July 25, 1980.
That was the day Dressed to Kill opened in
theaters across the country, and it marked the first of countless times I would
see the movie projected on a big screen, on a drive-in screen, panned and
scanned for home video, even interrupted and cut to ribbons for network TV. But
I’ll never forget seeing it that first time, in a cavernous old movie palace in
downtown Eugene, Oregon, its lush, complex, violently dynamic and meticulously
choreographed images, all set to a Pino Donaggio score which reflected
precisely those same qualities, thrilling me to my core.
I left that theater
buzzing, even if at first I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about the movie-- it
took me a few days and another screening or two to decide that the outraged
cries of Hitchcock plagiarism coming from some circles were unwarranted. For
me, Dressed to Kill is one of those
movies which so envelops and overtakes my senses, which zeroes in on my sweet
spot of cinematic pleasure to such a degree that it makes every other movie
look visually paltry and pedestrian. After seeing it, especially in a theater,
I’m under its spell to such a degree I begin to believe, however briefly and/or
irrationally, that all movies should
be like this one. (I feel the same way when I see a Robert Altman movie, or in
musical terms whenever I listen to one of my favorite Frank Zappa albums. It’s
that whole unique vision thing.)
The effectiveness of Dressed
to Kill has always been diluted by reduction to the scale of home video, even
when shown unbowdlerized and in its proper aspect ratio. The 2011 MGM release
of Brian De Palma’s unrated version, which restored all the cuts mandated to
the movie’s bookending shower sequences and the elevator murder sequence by the
MPAA in 1980, was a significant improvement, easily the best showcase Dressed to Kill had ever had on home
video up to that time. It even featured a supplement which did an eye-opening,
side-by-side visual comparison between De Palma’s version and the one seen in
theaters, as well as a look at just how badly those sequences were butchered for
the honor of being shown on network television, the sort of censorship which
today, in the age of Game of Thrones, The
Walking Dead and American Horror
Story, seems irredeemably quaint. (These mangled versions of theatrical
hits, scrubbed up for presentation on ABC, CBS and NBC, were how fans of my age
routinely encountered a lot of movies for the first time, especially if they
grew up somewhere outside the big city.)
Happily, the Criterion Collection’s brand-new Dressed to Kill edition, available on Blu-ray
and in a two-disc DVD set, does the movie its ultimate justice. The initial
pressings of Criterion’s discs were marred by an incorrect compression of the image that rendered it slightly squeezed.
After much righteous hullabaloo from the cinephile community and sites like DVD Beaver, Criterion managed to address the problem before most of the discs
had shipped to retailers, and the corrected version, labeled “Second Printing
2015” in fine print on the back cover, hit the streets in early September.
Click on that DVD Beaver link to make the comparisons for yourself if you care
to, but for my money Dressed to Kill
has never been presented with more care and brilliance on home video than in
its Criterion incarnation. It’s a four-star package, from the quality of the
scope imagery right down to the movie’s original mono soundtrack, which may
sound tinny and uneventful to ears trained to require all the bells and
whistles of a Dolby 7.1 assault, but which nevertheless reproduces with
fidelity and clarity the movie’s sound design, especially as it pertains to
showcasing Donaggio’s score, easily his best. This Blu-ray passed the lunatic
Cozzalio litmus test with flying colors: for weeks now after seeing it again I
still want to know why all movies can’t be Dressed
to Kill.
But for as beautiful as Criterion’s presentation of the
movie is, the disc shines in the supplements department as well. The 2015 set
carries over the 2011 MGM disc’s three terrific featurettes—that segment
comparing the unrated, R-rated and network cuts on the movie, in which De Palma
admits at being “enraged” at having to submit his movie to the whims of the
MPAA; a half-hour piece delineating the movie’s production history, directed by
the master of the “making-of” documentary, Laurent Bouzereau; and an
appreciation of Dressed to Kill by
Keith Gordon, who appears in the movie as Peter, the grief-stricken son of the
murdered Kate Miller, and who later became an accomplished director (A Midnight Clear, Mother Night) in his
own right.
Bouzereau’s doc takes a step-by-step approach beginning with
the movie’s genesis, rooted in De Palma’s early involvement with what
eventually became William Friedkin’s film Cruising
as well as in a fascination with transgender psychology. De Palma was
specifically inspired by the appearance of a transsexual on The Phil Donahue Show, a clip from which
appears in the movie. The doc moves through the movie’s shooting-- Angie
Dickinson remembers cinematographer Ralf Bode coming to her during the shooting
of the sequences involving Dickinson’s body double and asking if she knew what
was going on: “We’re doing beaver shots in there!”-- and straight on to the
movie’s largely rapturous critical reception and subsequent condemnation from
feminist groups on charges of misogyny.
The most surprising and satisfying of these MGM holdovers,
however, is Gordon’s brief segment. The actor-director exudes the customary
reverence for his director, but instead of the usual puffery and filler
designed to contribute to the illusion of Blu-ray and DVD “added value,” Gordon
elucidates upon De Palma’s visual method with genuine eloquence, and perhaps
even a bit of directorial envy as well. He enthusiastically details the sound
design and the use of split diopters in the police station interrogation scene,
which De Palma augments aurally with the use of Peter’s homemade surveillance
technology and breaks down visually with multiple frames-within-frames and the
compression of three different rooms within a single shot. Gordon sharply
points out how these directorial flourishes are not just De Palma showing off
but instead serving the material and its themes by constantly disorienting and
calling into question the audience’s perception of who’s watching who, who’s
listening to who, and even just whose point of view is being served at any
given moment.
The movie is a tour de force on the subject of split
personality, and as Gordon points out De Palma’s technique is unusually well
fused to his subject here in his use of devices like split diopters, which
allow two subjects on two completely unrelated focal planes to be in focus at
the same time, split-screens and multiple frames-within-frames, all of which
serve that disorientation but also illuminate the different perspectives at
play within the movie and at war within its characters. In fact, one of
Gordon’s most cogent observations is in regard to the movie’s clever doubling
of the murderer Bobbi, in a leather jacket, blonde wig and sunglasses, with the
cop assigned to keep the character of Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) under
surveillance. De Palma’s storytelling strategy is so clever, Gordon asserts,
that even though the audience doesn’t know as the movie unfolds that Bobbi and
the police officer are in fact two separate characters—we don’t know about the
presence of the cop— the film is acting
as though they are two characters through what De Palma is constantly
reinforcing visually. After being initially and masterfully fooled, the viewer,
upon reviewing what De Palma reveals in the frame over multiple viewings, can
only confirm the truth of Gordon’s claim.
As good as those old segments are, the new material in the Criterion Dressed to Kill collection is just as good. Anticipating the likely
delight of the upcoming feature documentary on the director, there’s a
16-minute segment of a conversation between De Palma and writer-director Noah
Baumbach, who co-directed the upcoming doc about De Palma with Jake Paltrow. The segment is
not culled from that project but instead a conversation commissioned by
Criterion which deals primarily with the position of Dressed to Kill in the director’s career. Baumbach proves to be an
enthusiastic, if somewhat hesitant interviewer, but De Palma seems more than
game, airing out his lingering disdain with those early criticisms of his merely
mimeographing tricks from the Hitchcock repertoire (“I’ve always felt I’ve
taken some of his ideas and developed them further”) and offering insight into
the way he approaches the choreography of a sequence like the museum visit or
the movie’s superb subway chase.
“The chess game can begin,” he intones in a
manner which doesn’t at all suggest that he’s tired of talking about his
method, “but you have to know the board and what the pieces can do.” It’s a metaphor
which presumably includes the confidence with which sequences such as Kate’s
visit to the museum unfolds, an extended flourish which depends almost entirely on what
the viewer sees, and what Kate sees, augmented only by the flush emotional
clarity of Donaggio’s music. (At one point De Palma considered using Dickinson
in a voice-over to illustrate Kate’s random thoughts through the sequence but
wisely decided against it.) And despite his own brilliant use of them as part
of his own visual repertoire, like any grand old man De Palma bemoans the
modern overreliance on close-ups and two-shots, which he lays squarely at the
feet of the size of the screens on which many viewers currently use to consume
movies and TV. “You’re not going to appreciate too many David Lean long shots
on an iPhone 6,” he bemusedly complains at one point, while the viewer winces
to imagine the insufficiency of seeing a great De Palma movie in the same way.
The other all-new-for-Criterion interview segments are in
their own way just as insightful. There’s a lovely segment
devoted to the talents of the movie’s late cinematographer, Ralf Bode, whose
chameleon-like ability to use his talents to literally fulfill a director’s
vision seems even more remarkable considering the other movies he shot,
pictures like Coal Miner’s Daughter,
Saturday Night Fever and A Simple
Wish, all of whose visual schemes and intentions differ from each other and
couldn’t be more separate from Dressed to
Kill’s baroque stylization. Nancy Allen, still lovely and vibrant, marvels
at her fortune over De Palma, whom she married on a break from shooting 1941 just before production on Dressed to Kill began, having written the part of Liz Blake
with her in mind. She credits familiarity with De Palma as her director and
fellow cast members Keith Gordon and Dennis Franz with creating a comfort zone
in which risk-taking was the natural response.
In the segment entitled “Pino Donaggio: The Music is an
Actor,” the composer who would become synonymous with De Palma during the
director’s greatest period, makes the claim for Dressed to Kill as their most fruitful collaboration. Given the
room in the museum sequence for his score to truly become another character
shadowing Kate Miller’s flight of sexual anxiety, Donaggio claims those nine
minutes of screen music as one of his best efforts. “(The music) gets under
your skin without you realizing it,” he says, proving his own claim that “a
thriller without music will have a hard time thrilling you at all,” and when
you think about Donaggio’s scores for De Palma, or Herrmann’s (Sisters, Obsession), or Williams’s (The Fury), the truth of such a claim
becomes even harder to refute.
Other figures important to Dressed to Kill also have their moment on the Criterion disc,
including producer George Litto, who exudes a genial hustler’s charm (“I
thought Brian could be one of the greatest directors of all time”); Dickinson’s
body double, Penthouse Pet of the Year Victoria Lynn Johnson, who marvels at
“Mr. De Palma’s” professionalism upon having being forced into the necessity of
asking her if she would mind dyeing her pubic hair to match the hue of his
star’s; and Stephen Sayadian, who began as a graphic artist for Hustler magazine and parlayed his
talents into a successful career designing movie one-sheets, describing the
evolution of his design for the iconic Dressed
to Kill poster (“It’s The Graduate all
over again!”) as well as an unlikely porno parody of the movie he directed
which De Palma himself trumpeted in a “Guilty Pleasures” article for Film Comment magazine. Sayadian marvels that De Palma would seize on
the opportunity to cast positive light onto a potentially legally troubling
project which he found delightful, “as opposed to suing us, which is what I
assumed he would do.”
Dressed to Kill seems
to me proof of Pauline Kael’s adage that “great movies are rarely perfect
movies”— some of the actors, particularly Gordon and Allen, are at sea in
isolated moments trying to breathe life into some of De Palma’s more
perfunctory dialogue (“I’m just a grief-stricken kid.” “Yeah, but what a
kid!”), and comedy of sort that has Allen rising from the back seat of a
careening taxicab, adjusting her jaw as if she were in a Keystone Kops comedy,
seems misjudged within the moment. But overall it’s one of De Palma’s two or
three most perfectly calibrated and composed movies, one in which the director
fuses form and thematic intent in a rigorous fashion that is at the same time
never labored but instead gleefully, sardonically assured. Those like me, who consider Dressed to Kill a masterpiece and a candidate for king of the De
Palma hill, will greet this marvelous Criterion disc with well-earned
applause.
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