Brian De Palma is an American filmmaker of the same generation as such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Cuppola but this is the first time a film of his has been featured here. His most respected film is probably the 1983 remake of Scarface. We probably should get around to watching it but I’ve always put it off because we’ve watched the 1932 original twice and liked it so much. This one seems to be only slightly less well known but I’ve found its quality to be all over the map.

Middle-woman Kate Miller is unhappy with her husband and seems to be on the look out for sexual thrills outside of her marriage. Her psychiatrist Robert Elliot advises her to discuss the issue with her husband but she tries to seduce him instead. She seems to find what she wants following an encounter with a stranger in a museum but shortly afterwards is cornered in an elevator by a blonde woman and killed with a razor. A young woman, Liz Blake is the sole witness to the attack but the detective investigating the case accuses her of being the prime suspect and, knowing that she is a prostitute, pressures her into helping to solve the case to clear her name. Meanwhile, Miller’s son who happens to be something of a tech wizard is also determined to find out who killed his mother and uses his gadgets towards that effect.

Certain scenes are utterly fantastic. The best one is probably the one in which Kate Miller is slowly seduced by the mysteriously man moving through the museum, culminating in a torrid scene in a taxi. This film turned out to be a lot more erotic with more nudity than I had expected! This proves that Da Palma is a master at building up tension, using a succession of innocuous movements to ratchet up the heat. Unfortunately he seems less adept at joining scenes together into a coherent film. After Miller dies, the focus switches quite abruptly to the character of Liz Blake who is a completely different kind of character. It turns out that the extended seduction scene doesn’t matter at all for the rest of the film. The scenes in which Peter Miller uses his gadgets to find out the identity of the killer are even more tonally dissonant, like something out of a 1980s teen movie.

It has to be said that this lack of a consistent narrative tone does result in a film that is somewhat unpredictable. You’re never quite sure which direction things are heading to next and there are red herrings and fake outs aplenty. Still, I’m not convinced that this is something that should be lauded as the result is highly unsatisfying. Watching this, I was struck by how parsimonious and elegant Hitchcock’s thrillers are in comparison. Every character has a place and a role in the overall plot and there are no extraneous characters. Every scene must advance the plot. Dressed to Kill on the other hand is a mess. Plot threads and characters that the film has spent lots of screen time on get dropped while new characters pop up out of nowhere, the female police officer being a case in point. This means that while Da Palma is good enough to make the individual scenes work, there’s no weight to the film as a whole. The twists and turns of the case is so distracting that you end up not really caring about the identity of the killer. Added to that is that its treatment of the transsexual angle is superficial and feels old-fashioned by modern cultural standards.

This means that while parts of this film are good and it’s certainly an interesting film, ultimately I found Dressed to Kill to be a disappointment that is undeserving of its glowing reputation.