Dressed to Kill (1980)

Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill arrives from 1980 with the confidence of a man who has studied Hitchcock's Psycho the way a seminarian studies scripture, and has decided the sermon needs more nudity. A sexually frustrated housewife, a museum seduction, a straight razor in an elevator: the machinery is immaculate, the surfaces gleam, and the film has no interest whatsoever in the moral questions it raises. It wants to thrill you and then send you home. We can respect the craft while noting the ledger.

The ledger's one substantive entry is Bobbi, the transgender alter ego of Dr. Robert Elliott, who emerges whenever the good doctor is aroused by a woman and settles the matter with a razor. This is the trans predator trope in its purest distillation, and the film was picketed at the time by feminist organizations and by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, who observed that a psychotic transvestite makes all sexual minorities look sick and dangerous. The passage of four decades has not improved the optics. A resourceful female protagonist exists in Liz Blake, but she exists inside a frame built for graphic violence against women, which is exploitation wearing a raincoat, not advocacy.

Beyond that, the film is a vacuum. The cast is white, the politics are absent, the bodies are displayed for titillation and nothing else, and the closest thing to a thesis arrives when Dr. Levy clinically explains the killer's psychology to a room of people who mostly need him to stop talking. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no cause. Just a very gifted director, a very sharp blade, and the sound of an audience deciding that was worth the ticket.