Dressed To Kill: Special Edition
2.35:1 Anamorphic Widescreen
MGM Home Entertainment

Reviewed by : Patrick Francis Mannion

Brian De Palma's first critical AND commercial success was "Carrie" in 1976. "The Fury" (1978) followed, and cemented his status as the best thriller/horror director on the scene at the time in American film. De Palma had proven he was fearless in trying new approaches, and not afraid of failure if they didn't work (something he has carried on through the subsequent decades, with a seemingly ever-diminishing return).

I really wished I liked "Dressed To Kill" more than I do. Whether it's the fact that it is so derivative of other work (and yes, especially if that dreaded specter of Alfred Hitchcock IS invoked), or that some of the scenes play out like an actor's workshop/rehearsal (as in the first interview between Dennis Franz and Nancy Allen here), or that the violence in the unrated director's preferred cut is just a bit too graphic for the needs of the film I can't say - it just doesn't all quite gel for me. The new MGM release of "Dressed To Kill" defaults to the original R-rated theatrical cut, yet has a seamless-branching version of the unrated cut.

To be sure, there are a couple of tour de force Steadicam mis-en-scenes within the film (foretelling another brilliant one-shot Steadicam which opened the disastrous "Bonfire Of The Vanities" made by the same director some years later), and again so much of the staging and camerwork are spot on, but the whole doesn't really add up to much more than a pastiche of by-then clichés spiced up with nudity and graphic gore.

A frustrated Manhattan housewife, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson), fantasizes about a sexual encounter while she showers, before her appointment with her psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine). After seeing the shrink she goes to the Metropolitan Museum, where she meets a man she goes off with and has a 'zipless f*%k'. Leaving the man's apartment she is attacked in the building elevator by a blonde woman wielding a straight razor.

The murder is witnessed by call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen), who manages to startle the killer into dropping the razor, which she retrieves. NYPD Detective Marino (Dennis Franz) feels the call girl to be his best suspect, although he also interviews the psychiatrist, and Peter (Keith Gordon), the son of the slain woman.

Liz is followed by the blonde woman in a car and on the subway. She and Peter team up to try to find the blonde murderess, under Marino's threat that he will arrest Liz for the murder.

And, well, what else? - madness and mayhem ensue yet again.

The scene in the museum early in the film is magnificent - not a word spoken, volumes of information given all by gesture and movement, a ballet by the prey (the housewife) and the hunter (a fellow who attempts to pick her up), wherein the roles of the dancers become reversed as the 'dance' proceeds. A Steadicam through the museum galleries and a complicated crane shot exiting the museum into a cab are marvelously executed, the perfect use of images to tell a story. However virtuoso those scenes are - and there are more scattered throughout the show - they don't balance well the plodding storyline, and so much of the obviousness of the plot.

This is an attempt to use "Psycho" as a model, and it fails in that attempt. There are other allusions to Hitchcock's work, "Psycho" being simply the most obvious; De Palma says that yes, he was influenced but no, he was not THAT influenced - yet time and again storyline and sequences feel like a direct lift from Hitchcock's most controversial (and seminal) film.

Don't get me wrong - this is a very good B-film. Brian De Palma started looting the works of other film makers around this time, following with "Blowout", which was certainly 'inspired' by Michaelangelo Antonioni's seminal existential film "Blow Up" from 1965; that Francis Coppola had been inspired by "Blow Up" and wound up with "The Conversation" shows just how perfect a film can be made from similar inspiration, but made totally one's own. De Palma even steals from himself, though some might view it as an homage! There are cheats in this film I just can't forgive.

De Palma IS an extraordinarily visual director - the train station shoot out sequence in "The Untouchables" (heavily influenced by Sergei Eisenstein's "Battleship Potemkin") is one of the greatest off-the-cuff action sequences ever devised (the original scene in the script took place in a car by the tracks, and had none of the excitement or pyrotechnics of De Palma's 'reimagining') - and surely "Dressed To Kill" delivers extremely well in that department.

Angie Dickinson is very good for what she is given; Nancy Allen teeters from acceptable to dreadful; Dennis Franz is fun to watch in an early incarnation of his Buntz/Sipowitz character, and really doesn't falter; Keith Gordon is quite good as the young son; Michael Caine is wasted (he loved the script I'm sure because it meant a good payday for what could have been no more than a week's work on a nice set) in what is essentially msotly a red-herring role.

Editing by Jerry Greenburg, costumes by Ann Roth, art direction by Gary Weist, photography by Ralf Bode and score by Pino Donaggio all contribute to the technical excellence of the production.

Picture:  Framed at 2.35:1 and presented in 16/9 anamorphic, the Panavision image looks pretty good, considering this was one of the worst years ever for Kodak film stock (one of the reasons "Manhattan" and "Raging Bull" were shot in black-and-white, to protest the current Kodak color stock). As with "Carrie", split-diopter shots (where the foreground and background are in focus, but there is some blur between them) and diffused lenses are the order of the day, and part of the original photography, so the softness and grain which show up often are part of the original photography. The elements are in less good shape than "Carrie", again due to film stock, so what appears here is probably as close as one can get to the surviving negative or interpositive. Colors ARE for the most part accurate, with a hint of flux during some scenes, and overall the image is pretty good, with great black level, no edge enhancement, etc..

Sound:  The Dolby Digital 5.1 track is very good, though the reprocessing causes some rather unusual pans to the rear, not quite matching what is appearing on screen - it is minor, but distracting in one scene, where the camera moves from a bathroom door to a bedroom door, essentially yielding no more than a 180 degree sound pan, yet the soundtrack track does a 270 degree pan. The original English mono track is included, as is a French mono track.

Extras:  Another good documentary - written, produced and directed by Laurent Bouzereau - is the main extra. It is not time encoded, and no time is given on the menu, but it's about 30 minutes long, and says pretty much all that needs to be said about the film. Brian De Palma and Nancy Allen are interviewed (apparently during the same session as they were for "Carrie"), as is editor Jerry Greenberg, producer George Litto and star Angie Dickinson, with Michael Caine most notably absent. Dickinson confides she has just finished her "Police Woman" tv series the year before, and that De Palma hired her because he needed someone the audience would immediately like and identify with, as there was no time to set up her character (and, of course, what remains unsaid is that she fulfills PRECISELY the same function as Janet Leigh in "Psycho"). There is a very noticeable difference in how the folks comport themselves here and how those involved in the documentaries on "Carrie" discuss their work - which is also an indication of how this film stands in their body of work (Dickinson thinks she did a great job, but doesn't have anything to say about the film as a whole).

There are three segments on the differences between the 'unrated' cut, the 'R-rated cut' and the broadcast television version - the last being "Slashing Dressed To Kill", in which everyone involved tries hard to justify artistic license as the reason for the more bloody and sexual unrated cut. While the sex didn't bother me the violence did - sometimes less is more, and my gut-level feeling is that the R-rated version works better with the violence. And, inherent in these segments there is the strong argument for letterboxing and making available on DVD seamless branching of different versions of films.

An original theatrical trailer, a stills gallery, and three advertising galleries of poster concepts, print ads and such round out the materials on the DVD.

Summary:  "Dressed To Kill" is not a truly bad film by any means - it is derivative and predictable, but amusing (in a way I don't think was intended), and does indeed contain some great set pieces. It is not, however, the classic piece of art some would have you think it is. (It's funny, I just checked "Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide" and it gives 2 1/2 stars to "Carrie" and 3 1/2 stars to "Dressed To Kill" - however, the "Dressed To Kill" review is of the R-rated theatrical release; oh well, shows what I know - I still stand by my assessment and opinion). On its own it's fun, especially if you don't know the films it evokes.

MGM has done a fine job in putting together another special edition of a De Palma film, and fans will be quite ecstatic - especially at the wonderful $20 price point.

© 2001 Patrick Francis Mannion