Recencies van critici

The film opens like a diamond reflecting light in many directions, inside the Day-Glo ambience of a bedroom, bathed in the immortal sound-sphere of Pino Dinnaggio's soft-core string arrangements; the mind is where this film begins and ends. The glare of light pierces through the skin of this film like a sharpened razor, tearing at the fabric of the illusion. No other filmmaker, other than Godard, has played so much with what we as viewers perceive as the surface.

It is such obvious surface, but the surface goes on for miles. As a formalist, Mr. De Palma repeatedly cast his lot with the films of Alfred Hitchcock — in "Blow Out," "Body Double" and "Raising Cain," too. The museum sequence is like an exhibitionist "Vertigo" whipping open its trench coat and flashing its great big Judith Krantz.

Mr. De Palma has made more coherent movies than "Dressed to Kill" (namely "Carrie" and "Blow Out") during his long career, but few have been so technically accomplished, felt more personal or raised more hackles: "Dressed to Kill" had to be recut to avoid an X rating and, along with William Friedkin's "Cruising," which opened the same summer, was attacked for its stereotyping.

It's easy to see why people hated a movie as arch, violent, and glib as Dressed To Kill, and equally clear that this is exactly what De Palma was going for with all the gusto he could muster.

In retrospect, it's clear that this was all buildup to Dressed to Kill, in which De Palma further magnifies the terrors and seductions of Psycho to call attention, with his most accomplished filmmaking and the fullest realization of his metacinematic ambitions to that point, to the workings of cinema and what it means to be a movie watcher. In case this sounds academic, rest assured that there's hardly a frame in Dressed to Kill that isn't sense-heightening.

De Palma's exercises in delirium dissolve on the screen, with at least one master-class in voyeurism that foreshadows the self-reflexivity of Body Double, Femme Fatale: Allen, Mrs. De Palma, dons garters and stockings and coos "You wanna fuck me?" to the camera, scored to Pino Donaggio's thunderstorm fondue.

The pleasures of Dressed to Kill flat out do not translate to print, but for what it's worth it is the most perfectly-directed film ever, provided you, like me, bust into orgasmic laughter when De Palma's double-shuffling editing makes it seem like the only threat Nancy Allen and a wooden cop can see boarding the subway is a 250-pound bag lady.

That De Palma mucks about with soft-core porn and hard-edged horror…does not mean in and of itself that he is a raunchy ghoul. Nor does the fact that he mutilates and murders women on screen mean that he hates women off screen….I do not hold it against De Palma that he imitates Hitchcock, but, rather, that he steals Hitchcock's most privileged moments without performing the drudgery of building up to themse moments in thoroughly earned climaxes.

Brian De Palma plunders Psycho, with incidental grabs from Murder, Spellbound, and Vertigo. Originality has never been a high value in the genre-bound aesthetic of filmmaking, but De Palma cheapens what he steals, draining the Hitchcock moves of their content and complexity. He's left with a collection of empty technical tricks and he fills in the blanks with an offhand cruelty toward his characters, a supreme contempt for his audience, and a curdled, adolescent vision of sexuality.