Brian De Palma (Dressed to Kill) Dressed to Kill
Brian De Palma wrote and directed Dressed to Kill, his most commercially successful thriller and his most explicit reworking of Hitchcock's Psycho. The film grossed $31.9 million against a $6.5 million budget in the summer of 1980, giving De Palma the leverage to make his most personal film the following year.
De Palma built the film from set pieces connected by enough plot to justify the next visual sequence
De Palma has always described himself as a filmmaker who works from image to story, not the reverse. Dressed to Kill is the purest expression of this method -- the shower, the museum, the elevator, the subway, the seduction -- each a self-contained exercise in visual storytelling with connective tissue between them.
"That's the whole way of building a sequence -- using a fairly basic element of cinema, which is following a beautiful woman around." -- Brian De Palma, Cinephilia & Beyond (2015)
"Geography is very important when you're setting up a suspense sequence, because you've got to know where things are relative to the principal. You've got to know the board. You've got to know what the pieces can do. And you've got to stay within that logic." -- Brian De Palma, Cinephilia & Beyond (2015)
Roger Ebert identified this as the film's governing principle:
"Dressed to Kill is an exercise in style, not narrative; it would rather look and feel like a thriller than make sense, but DePalma has so much fun with the conventions of the thriller that we forgive him and go along." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (1980)
The elevator murder is what De Palma considers his finest work
De Palma singled out the elevator sequence as the best murder scene he ever directed -- above anything in Scarface, Blow Out, or Body Double:
"I guess I would have to say Dressed to Kill, the murder in the elevator. I had a very good idea in terms of Bobbi killing Angie and Nancy witnessing it and the use of the mirrors and the slow motion." -- Brian De Palma, The Talks (2015)
"I think that's sort of the bloodiest murder I've ever done." -- Brian De Palma, The Talks (2015)
See The Elevator Murder for the full analysis.
De Palma put himself into the film through Peter Miller's science project
Peter Miller -- the teenage inventor who builds a binary computer and solves the case with a time-lapse camera -- is De Palma's most autobiographical character. De Palma grew up building electronics and entered science competitions before pivoting to filmmaking:
"That character in Dressed to Kill is me. I mean, that's my room. That machine, I built that machine. It was a differential analyzer." -- Brian De Palma, Cinephilia & Beyond (2015)
De Palma preferred photographing women being followed and did not pretend otherwise
De Palma's candidness about his visual preferences has always fed the controversy around his thrillers. On the question of why his films so consistently follow women in danger:
"If you're going to follow around somebody to murder, I'd much rather be photographing a woman than a man. They're a lot more interesting to look at and a lot more vulnerable than if you had Arnold Schwarzenegger walking around carrying a candelabra." -- Brian De Palma, The Talks (2015)
This statement feeds directly into the feminist critique that has dogged De Palma since Dressed to Kill -- see The Gender Politics Controversy.
The Hitchcock debt is structural, not incidental
De Palma's borrowing from Hitchcock in Dressed to Kill is open and systematic: a protagonist murdered at the end of Act I (Psycho), a wordless pursuit through a public space (Vertigo), a killer revealed to have a split identity (Psycho), and a psychiatrist's exposition to close the case (Psycho). Hitchcock himself reportedly dismissed the homage when told about the museum sequence:
"You mean fromage?" -- Alfred Hitchcock, quoted in Film Daze (1980)
See The Hitchcock Connection (Dressed to Kill) for the full analysis.
Dressed to Kill gave De Palma the commercial leverage for his next three films
The $31.9 million gross made Dressed to Kill De Palma's biggest hit and bought him the freedom to make Blow Out (1981), Scarface (1983), and Body Double (1984) -- the most concentrated run of his career. When Blow Out flopped and Body Double flopped harder, it was the commercial credibility established here that kept studios returning his calls.