KURT: After The Fury comes the ultimate De Palma film: Dressed to Kill.

HOWARD: Dressed to Kill is important because thematically De Palma is at the height of his focus with ideas of femininity, masculinity, religion – in other words, things that in modern society have been made to cripple individuality and dwarf identity and sometimes remove identity, things that just shouldn’t belong in society for a successful society or for successful mental and physical health. And Dressed to Kill in 1980, we’re going out of the ‘70s now into a new era. And he just takes all this along with a slightly more self conscious wink to his own work. So in Dressed to Kill, sure, he’s making some very sophisticated jokes about psychology – obviously jokes, again, but look where he came from. He’s a satirist. He’s not going to let you forget this. So even though there’s this wonderful tricky story about who performed this horrible vivisection with a razor blade in an elevator, he starts to stack up the thought process of the mainstream commercial critics and the audience at the time. The whole point of Carrie was to provoke, provoke, provoke, then explode when your audience and your studio is just not getting it. This is going a little bit farther now. There are scenes in Dressed to Kill where he shows that. You could call it a wink or a spoof – I hate using that word, but it’s just to make you laugh: the very last scene is this dream that Michael Caine is coming for revenge on the woman who put him away, the prostitute played by Nancy Allen. It looks like Halloween! – this subjective camera moving outside the house. In the very next film that he made, Blow Out, he spoofs the spoof. He’s taking that and he’s making it obvious: “This is how you make that scene.” And he replicates the scene that he staged and shot as the dream in the climax of Dressed to Kill, and now he’s using that as an example of how a low-budget director makes a film. So the success of Dressed to Kill as a thriller, because it was shot so elegantly and poetically by Ralf Bode, when he moves on to Blow Out just a year later, it’s all self examination, self reflection, and everything is out in the open. “This is what I have to think about when I make something like this. I need a good scream. I need a good scream. How do I get that scream?” Of course that’s a play on Vertigo with Jimmy Stewart trying to figure out he’s going to get rid of his vertigo, and he has this whole contrived psychological horror thriller he has to put himself through just for the punch line – “Okay, I don’t have vertigo anymore.” And the end of Blow Out, it’s, “Okay, I got my scream.”

It's all connected. The language is all connected. I hate to say they’re jokes, but they are. They’re amusements to him, because this is why you do it. Dressed to Kill is important because once again, like Carrie, his ability to hone emotional capital from these characters was profound for that time. Movies that made you care about horror movies, that made you care about women – not putting them in distress porn horror, that’s not what he’s doing. He’s creating characters that you, the audience, are to identify with. Are you identifying with aspects of someone with transgender passion and an inability to break through that? Michael Caine’s character ultimately is quite a poignant character, especially the use of mirrors in that movie. Mirrors from the very opening scene are very important. What’s obscured? What’s hazed over by condensation? What’s visible? Michael Caine looking at himself in a mirror is so much more indicative of a pain that his character is dealing with which causes a schizophrenia, a violent combination of parts of your mind working against each other, ultimately trying to reconcile. But like Carrie’s mother did to Carrie, your upbringing is dwarfing your ability to process life naturally.

The end of that movie once again reiterates that the nightmare will stay with you if you’re someone who has compassion and who understands why you’re a human being, how you interrelate with other people, how you look at yourself and how you can be healthy or how you can be aberrant. This is not just a moral director but a voice of honest humanitarian concern. People overlook that completely. And Dressed to Kill is a phenomenally emotional film if you look at it even on the superficial level and you don’t look at the Hitchcock winks and jokes and nods.

Brian de Palma has a bit of a chilly personality, but I admire him as a director and technician. So when he offered me a rathar weird horror film called Dressed to Kill, I figured this was a gamble that might pay off. He was very demanding, often shooting on and on until he got precisely what he wanted. I remember one nine-page sequence that incorporated a 360-degree swing of the camera and required 26 takes (a record for me); whenever we actors got the scene right, the camera didn't and vice versa. That one sequence took a whole day to shoot.

The man is wearing sunglasses, a clear indication that he is not there to appreciate art. But this detail also foreshadows Bobbi, who hides her identity behind dark sunglasses, day and night. Through this association of two characters with “no eyes,” the stranger is the dark angel, the one who delivers Kate to Bobbi, her killer. This approach of connecting worlds is also present in a similar fashion in Psycho; Marion has fallen asleep on the side of the road and is awakened by a policeman, who is wearing dark sunglasses. He never takes them off; we never see his eyes. This very much presages the other character with no eyes, Norman Bates’s dead, mummified mother in the cellar. When she is revealed—as a lightbulb swings back and forth above her face—we see dark holes instead of eyes, just like the cop who wouldn’t take off his sunglasses.

The 1980 thriller "Dressed to Kill" may not have the same reputation as other movies in director Brian De Palma's filmography. (He did, after all, helm "Scarface," "Carrie" and "Mission: Impossible.") But one particular scene sent critics swooning at the time, and still comes up in retrospectives: the extended, wordless sequence inside the art museum.

The eight-minute sequence follows bored housewife Kate (Angie Dickinson) through the galleries as she trails and dodges a handsome stranger. It's supposed to take place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the exterior shots are, unmistakably, of uptown Manhattan. Look a little closer at the interior, however, and you might recognize the winding halls of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

PMA posed as the Met for the movie, released in theaters 45 years ago today. It was natural choice for De Palma, a Philly native who graduated from Friends' Central School and won the Delaware Valley Science Fair with his homemade computer. Despite his scientific pedigree – his dad was also an orthopedic surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University – he ultimately chose to tinker with film reels, not motherboards.

The director, who would later use the city as his backdrop for "Blow Out," leaned on his hometown for "Dressed to Kill" when New York shut him down.

“We scouted the sequence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they didn’t like the script," De Palma later recalled. "They thought it was in bad taste. And because I grew up in Philadelphia, we were able to move the interior to the Philadelphia Museum of Art."

De Palma said he got the "visual idea" for the scene from his trips to museums as a college student. After visiting PMA, taking photos and obsessively tweaking his storyboard, he was ready to film.

Viewers will notice art on the walls that would've been contemporary for the time. Kate sits on a bench in front of "West Interior," a 1979 piece by Alex Katz that is no longer on view but still in the museum's collection. As she glances around the room, her eyes fix on "Reclining Nude," a 1976 portrait of a gorilla by Tommy Dale Palmore. It also remains at PMA, though off display. As she chases the stranger through the museum, "2 Priory Walk" by Jennifer Bartlett is visible.

Dickinson remembered the scene as a tricky bit of choreography, emotionally and physically, in the book "The De Palma Decade."

"As serious as the scene is, it is also humorous, because it gets desperate," she said. "At first, she is intrigued. And then she finds him rude. Now, she’s going to confront him but can’t find him. And technically, it was so complicated, and complex to do – in fact, I was (at times) holding a rope attached to the camera, so I would stay in focus as I walked."

The scene made an instant splash when the movie hit theaters on July 25, 1980. Roger Ebert called it "absolutely brilliant." Critics at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other publications also singled out the sequence in their reviews.

De Palma is also making a film during a period of time when Italian cinema was capitalizing on the concept of Hitchcock thrillers. In general, it is common for exploitation titles to be released that mirror the most popular genre films of any given era. In other cases, an entire new wave of genre films populate specific cultures. Italian literature was inspired by Hitchcock's films and began releasing thriller novels in the same vein. These novels would then inspire the "Giallo" wave in Italy, in which filmmakers were making their own kinds of Hitchcock thrillers. With a more violent approach to thrillers, Giallo films would go on to inspire a lot of '70s and '80s slasher movies in America. Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill is a Giallo thriller that builds on Hitchcock's Psycho in a more contemporary way. Everything in the film is deliberate, like the depiction of sexuality, violence and mental health, which is not bound by the obligatory constraints of Psycho. Dressed to Kill is stylistically one of the most compelling films of the '80s and doubles down on Hitchcock thrillers and giallo cinema in every way. For this reason alone, it might be Brian De Palma's greatest film.

The only thing that might keep Dressed to Kill from being De Palma's overall masterpiece is a misstep in terms of the actual reveal of the killer. There isn't an "aha" moment that audiences are expecting where Liz or Peter actually discover the truth for themselves. The final cross-cutting sequence had an opportunity to capitalize on this by having Liz discover something in Elliot's office that reveals the truth just moments before being attacked. While it makes sense why De Palma would want to mirror Psycho instead (literally having a wig fall from the killer's head), the "aha" moment would have been an effective deviation from the 1960 classic. With that being said, there is no denying the overwhelming style and craft in Dressed to Kill as well as a personal element for Brian De Palma that makes the film his thriller masterpiece. While the performances are worth noting, especially Michael Caine and Nancy Allen, it is Brian De Palma's presence that adds extra depth to the story.

When he was a child, honing his earliest directorial skills with a camera, his mother confided in him about suspecting De Palma's father of cheating on her. At his mother's request, De Palma would follow his father around with his camera and record his movements in order to try and catch him in the act. It is easy to see how this would stick with someone, it just happened to stick with a cinematic artist throughout his formative years. Those experiences not only inspired Dressed to Kill, but they also inspired the inclusion of the Peter character. Peter (played by Keith Gordon) is an unexpected highlight of the film. It's almost a wonder what a child's perspective would be doing in a story like this, but his inclusion is vital to the film's progression. Peter is clearly a conduit for De Palma himself, who uses his unique skills and talents to capture the truth about Elliot (or Elliot's "patient") with a camera. This aspect is also a comment on Hitchcock's use of voyeurism in Rear Window, which is expanded on through De Palma's personal touch. It becomes the essential piece of Dressed to Kill's structure. To top this all off, De Palma's visual craft is on display in a myriad of ways that include split-screen remembrances, intentional reverse shots in a mirror and immersive shot compositions. De Palma's vision, mixed with engaging performances and Pino Donaggio's mesmerizing score, makes Dressed to Kill the quintessential thriller of the 1980s.

4K ULTRA HD LIMITED EDITION CONTENTS

4K (2160p) UHD Blu-ray presentation in Dolby Vision (HDR10 compatible)

Original lossless 1.0 mono soundtrack

Optional lossless 5.1 soundtrack

Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing

Brand new audio commentary by critics Drusilla Adeline and Joshua Conkel

Audio commentary by critic Maitland McDonagh

Beyond Good and Evil, a brand new visual essay by critics BJ and Harmony Colangelo

The Empathy of Dressed to Kill, a brand new visual essay by critic Jessica Crets

Strictly Business, a 2022 interview with actress Nancy Allen

Killer Frames, a 2022 interview with associate producer/production manager Fred C. Caruso

An Imitation of Life, a 2022 interview with actor Keith Gordon

Archival interviews with actors Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon, and producer George Litto

The Making of a Thriller, an archival documentary on the making of the film

Unrated, R-rated and TV-rated comparison featurette

Slashing Dressed to Kill, an archival featurette examining the changes made to avoid an X rating

Photo gallery

Theatrical trailer

Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Gilles Vranckx

Collector's booklet featuring new writing on the film by Sara Michelle Fetters, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Matthew Sorrento and Heather Wixson