Dressed to Kill

"We can just get back to the mindfuck." Reveries of carnality and violence bracket the tale, a full-scale study of Psycho with a build-up out of Lubitsch's That Uncertain Feeling. Amid steam and soap, the Manhattanite (Angie Dickinson) savors herself to the sight of the erect blade, a hand grabs her from behind and she awakens to her husband's uninspired humping. The appointment with the psychiatrist (Michael Caine) is a fumbled flirtation, it balloons into an inflamed Steadicam rhapsody at the museum, dizziness in the labyrinth segues into afternoon delight with the tall, dark stranger. Punishment is swift and sanguinary. "There's all kinds of ways to get killed in this city, if you're looking for it." Brian De Palma enjoys a good symphony, the sensations of his characters are luxuriantly dilated and humorously strewn with feints and symbols (discarded glove and ring give way to lost panties) in a cunningly splintered screen. Gender upheaval amid "binary numbers" points the way (cf. Hitchcock's Murder!), the culprit is a slashing blonde on a bulging mirror, investigative duties fall to escort (Nancy Allen) and whiz-kid (Keith Gordon). Elevators and subways are cages for colliding urges, multiple visual planes help the Panavision rectangle accommodate the fractured psyches. (The locus classicus of doubled composition connects the doctor in his apartment and the call-girl at her vanity table, the same interview with a transgender dowager plays on both their TV sets.) "Emotional dysfunctions and problems of maladaption," the split phallus and the bloodied lingerie. Practically a treatise on cinematic pleasure by De Palma, who remembers to turn the camera back on the voyeurs: Allen's cooing "You wanna fuck me?" surrounded by lightning flashes, then a pitch of Grand Guignol before a howling Marat/Sade audience. Fulci in The New York Ripper has the following stage of the cycle, scraping off the hedonistic gloss for the grimy Eros and Thanatos tangle underneath. Cinematography by Ralf Bode. With Dennis Franz, David Margulies, Ken Baker, and Susanna Clemm.