There is only one way to view Dressed to Kill as dangerous, and that is if you are literal enough to read it straight. De Palma’s career has been hounded by accusation of misogyny because too many people think he is serious about his subject matter. They miss (or ignore) De Palma’s guiding voice behind the camera lens telling us that, beneath its literal exterior, this is all an elaborate parody. Dressed to Kill, with its transsexual serial killer, graphic murder scenes, and steamy shower fantasies that turn suddenly violent is too easy to find offensive if you read it literally, which is exactly what many people did.

But, once you absorb De Palma’s intricate camerawork, take into account the mixture of straight and over-the-top performances by the actors, and look at how Pino Donaggio’s orchestral score works ironically against the action on-screen, a whole different experience emerges, one that is a brilliant send-up of suspense and horror conventions that is, at the same time, extremely suspenseful and often vary scary. Some react against De Palma’s movies because they work too well. If he were a shabby, lazy director who made bad movies with violence against women, no one would care. The problem is that he is too skilled, too perceptive about how our buttons get pushed, and too adept at manipulating our emotions; people get angry because he works them over, but only the ones who can’t see the humor in it all, especially their own vulnerability in the darkness of the movie theater.

This is where De Palma excels, as did his spiritual cinematic mentor, Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock could get away with it because, since the late 1950s, he had been elevated to auteur status among academics and the high-art crowd. In 1980, De Palma was still viewed by many as a hack, despite his being highly acclaimed by film critics throughout the 1970s. It is at this point, of course, that we should not forget how intensely negative was the response to Hitchcock’s Psycho—now an undisputed cinematic masterpiece and historical milestone—when it was first released. Stanley Kauffman, writing in The New Republic, could have been writing about Dressed to Kill when he complained that Hitchcock employed “his considerable skill in direction and cutting and in the use of sound and music to shock us past horror-entertainment into resentment.”

Like Psycho, it is difficult to describe the plot of Dressed to Kill without giving away its secrets. Suffice it to say that it is a murder-mystery that involves a sexually frustrated housewife (Angie Dickinson), her brainy, inventive teenage son (Keith Gordon), her psychoanalyst (Michael Caine), and a high-price call girl (Nancy Allen). The murderer in the film is a transsexual named Bobbi who is also one of Caine’s patients, which raises the interest of the investigating detective (Dennis Franz). Like Psycho, it is structured around a sudden shift in audience identification, as De Palma succeeds in getting us to identify wholly with one character, before introducing a sudden murder and then switching the identification to another character. He does this exceptionally well, and it helps that the two characters with whom we are meant to identify are interesting and likable people, well-played by the actors.

As a director, De Palma had reached his greatest point of maturity with Dressed to Kill; it is a movie in which he is completely and utterly in control of every detail, no matter how seemingly insignificant. The movie has a trashy, almost contemptible brilliance, and as Kauffman complained about Hitchcock, I think many thought De Palma was squandering his talent on junky murder and horror movies laced with pop psycho-babble and lots of blood and nudity. Yet, it is exactly this kind of material that cries out for the treatment De Palma lavishes on it because, otherwise, it sinks into mediocrity. He infuses the material with a dark wit and punches it up with dirty, but recognizable sexual fantasies and an overriding theme about guilt. In terms of the mechanics of writing, De Palma is not particularly great; the structure of Dressed to Kill is almost too much a reflection of Psycho (right down to the tedious explain-all scene at the end), and his dialogue is often flat. Yet, he brings the story to life with bombastic visual aplomb and an ironic sensibility. He refuses to take himself too seriously, which is perhaps why so many others did.

Dressed to Kill is replete with memorable sequences that stand on their own as great examples of gripping cinema. A scene in which Angie Dickinson’s character plays a cat-and-mouse game of flirtation with a handsome stranger in a museum is a brilliantly sustained bit of silent cinema, telling us everything we need to know through imagery and music—not a single word of dialogue is needed. The infamous elevator murder sequence is a work of malevolent genius, both for its effectively gory shock tactics and the careful manner in which De Palma frames the aftermath, showing how another character catches a glimpse of the murderer in a concave mirror, thus sending the narrative into an entirely new direction (one can already see him paying homage to his own previous work, in this case his 1973 film Sisters).

As the years have passed, the controversy surrounding Dressed to Kill has subsided, especially as De Palma’s reputation as an auteur in academic circles has increased. Those who vilified the movie in 1980 probably still think it is a sick piece of trash that encourages violence against women, even if their efforts have been expended in other areas. As happens with most situations of that nature, time and reflection have shown that the outrage surrounding its release was mostly overheated and misguided. The movie’s detractors have the right goal—to eliminate violence against women, or against anybody, for that matter—but pinning such a wide-ranging social blight on a single movie or group of movies only takes attention away from its real sources. As the controversy has subsided, the humorous detachment De Palma always intended when he made Dressed to Kill has only become more obvious.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

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