Dressed to Kill

Dressed to Kill (1980) is set in New York. A woman unhappy in her marriage sees her therapist, meets a stranger at a museum during the day, and is killed with a razor in a lift that evening. A sex worker who witnesses it becomes a target for both the police and the killer. It is the film in which De Palma's debt to Hitchcock is most open. Psycho's structure is used directly: the character we have followed for half an hour is killed and the story is handed to someone else. The museum sequence is almost entirely wordless and runs for ten minutes on looks alone. It was protested on release. Women's organisations said it aestheticised violence against women. The heavier objection concerned its depiction of trans identity; the film draws a direct line between being trans and mental illness, a pattern repeated often in the mainstream cinema of that period. That criticism still stands and the film does nothing anywhere to balance it. Michael Caine plays the therapist, Angie Dickinson the woman and Nancy Allen the witness. Ralf Bode shot it and Pino Donaggio wrote the score. It was cut to avoid an X rating in America, and the uncut version later went into circulation. It runs 105 minutes. Good for: formally ambitious suspense, the Hitchcock influence, and De Palma. Less good for: the depiction of trans identity is harmful and the film never questions it. The violence and sex are explicit. The psychiatric explanation in the plot is invented and repeats Psycho's mistake.