Knife of Brian

By RICHARD CORLISS

DRESSED TO KILL Directed and Written by Brian De Palma

A shower stall. An attractive, restless blond, whose search for sexual fulfillment will lead her to an ominous rented room. A man, whose schizophrenic lust turns him into a knife-wielding killer in a cheap wig and dress.

These gimmicks could provide the basis for a great horror movie. In fact, they have: Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho. But Brian De Palma seems to have been inspired by his first youthful look at Psycho the way other teen-agers are affected by a helpful teacher or a first kiss: he has built his obsession into a career. De Palma's last seven films, from Sisters in 1973 to the current Dressed to Kill, have been informed by Hitchcock's work until some of them begin to look like remakes. Dressed to Kill is the most explicit of these homages: that shower (in a Long Island home instead of in the Bates Motel), those blonds (Angie Dickinson and Nancy Allen instead of Janet Leigh and Vera Miles), that transvestite killer (Mr. X instead of Anthony Perkins), plus a prowl through a museum, lifted from Vertigo, and a sound-effects trick from The 39 Steps. But De Palma has done it before, and, in Sisters and Carrie, he did it with compassion and an agreeably gross wit.

The characters in Dressed to Kill are not candidates for compassion or figures of raunchy fun. They are animated mannequins--the wandering housewife (Dickinson), the loving son (Keith Gordon), the harried hooker (Allen), the patient psychiatrist (Michael Caine)--whose only function is to attack or be attacked, to play villain or victim. The plot has so many coincidences and contradictions that the moviegoer is left with only one option: to savor Dressed to Kill as an exercise in directorial style.

Of all film genres, the thriller is the most dependent on directorial technique. Using camera tracks, point-of-view shots and disorienting cuts, the director can reveal or conceal, lead and mislead the viewer into a position as vulnerable as that of a fair-haired virgin in an old dark house. De Palma knows all about this. His camera glides down corridors and through rooms as elegantly as a downhill racer with murder on his mind. His actors of ten move at an otherworldly pace that recalls the stylized slowness of silent movies--especially in a wordless sequence that lasts almost half an hour. He builds suspense through the use of the unsuspected detail: a hand picking up a glove, a gleaming doorknob, an empty pair of shoes.

Some of these pyrotechnics fizzle, and all of them operate in a narrative void. One reason Psycho continues to disturb is that Screenwriter Joseph Stefano gave Norman Bates and his hapless victims some emotional resonance. Even if you never screamed while watching Psycho, you could appreciate it for the sense it gave of seemingly ordinary people drawn into a swamp of frustrations and aggressions. De Palma's movies no longer explore these tensions; they have become exhibitions of a master puppeteer pulling high-tension strings. In Dressed to Kill, the marionettes on-screen still respond to De Palma's manipulations. Moviegoers may not, especially those who hoped that De Palma would become the heir to Hitchcock's throne rather than the scavenger of his vaults. --By Richard Corliss

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