Dressed to Kill (1980)

Brian De Palma was heavily, heavily influenced by Alfred Hitchcock and it shows. His movies always feature characters on their own against horrible evil that lurks underneath a pleasant facade. So today we cover his first movie of the '80s - Dressed to Kill (1980). 

Dressed to Kill starts with a wild, "WOW!" opening - we see a woman touching herself in the shower as she watches a man shaving with a straight razor as lilting, romantic soap opera music for violins plays. Then, suddenly, shockingly, she is attacked in the shower by a man. She cries out a horrible scream that echoes as the screen fades to black ... and cuts to her in bed, making love with dead eyes to the man who was shaving earlier. 

This is a twisted world, my friends. This is Angie Dickinson's masterpiece, as well. She is just top notch, working with Michael Caine (always good). She plays Kate Miller, a bored housewife who has your everyday housewife rape fantasies ... and who begins a real affair with a stranger she meets at a museum... and then is brutally murdered (!!!!!!!). 

Taking cues from Hitchcock's Psycho, De Palma kills off the purported heroine a third of the way in, shocking audiences and destabilizing the viewer. But there was a witness to her murder ... Liz, an escort, who must team up with the slaughtered Kate's electronics-wizard son to catch the killer when the cops (as in Hitchcock) prove stupid, ineffective, unwilling to help. Caine plays Kate's psychologist who tries to help solve the murder with no help from the authorities. 

This movie is chock full of incredible style and iconography taken right from Hitchcock - the fantastic museum scene (extremely reminiscent of the scene in Vertigo where Jimmy Stewart follows a woman to an art museum in San Francisco). It starts in total silence, and ends with a series of tracking shots of Kate alternated with shots from her point of view as she curiously follows the man she has shared glances with. In Hitchcock, as in this movie, such tracking shots mean the character is being drawn irresistibly into a terribly dangerous position (see: Notorious, North by Northwest, Vertigo, many others). It's used to great effect here. 

The film also has a great soundtrack (by Pino Donaggio) full of lilting violins that remind me very much of Angelo Badalamenti's immortal score for David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986). It enriches every scene and fabricates an atmosphere of real danger ... but classy danger. I would go so far as to say this is one of the best orchestral soundtracks of the 1980's. 

The camera is always moving, as well. We see Kate on the museum stairs (stairs - another Hitchcock icon, where the character encounters some danger) and the camera lowers, pans left, zooms back out to show a taxi, then zooms in to show the stranger waving her glove at her in a "come hither" way. The camera works as almost a surrogate for the viewer, and as such it enhance the tension tremendously.

I could write about this movie all night - a good sign - but will instead say instead that the look of the film is also heavily inspired by Vertigo - shadows alternate with bright clothing choices (white especially) and interesting, baroque sets. It looks great. 

Be sure to catch Dennis Franz as the terrible cop - but with a full head of dark hair!

The movie did very well in the box office. IMDB reports it cost $6.5 mil to make and brought back almost $32 mil - pretty damn good for a mid-July release in 1980, coming up against The Empire Strikes Back, Caddyshack, and Airplane.