and silence. Who, to paraphrase Kael, could turn a seamy museum pick-up into an accelerated, 10-minute Dangerous Liaisons.

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The pleasures of the screwball Dressed to Kill (emphasis on both “screw” and “ball”) flat-out do not translate to print, but for what it’s worth, it’s the most perfectly directed film ever, provided that you, like this critic, bust into orgasmic laughter when Jerry Greenberg’s double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat that Nancy Allen’s Liz Blake and a wooden Samm-Art Williams’s subway cop can see boarding the subway train is a 250-pound bag lady.

Score: 
 Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickenson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, Dennis Franz, David Margulies, Ken Baker, Susanna Clemm, William Finley  Director: Brian De Palma  Screenwriter: Brian De Palma  Distributor: Filmways Pictures  Running Time: 105 min  Rating: R  Year: 1980  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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