Fashion Statement: Hitchcock as Precocious Teenager
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
Screen FASHION STATEMENT HITCHCOCK AS PRECOCIOUS TEENAGER BRIAN DE PALMA's Dressed to Kill plays with time in much the same way that one of the characters in the film, a precocious teenager,...
...He parks the Moped so the camera will be aimed at Elliott's door, and afterwards he looks at the movie in the company of a hooker named Elizabeth (Nancy Allen) who is also in on the case...
...In it, Kate is standing in the shower masturbating as she watches her husband shave with a straight razor at the sink...
...As the two of them play cat and mouse, pursuing one another through the galleries, the scene becomes more and more antic...
...In fact, the entire movie is an attempt to dress action in veils of illusion, to smudge the line betweem fantasy and reality...
...It produces scenes which have only a kind of fun-house thrill to them...
...But it soon becomes apparent that this virtuosity exists in the film independent of plot and character, neither of which benefit from it...
...Screen FASHION STATEMENT HITCHCOCK AS PRECOCIOUS TEENAGER BRIAN DE PALMA's Dressed to Kill plays with time in much the same way that one of the characters in the film, a precocious teenager, tinkers with electronic gadgets...
...One that seems to elongate the action occurs when Peter's mother, Kate (Angie Dickinson), allows herself to be picked up by a man at an art museum...
...The same question might be asked of De Palma himself...
...In some scenes De Palma distends our sense of time, stretching out seconds into agonizing minutes...
...All at once another man grabs her menacingly from behind, and then, just as abruptly, she is lying in bed with her husband on top of her having a bash...
...The movie Peter makes is actually a bit of amateur sleuthing, an act of surveillance...
...She smiles at the advances a man makes to another woman in the gallery...
...At last she decides to turn and give the fellow a smile, to encourage him...
...COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...When a man sits down next to her, she goes through one of those nervous, self-conscious adjustments of her posture to which we all resort when we suddenly find ourselves in close proximity to a stranger...
...But like much of what follows, the actual effect is only one of unnecessary confusion...
...29 August 1980: 467...
...While he re-arranges the relationship among the characters somewhat, De Palma sticks in outline pretty close to the Hitchcock classic...
...That's the film's downfall...
...He even ends with a reprise of Hitchcock's coda, the worst scene in Psycho, where a psychiatrist explains to everyone the nature of the killer's schizophrenia...
...Among the jerky, flickering forms of Elliott's patients emerging from his office, Peter and Elizabeth find, as they hoped they would, a transvestite whom they know to be a psychopathic killer...
...In other scenes he telescopes the action so that everything seems to be happening at once...
...Only several reels later do we figure out that the shower sequence was just a fantasy with which she was trying to get herself excited during her husband's inept lovemaking...
...De Palma has used up Hitchcock's plot and really has no place else to go...
...Offended, she now decides she will definitely discourage him, so she takes off her glove and begins fingering her wedding ring...
...Elliott (Michael Caine...
...Peter is about as close as the movie comes to having a hero...
...As both writer and director of the movie, De Palma has clearly created this boy, Peter Miller (Keith Gordon), in his own image...
...But he forges ahead anti-climactically anyway, determined to wring yet another nightmarish murder scene out of his material...
...There's only one problem: who needs it...
...But when she does, she sees he's paying no attention to her...
...The result is that De Palma, like the teenager, impresses us as being a terribly clever fellow, but one whose inventions do seem in the end a bit superfluous, even frivolous...
...What this scene tries to work up to is a certain hallucinatory quality...
...Next he drafts elaborate drawings and plans from which he constructs a movie camera that will shoot time-lapse pictures automatically while concealed in a box on the back of the Moped...
...Now she's really upset and jumps up to go find him, dropping her glove in the process...
...The distortions of time that result from De Palma's own machinations with a movie camera do provide his film with at least a few extraordinary scenes...
...At one point he even makes a movie of his own which manipulates time relationships just as Dressed to Kill does...
...She notices a young couple being affectionate with each other...
...The scene doesn't really drag out the action so much as include little incidental details of a sort that reality always contains, but movies seldom do...
...Gradually she is distracted by the people in the room...
...It is of the patients who visit the office of his mother's psychiatrist, Dr...
...The very first scene tries to plunge us into that state of disorientation which De Palma hopes he can keep renewing throughout the rest of the film...
...De Palma's purpose in the opening is to tantalize and shock us—to mystify us—so that he will have us in his power right away...
...At another point, she throw,s away the one she still has...
...She ooches over a little, crosses, then uncrosses her ankles, taps the floor with her shoe a bit...
...Like too much else in Dressed to Kill, this final exercise in atmospherics, thrills and violence seems merely gratuitous...
...When she turns again to see whether this hasn't finally caught his attention, she discovers that it has: he's left...
...Although there is in the film's credits no acknowledgement of Alfred Hitchcock, that opening scene in the shower might have tipped us off that what we are watching here is a re-make of Psycho...
...They leap out at us from some unseen niche in the wall as we feel our way blindly through De Palma's story...
...This extension De Palma has built on to Hitchcock's plot only serves to show how flimsy De Palma'a own ideas are...
...In a few scenes like the one at the art museum, De Palma's expressionism is mesmerizing...
...What Peter does is to ride his Moped into the city one day to Elliott's brownstone and lurk about on the sidewalk timing the patients' arrivals and departures...
...Why didn't Peter just check out Elliott's patients with his own eyes while he was timing their comings and goings...
...From this he Commonweal: 466 determines how frequently they occur...
...At first Kate just sits trying to concentrate on the paintings, though actually more involved in jotting down reminders in her appointment book...
...Pretty neat, huh...
...Why did he have to go through all this complicated business of making the movie...
...At least, this scene ought to be the end of Dressed to Kill...
...The whole drama of the flirtation is, at least at first, only in Kate's mind, and the scene tries to retain and intensify that feeling of paranoia...
...At one point he puts on the glove she's dropped...
...In the end the scene comes to a climax, literally, in the back seat of a cab...
Vol. 107 • August 1980 • No. 15
