Angie Dickinson's cruel fate in an elevator sets off Brian De Palma's intriguing thriller plot in Dressed to Kill, one of his great early 80s tributes to Alfred Hitchcock.
Dressed to Kill (1980), directed by Brian De Palma from his own script; starring Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen, Keith Gordon, and Dennis Franz.
Like Still of the Night, Dressed to Kill is another film I saw in the theater when I was in college. Damn, I must have seen a lot of movies in college. At the time, I didn’t know anything about Brian De Palma and very little about Hitchcock's work. Dressed to Kill is even more blatantly a Hitchcock homage/reboot than Still of the Night, and it's a much better film all around.
I remembered Dressed to Kill all these years later for its unforgettable plot and sleazy, somewhat surreal atmosphere. As a more sophisticated film fan today, rewatching it almost forty years later, I racked up the Hitchcock homages. I counted major hat tips to Vertigo, Psycho, and Rear Window. The film begins and ends with two suspenseful shower scenes, obviously inspired by that scene in Psycho.
Angie Dickinson is herself a Hitchcock tribute: the cool, elegant blonde in a white, wool coat (recalling the white coat that Kim Novack wears in the Big Sur beach scene in Vertigo.) She plays Kate Miller, an upper-middle-class East Coast housewife who is sexually unfulfilled. Her therapist, Dr. Elliott, (portrayed by Michael Caine) hears all about it as Kate complains about her husband’s lousy performance in bed.
After unloading on Dr. Elliott, she prowls around town and ends up at an art museum, where she sits on a bench and stares at a painting for a long time. Of course, this is a major clap-back to the same scene in Vertigo, where Kim Novak’s character sits on a bench and stares at a painting, while being tailed by former police detective John Scott “Scottie” Ferguson (Jimmy Stewart).
In this version, though, Kate is being tailed by a handsome seducer, not a detective. She and the handsome seducer play a little game of hide-and-seek in the museum. (The museum scene, filmed completely without dialogue, is a great example of Hitchcock’s “pure cinema” theory.) At the end of their hide-and-seek game, they have sex in the back of a cab. Kate then follows the seducer home to his fancy apartment building for more "afternoon delight."
When she leaves, she takes a fatal ride in the elevator, slashed to death by a tall, mysterious blonde woman in sunglasses and a dark coat. Liz Blake (played by Nancy Allen -- at the time Mrs. De Palma), is a high-class hooker leaving an assignation in the same building, and she witnesses the attack.
Dr. Elliott, meanwhile, has his own problems. A former patient named Bobbie, obviously deranged, is leaving nasty messages on his answering machine. Bobbie claims that she’s the blonde who killed Kate and that she wants to kill Liz next. Bobbie is a “transsexual” (as transgender people were known back then), who’s angry at Dr. Elliott for not approving her gender reassignment surgery.
Stalked by Bobbie, Liz Blake hooks up with Peter Miller, Kate’s teenage son, played by Keith Gordon. Peter is a geeky whiz kid who likes to play with movie cameras, especially to spy on his neighbors (clap-back to Rear Window). Peter knows that Dr. Elliott is somehow mixed up with his mother's murder, and he starts spying on the doctor -- with Liz’s help. Dennis Franz is the "guido" police detective (complete with gold neckchains and an open shirt), who initially suspects that Liz is the killer.
The “twist” towards the end that reveals Bobbie’s true identity is pretty original, especially if viewers weren’t paying attention to the clues that De Palma carefully salts in a few scenes before the big “reveal.”
There are a number of expertly done suspense sequences, including one where Bobbie chases Liz through a long subway train, and the two shower sequences. Plus, another suspense sequence involving Liz in black lace lingerie (from this scene, it's easy to see why De Palma fell for the young Nancy Allen.) Her character is much smarter and more sophisticated than the low-rent hooker she plays in De Palma's Blow Out (1981), but Liz is still much the same big-haired hooker that Allen played in her husband's other great thriller of the early 80s.
The acting is good, although nothing really stands out. Caine does his usual ultra-professional job as Dr. Elliott; Allen and Dickinson are good, and Gordon as Peter is excellent (he later turned to directing, mostly for television productions). Pino Donaggio, who composed the brilliant, baroque score for Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now (1973), turns in a worthy accompaniment here, also.
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