Dressed to Kill

The word for Brian De Palma is methodical (as it often is for the calculating killers who populate his films). After watching "Dressed to Kill" -- out now on Blu-ray via the Criterion Collection -- you're surprised to find that the film is made up of a very small collection of set pieces.

There's a frustrated housewife (Angie Dickinson), her too-cool therapist (Michael Caine), and her savant son (Keith Gordon). The housewife is killed by a blonde murderess (unknown), and the prostitute who witnesses it (Nancy Allen) provides the police (represented by Dennis Franz) with their only hope of cracking the case. Each of the surviving players gets one operatic sequence told from their point of view. And once we've seen from each set of eyes, the whole story is laid bare. The narrative itself isn't dense -- the images and movements are.

There's one that we can describe without spoiling too much. Dickinson, having been treated roughly by her husband and then unsympathetically by her therapist, retreats to the museum to make her grocery list. She drops her glove. A flirtatious stranger picks it up. And the pair stalk each other through the galleries, with De Palma's camera following behind them in thrall, taking the corners and crannies of each hallway into account at each turn, searching with its eyes as the characters do with theirs. All dialogue drops out -- all we here is the score, as though this were a silent suspense film. Search the frames closely enough, and you'll even find clues: Hidden in the center of a right-to-left pan, from Dickinson's face to that of her new man, is the aforementioned murderess, already stalking the scene. What's most apparent in "Dressed to Kill" is De Palma's rare ability to elevate composition into choreography. Scenes like these -- and the whole film is comprised of them -- are more than "chase sequences." They're ballets of sinister human movement.

Criterion's Blu-ray release, like their earlier release of De Palma's "Blow Out," strikes you as a definitive statement on the film. For starters, there are six interviews, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes each: Stephen Sayadian, the art director for the marketing department, speaks about the film's iconic poster design. Victoria Lynn Johnson, who features in the opening shower scene, speaks about her contribution to the film. Composer Pino Donaggio speaks about his long term working relationship with De Palma, and about the emotional chords they hoped to strike with their use of audio. Producer George Litto-who worked on the aforementioned "Blow Out" -- is also here to comment on his collaboration with the auteur.

Following the interviews are a number of appreciations. Actor Keith Gordon discusses the exacting nature of the film's visual design in a short piece. In the next appreciation, "Defying Categories," director Michael Apted and video artist Peer Bode speak about the virtuoso talents of cinematographer Ralf Bode, and about the influence he had on each of their films.

There are a few other small extras, as well: A theatrical trailer, a six-minute featurette that compares the unrated cut (featured on the Blu-ray) to the compromised R-rated cut demanded by the MPAA, and "Slashing Dressed to Kill," which allows members of the cast and crew to briefly comment on those changes.

The longest extra feature on the disc is "The Making of Dressed to Kill," which collects interviews with many of the principle participants -- De Palma, Dickinson, Gordon, and Litto -- to discuss the film's production. The 45-minute feature is broken up into seven parts, with pieces dedicated to casting, dialogue, the film's relationship to the horror genre, and more. Given the prior paragraphs, it should come as no surprise that we're partial to the section dubbed "visual complexity": the team discusses, in great depth, the many pragmatic challenges that dogged the creation of those aforementioned set pieces. Everything from the placement of cables to the placement of the sun had to be taken into account. The exacting architecture of those sequences turns the very subject of his films into "sight" -- this feature, and this disc, helps us to see how he does it.

"Dressed to Kill"
Blu-ray
$39.95
Criterion.com