With it's recent release on Blu-Ray through the Criterion Collection, I was curious to take another look at Brian DePalma's 1980 horror thriller Dressed to Kill and see if it still holds up some 35 years later. In many ways it is still as frightening and suspenseful as it ever was, but it does have some troubling plot points that stick out even more all these years later.
Kate Miller (played by Angie Dickinson) is a sexually frustrated housewife in an unhappy marriage. One of her bright spots in her life is her son, Peter (played by Keith Gordon), who is a bit of a science whiz but seems to have more interest in his gadgets then her at the moment. She is currently seeing a therapist, Dr. Elliot (played by Michael Caine), whom she confesses her sexual problems and confides in her desire to have an affair. When she is alone one afternoon, she indulges in the fantasy and goes home with a stranger she meets at a museum. She leaves his apartment after their adulterous encounter but quickly heads back when she realizes she forgot her wedding ring there. However, when she reaches the floor the apartment is on the elevator doors open, revealing a large, blond haired woman in dark sunglasses that proceeds to brutally slash her to death with a straight razor. The lone witness to the crime is Liz Blake (played by Nancy Allen), a call girl who was leaving a job when the elevator opened in front of her. Liz catches a glimpse of the woman who attacked Kate in a mirror in the elevator and is barely able to get away. Finding herself the prime suspect by the detective in charge, Detective Marino (played by Dennis Franz), Liz teams up with Kate's son Peter, who feels guilty since he was originally supposed to spend the day with his mother the day she was killed, to figure out who the real killer is.
There is a lot about Dressed to Kill that was still as effective for me as it ever was. Kate's death scene in the elevator is absolutely horrifying, in a large part due to Dickinson's performance in the scene. Likewise the extended chase scene where Liz is pursued by Kate's killer later in the film is incredibly tense. The film is very well shot by Ralf Bode, setting up many interesting shots using split diopter, which creates a deep depth of field within the shot. An example of this is pictured above, from a scene where Peter listens in on a conversation between Dr. Elliot and Detective Marino. DePalma also does a great job crafting a tense and exciting story both as the film's director and screenwriter. I particularly liked the scenes of Liz and Peter working together to find his mother's killer. They worked well together and made an interesting pair, mixing his technical prowess and cleverness with her street smarts.
It's not until close to the end that the film really stumbles. It is revealed that the killer is another patient of Dr. Elliot by the name of Bobbi, a transgender woman. There is a scene where a psychiatrist (played by David Margulies) explains to Liz and Detective Marino about Bobbi in a scene that is a direct homage to a similar scene at the end of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. However, the explanation given is so badly fumbled in the execution is appears that the fact that Bobbi is transgender rather than the fact that she suffers from dissociative identity disorder is responsible for her homicidal actions, with the murderous Bobbi identity being completely separate from their main personality. It's badly written and has always really bugged me. I don't think the film was deliberately trying to be transphobic but with this scene it really comes off that way. The film does go out of it's way to include other information about transgender people to attempt to balance it out, but with the badly fumbled ending scene it doesn't quite work. Does this ruin the film for me? No, actually it doesn't because I'm smart enough to know that one film character is not representative of an entire community, nor does the film really attempt to portray it that way. It just has one unfortunate scene that probably caused a lot of misinformation for people who saw the film, but I would hope that one wouldn't take a pulpy psychological horror film like this quite so seriously, or as a source for medical facts, in the first place. If nothing else, it is also a benchmark showing how far we've come with understanding transgender people in the last 35 years.
Overall, Dressed to Kill, despite it's few significant flaws, remains a superior suspense film that certainly continues to keep me on the edge of my seat when I watch it. I am able to get past some of the more controversial plot elements because I don't believe the movie was deliberately trying to be malicious towards an entire community, but at the same time I can understand the controversy the film continues to provoke.
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