On the way out of Lockman’s apartment, she is followed down the hall by a man in a blonde wig, sunglasses, and unconvincing drag, who carves her up with a straight razor as soon as they’re alone together in the elevator.
Don’t blow the Sad Trombone just yet, though, because Kate’s evening is about to take an even sharper turn for the worse. Kate’s tryst with Warren is everything she wanted it to be… until she goes looking in his desk for stationery on which to write him a “Thank you and goodbye” note, and discovers a memo from the municipal health department informing him that he’s tested positive for venereal disease. With that avenue foreclosed to her, Kate picks up a stranger by the name of Warren Lockman (Ken Baker, who is not to be confused with 80’s dwarf actor Kenny Baker, however delightful that would make these next few scenes) at De Palma’s own favorite romantic stalking ground, the Museum of Modern Art. So far as we can see, he’s quite possibly the only truly ethical psychiatrist in the history of motion pictures, and he’s an ethical husband on top of it. Indeed, she’d really like to have an affair with Elliott- and has told him as much!- but no chance there. At the same time, Kate recognizes that what she really needs is something that Elliott would never recommend for her- a nice, tawdry, adulterous affair to make her feel properly appreciated by someone. She has to manage her life’s dissatisfactions the officially approved way, with regular visits to psychiatrist Robert Elliott (Michael Caine, from Children of Men and Inception). Peter pours all the psychic energy he might otherwise spend on family resentment into his inventions, but Kate doesn’t have that option. Kate’s teen-genius son, Peter (Keith Gordon, of Jaws 2 and Christine), isn’t fond of Mike, either, but kids often have trouble accepting their stepfathers, even when their real dads weren’t killed in Vietnam. He’s inconsiderate, insensitive, and no good at all in bed, and some sense of the enthusiasm with which she greets his habit of groping her awake for a first-thing-in-the-morning fuck may be gained from the way her subconscious edits the stimulation of his hands into her dreams- the first thing we see is her dreaming of a languorous and sensual shower being interrupted by a rapist attacking her out of physically impossible nowhere. Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson, from The Norliss Tapes and The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler) doesn’t like her husband (Fred Weber) very much. Skulking around inside this seemingly fawning tribute to Psycho is a subtle critique of it, a suggestion that Hitchcock didn’t take the premise as far as he should have, and that the time had come for an interpretation of the same themes that was a little more aggressive, a little less squeamish, and a lot less eager to make tidy returns to the status quo ante in time for the closing credits. Then again, maybe Hitch also saw something in Dressed to Kill that isn’t immediately obvious. I think they interpret it as a threat to their standing when some young upstart successfully replicates their techniques. Hitchcock himself was incensed when he saw Dressed to Kill at the instigation of John Landis in response to Landis’s attempts to convince him that he should be honored by De Palma’s homage, Hitchcock snorted, “More like fromage!” Of course, artists with big egos often take offense at such things. It is, for all practical purposes, De Palma’s rebuild of Psycho, right down to the bait-and-switch protagonist, the cross-dressing killer, and the resolution hinging on an unsuspected case of dissociative identity disorder.
Victoria johnson dressed to kill full#
Dressed to Kill was the project where that transformation took full effect. There’s a difference, though, between acknowledging one’s influences and emulating them, and as the 1980’s dawned, De Palma’s Hitchcock cribs shifted from the former mode to the latter. Few if any of De Palma’s early horror and suspense films are without a reference here or a tribute there- even The Phantom of the Paradise pokes a moment of affectionate fun at the Psycho shower scene. You don’t have to watch one of Brian De Palma’s movies from the 1970’s for very long to see something that reveals his admiration for Alfred Hitchcock.
0 kommentar(er)
