And then there’s Peter, Kate’s son, who has no issues with using his surveillance equipment to spy on the police or Liz. Yet it seems like he has secrets beyond informing the police of the threats of his obviously unbalanced patient Bobbi. Elliot is obviously attracted to Kate but claims that his marriage prevents him from having sex with her. Liz is a prostitute - no slut shaming here, she’s a strong businesswoman more than anything - but she’s also a practiced liar, as a scene shows her deftly manipulating several people via phone to get the money she needs to buy stock based off an insider tip she receives from a client. She’s raised a son and seen her marriage lose any hope of sexual frisson. Kate is a woman who is bored with her life. Let’s toss in a little moral ambiguity here, too. Giallo gives us no assurances that just because we see someone as the protagonist, there’s no reason they couldn’t also be the antagonist. Or her doctor, who has an insane patient named Bobbi who has stolen his straight razor and demands that she give him more time than the rest of her patients. Or the son of the murder victim who wants to discover why his mother really died. We also have characters trying to prove that they’re innocent, investigating ahead of the police. Then there are the music cues from Pino Donaggio, who also scored Don’t Look Now, Fulci’s The Black Cat and Argento’s Do You Like Hitchcock?The film not only looks the part, but it has the intense sound, too. Robert Elliot (Michael Caine, how could we pick any movie other than Jaws 4: The Revenge). This is the kind of film that makes you stop and notice an outfit, such as what Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson, Big Bad Mama, TV’s Police Woman) wears to the Metropolitan Museum of Art or the blue coat that Liz Blake (Nancy Allen, Carrie, Strange Invaders) wears to meet Dr. Yet what of DePalma being dismissive of Argento in interviews, claiming that while he saw the director as having talent, he’d only seen one of his films? Or should we believe his ex-muse/wife Nancy Allen, who claims that when she told DePalma that she was auditioning for Argento’s Inferno that he said, “Oh, he’s goooood.”Ĭontrast that with this very simple fact (and spoilers ahead, for those of you who worry about that sort of thing, but face facts, this movie is 37 years old): DePalma rips off one of Hitchcock’s best tricks from Psycho: he kills his main character off early in the film, forcing us to suddenly choose who we see as the new lead, placing the killer several steps ahead of not just our protagonists, but the audience itself.Īnd yet there are so many other giallo staples within this film: fashion is at the forefront, with a fetishistic devotion to gloves, to dresses, to spiked high heels, to lingerie being displayed and removed and lying in piles all over an apartment or doctor’s office. Much like Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, it exists in its own dream reality, where the way we perceive time can shift and change based on the storyteller’s whims. That’s because - to agree with DePalma above - this film does not exist in our reality. However, I’d argue that this film has more in common with giallo than anything the “Master of Suspense” directly created. If anything, Dressed to Kill has more of a Buñuel feeling to it.” Dressed to Kill is about a woman’s secret erotic life. A girl steals money for her boyfriend so they can get married. I am dealing in surrealistic, erotic imagery. The director claimed, “My style is very different from Hitchcock’s. What is true is the interview that De Palma did after Dressed to Kill ( Rolling Stone, October 16, 1980). In fact, when an interviewer asked Hitchcock if he saw the film as an homage, he replied, “You mean fromage.” That said - Hitchcock died three months before the film was released, so that story could be apocryphal (it’s been said that the famous director made this comment to either a reporter or John Landis). Let’s get this out of the way: Brian De Palma, much like giallo, was heavily influenced by Hitchcock. VIDEO ARCHIVES NOTES: This movie was discussed on the Octoepisode of the Video Archives podcast and can be found on their site here.
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