For all intents and purposes, Dressed to Kill is a remake of Psycho. Both films have a lusty female lead who gets horribly murdered at the end of the first act. Both films have a killer who has conflicting personalities. Both films have men dressing up as women. And both films are obsessed with showers.
However, the quality of the films are vastly different. For the most part, besides the final dialogue with the doctor and the bland lead characters, Psycho is a masterpiece. Dressed to Kill, on the other hand, is not. It’s silly, trashy and very hard to take seriously. It’s great fun, but sometimes in spite of itself.
Another way that Dressed to Kill differs from Psycho is that Psycho has an amazing beginning but then kind of runs out of steam towards the end. Dressed to Kill, though, has an atrocious first act but then picks up once our heroine is murdered.
It’s kind of hard to put into words just how terrible the first 30-40 minutes are. I haven’t cackled so much at a movie in a long time.
The film opens with Angie Dickinson having a long, steamy, luxurious shower while watching her husband shave. The sheer rugged masculinity of this old geezer scraping hairs off his face with a kickass macho cut throat razor turns her on. She can’t help but fondle herself with a bar of soap as we’re shown many close-ups of her tits. It’s filmed in the same kind of soft-focus nonsense way that De Palma films the shower scene in Carrie. Like that scene, everything is achingly romantic as bullshit twinkly music plays.
The twist in the Carrie shower scene is that Carrie gets her period. The twist here is that a second man appears from within the steam to rape Angie. Is it a nightmare? Or is it a fantasy? We immediately cut to Angie having unsatisying sex with her husband. Once he comes, he gives her the most hilarious, patronising, ‘You did a good job’ slap in the face. No wonder she wants sexy steam guy to rape her.
The sequence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art is much lauded in certain critical circles, but I find it profoundly silly. It may have all the typical De Palma elements - long takes, split screens, lack of dialogue, great visuals - but the actual story that it tells is laughable.
Angie hangs out in the museum, watching the world go by, when she notices a guy taking an interest in her. He looks like complete Eurotrash (although we later find out that he has a very American name). He’s got huge sunglasses, jet black hair that looks like it’s been sandblasted on his head and he has a habit of thoughtfully sucking on his pen. He looks like he should be selling turtlenecks on the Cote d’Azur. Roger Moore would be envious of him.
Angie and the man give each other eyes and then eventually he sits down next to her, sucking on his pen like he’s oh so thoughtfully contemplating the artwork and totally not inviting her to suck on something else. They sit there for a while like a pair of idiots until she removes her glove, accidentally revealing a huge ring. In a hilarious moment, like Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville turning their backs on Kelly Cates, he gets up and runs off. Much nonsense follows. Where’s the guy? Where’s my glove? The guy has my glove and has terrified me with it! I must run off! Oh, now I’m outside and only have one glove. I must throw it on the floor and litter! Oh, now the guy is in a taxi outside the Met and is beckoning me by waving the other glove out of the window! Yeah, that’s totally not creepy and disrespectful. I’ll totally get into the cab with him.
Once they’re in the cab, they begin making out. And before you know it, in almost a magic trick, the man has Angie’s panties off and is going down on her. The music in the scene is hilarious. It’s very sweet and romantic, because, you know, there’s nothing more romantic than getting on the floor of a dirty, disgusting New York taxi and having someone perform oral sex on you; a complete stranger who beckoned you like you were a dog or a cat. And also having a slobbering cabbie watch it.
The next scene is my favourite. After an afternoon of rigorous, Olympic-level sex, Angie decides to sneak out of bed and back to her husband. She thinks for a moment, and in split screen, remembers her panties falling to the floor. No shit, we have a split screen of her smiling and her knickers falling off. She then decides to write a note to her one night stand, saying how much she enjoyed herself. She goes through a couple of drafts and then decides to look at something in the man’s desk drawer. She comes upon a medical report. For a moment, you think that the man might be crazy. That he’s a lunatic killer. But the reveal is so, so much better. The letter says that the man has venereal disease. By this point I was beyond myself. I was laughing like a maniac. You see what happens when you have the audacity to sleep with someone else? You see what happens when you betray your poor, condescending, selfish husband? You get the clap. As Sully in Commando would say, ‘You fuckin’ whore.’
Angie rushes away from her diseased lover but then realises that she’s forgotten her wedding ring. This is after she suffers a withering, dirty look from a small child in an elevator. The child obviously knows that she’s in the presence of a clap-ridden trollop. So Angie presses the elevator button about a million times before going back up to the man’s apartment. But before she can get there, she gets slashed up by a burly woman with a cut-throat razor. You know, because she’s a fucking whore and this is the price of a good time.
The killing, as per usual for De Palma, is a bloodbath. And then in a direct reference to Psycho, we have a shot of a blood-stained Angie Dickinson reaching out as the elevator doors open. It’s exactly the same as Janet Leigh reaching for the shower curtain.
Normally this sort of sequence should bring out the best of De Palma, but the musical score is terrible (I can’t fully explain just how horrible it is) and the reactions from the characters are unintentionally hilarious. Karen Allen’s escort girl witnesses the aftermath of the killing but then a hysterical woman sees Allen holding the weapon and screams like a banshee, thinking she’s the killer. The timing, the acting and the staging are ridiculous.
Once Angie Dickinson is killed, the film improves somewhat. Much like the vastly superior Blow Out, it develops elements of technological, surveillance thriller. Angie’s tech savvy teenage son becomes involved in the case and begins eavesdropping on cops and staking out Michael Caine’s shrink character. All of this stuff is great.
There’s also a fantastic sequence on the New York Subway. But even this is peppered with nonsense. Nancy Allen inadvertently gains the attention of a group of black men who immediately begin intimidating her. They say charming things like, ‘I’m gonna break her fucking ass.’ They’ve obviously become violently aroused at the sight of this prostitute and stalk her like a pack of wild animals. It’s the most cliched depiction of street thugs you’re likely to see. And the scene is made even more strangely amusing by the sight of a terrified Nancy Allen being stalked from one side of the train by a group of angry black men and by being stalked on the other side by a murderous transsexual.
Despite the dubious stereotypes, the scene has a lot of tension and there’s some fantastic deep focus photography. At one point we see Nancy Allen talking to a belligerent cop while the murderer sneaks onto the subway car in the background. And earlier on in the scene there’s a wonderful shot where both the murderer and Nancy Allen turn their head at the same time, both of them a distance apart but both of them perfectly in focus.
There’s a ridiculous but enjoyable scene where Nancy Allen comes onto Michael Caine’s shrink character. She needs info on one of his patients so she plans to seduce him so that she can get a look in his appointment book. It’s incredibly silly, what with the very conceit of the scene and the fact that it’s filmed with lightning and thunder (there’s a conflict within Caine...in his pants!). But despite how hokey it is, it works. And then we get the reveal that the murderer is...Michael Caine dressed as a woman!
Again, like Psycho, we have a terrible scene where a doctor conveniently explains everything that has been going on. Apparently Caine’s character has been looking to transition into becoming a woman. But inside Caine’s body there was a fight between the two sexes (!!). The female part didn’t want the masculine part to become dominant, so whenever Caine got aroused by a woman, the female side would come out and kill whoever gave him a boner.
Okay then...
But even though in the current climate that idea sounds offensive, the film is so silly and over the top that it’s hard to take offence. This film isn’t about sexuality or transsexuals. It’s about cinema. It’s a movie about movies. It’s a blatant attempt to remake Psycho and dress it up in different clothes. It’s not a disaster but it’s also not a success. There’s a lot to appreciate in the filmmaking craft and the visual storytelling, but the screenplay is appalling; lots of it is laughable. It even has the really annoying fake out ending, where it seems that the lead character has been brutally murdered but it turns out to be a paranoid dream. Thankfully lots of these ideas would coalesce into the much superior Blow Out.
There’s a scene in American Sniper where Bradley Cooper’s character, with complete sincerity, says that America is the greatest country in the world. As if the worth of countries can be quantified and as if America would be anywhere near the top if they could.
I feel that there’s a complete lack of objectivity in American Sniper. Clint Eastwood obviously feels that Chris Kyle (Bradley Cooper) is a great guy when his actions constantly suggest he’s anything but. From kicking down the doors of Iraqis, intimidating men, women and children, and beating up people in their own homes, he’s a reprehensible human being whose cowboy instincts are never used to help the Iraqi people but to perpetuate this mistaken idea of American exceptionalism.
In numerous scenes the American soldiers refer to the idigenous population as ‘savages’. I fully believe that soldiers talk this way, but I never felt that Eastwood was being objective. I feel that he, like the American characters in the movie, feel that they are somehow above the native population. Here the Americans are, rolling into Iraq to save everyone from themselves and their fucked up country, and what gratitude do they show? They don’t evacuate their homes when they’re supposed to and they even try and arm themselves against the invaders. What ingrates.
There’s no attempt here at any complexity. Chris Kyle is portrayed as a serious, committed soldier and the Iraqis are just cannon fodder. They even create a shadowy Syrian sniper counterpart called ‘The Butcher’ who slays people in cold blood and who is just generally filled with misplaced rage. He must be stopped of course by our heroic white hat.
One of the opening scenes has our hero hunting deer with his daddy as a child. Nevermind that Chris has taken his first life, his daddy chides him for not looking after his gun properly. Contrast this to an equivalent scene in Last of the Mohicans where the Native American characters hunt a deer and then give thanks to it after they kill it. They realize the enormity of what they’ve done and the sacrifice that has been made. Chris Kyle’s daddy is just concerned that Chris isn’t looking after his penis extension.
The end of the movie is basically a fantastical ‘my gun is better than your gun’ and ‘my dick is bigger than your dick’ showdown between Chris Kyle and the dastardly Butcher. Of course our hero triumphs with an impossible shot from about a mile away because he’s an American with a massive gun/penis and the other guy is just a little savage with a limp noodle.
The film makes an attempt to acknowledge the difficulties that Chris Kyle had adjusting to civilian life. He can’t concentrate at home when he has to hold his baby (which uncannily resembles a lifeless doll) and a BBQ turns into a nightmare when he almost beats a dog to death. Even in his PTSD he’s a complete asshole.
But then he discovers the joys of helping veterans. By talking to them, you say? Of course not. He helps them by shooting big guns at target ranges.
One of the most risible scenes is when Chris Kyle, who has now got his mojo back, sneaks up on his wife in full cowboy attire and draws a gun on her and makes out like he’s going to force himself on her. So sexy. You get it? The big, shiny six-shooter is his penis. Get it? Nevermind that he’s killed men, women and children with his rifle, isn’t it so sexy to fetishise guns?
The most jarring thing about the movie is how it ends. Kyle is happy and smiley and fully recovered and helping veterans and trying to pretend to rape his wife as a sexy cowboy when he gives a lift to a shifty looking fellow. A title then appears on the screen saying that the man murdered Chris Kyle. No attempt at all to depict this event or explain it. Our white hat just gets murdered.
And then you have the titles. Good Lord Almighty, you’d think that Oskar Schindler had died. American flags flutter and thousands of people line the streets to salute the paid murderer. It just goes to show that America is still deeply, painfully, worryingly and unabashedly in love with their frontier bullshit, their cowboy mythology and that most American of symbols: the gun.
