Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [86]
When inviting guests, De Palma said it was a going-away party for Allen, who was moving to Los Angeles to star in Steven Spielberg’s 1941. But when the guests arrived at their Greenwich Village apartment, instead of being greeted with hugs and hellos, the door opened to a surprise. There was Brian De Palma holding a film camera pointing right at them. He said nothing and pointed to a slip of paper taped to the wall. What was this all about? Then each of the guests took a closer look. It was a marriage certificate. The names on it were Brian De Palma and Nancy Allen. A moment or two passed as it became clear that this was not a going-away party at all. It was a wedding, a very odd kind of wedding, one where the groom doubled as the photographer.
They had officially been married earlier in the day by a Unitarian minister. Allen’s parents didn’t know what to think about this strange trick. Their worries about their daughter getting involved with someone who made movies were confirmed, but then again, this was a very happy event. So there were shouts and congratulations and kisses all around. De Palma, for his part, looked thrilled. He studied the problem, hatched a plan, figured out the trick all by himself, and it worked to perfection. Allen recalls him as thrilled, saying, “He was pleased and delighted to be surprising everyone.”
While staying behind the camera in his personal life, De Palma was pushing himself more in front of it in his movies, using his new clout to make increasingly autobiographical films. Dressed to Kill told the story of a remote science geek, Peter Miller (Keith Gordon), who tries to solve the murder of his romantically unhappy mother, Kate (Angie Dickinson), who is killed going out alone after her son cancels their date to work on a science project. You don’t need to look hard to find De Palma’s guilt about helping his mother. Critics focused on the Psycho references (another shower scene) and the brutal violence against women.
De Palma, who always dismissed his use of the female victim as simply a convention that works, surely invited charges of sexism by having his female characters in this movie be a bored housewife who gets killed after cheating with a random stranger, and a high-priced hooker, played by Nancy Allen. It’s probably De Palma’s most controversial movie because Kate is murdered after sleeping with a stranger, making it seem like a classic case of punishing the woman for having sex. But this is a case where De Palma’s personal obsessions came into conflict with his pure cinema technique.
Looked at in the context of the rest of his career, Kate is just another voyeur-hero—except the person she is trying to save is herself. Her husband doesn’t satisfy her. Her shrink remains cold to her. And when she sees a man at a museum, she becomes interested and does what comes naturally to De Palma characters: she watches him. Throughout these scenes, the movie takes her side. Kate is a deeply sympathetic character. She’s even ignored by her son, who would rather tinker with computers than spend time with her. If anything, his decision is the one that is punished. But some critics read the movie differently. She pursued a stranger, slept with him, so she was killed.
Her wordless chase of the man in the sunglasses in the museum is rightly celebrated as a master class in suspense. It originally featured an interior monologue that explained her feelings of irritation, desire, and awkwardness.