Dressed to Kill

• The MPAA slapped it with an X. De Palma trimmed blood, nudity, and some sexually explicit dialogue to land an R for theatrical release; the cut footage was later reinstated for the unrated cut Criterion put out.
• The shower body that bookends Kate Miller's morning was not Angie Dickinson. It was Victoria Lynn Johnson, a Penthouse model used as a below-the-neck stand-in. When the film came out, producers pushed the then-48-year-old Dickinson to let people think the body was hers.
• The famous wordless museum stalk is set at the Met in New York but the interior was shot at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. De Palma is a Philly native and used his hometown's gallery; only the exterior establishing shots are the real Met.
• Liv Ullmann was De Palma's first choice for Kate and turned it down over the violence; the part went to Dickinson. Sean Connery was offered Dr. Elliott and was keen on it but bowed out over prior commitments, leaving the role to Michael Caine.
• Made for roughly $6.5 million, it grossed over $31 million, a clean hit for Filmways and Cinema 77.
• On release it drew picket lines. The San Francisco group Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media leafleted screenings on August 28, 1980, calling it 'a master work of misogyny' and blasting its 'psychotic male transvestite' killer for making all sexual minorities 'appear sick and dangerous' — a transphobia charge critics still level at the film today.

The whole film is built on the split-diopter and split-screen tricks De Palma never stops using, and that's the point: a movie about a fractured identity is shot with two planes always in focus at once, two protagonists, a narrative cleaved down the middle. The form is the diagnosis, announced long before the third act spells it out.

Read it as a horror riff on Psycho rather than a thriller. De Palma kills his star early, swaps in a new lead, and hides the threat behind a therapist's calm exactly the way Hitchcock buried Norman behind Mother. The murder weapon and the elevator are just the 1980 update of the shower and the knife.

Kate's punishment is the engine. She acts on desire once, gets a razor for it, and every surviving woman who picks up the trail is also a sex worker or a teenager. The bodies stack along a single moral line, which is exactly what the protesters clocked: the camera treats female pleasure as the thing that gets you killed.

A bored Manhattan housewife trades her analyst's couch for a stranger's bed, and pays for the afternoon with a straight razor in an elevator. The only witness is a high-end call girl, who gets drafted into amateur detective work alongside the dead woman's gadget-obsessed teenage son. Stalking them all is a blonde in dark glasses with a blade, and the trail runs straight back to a psychiatrist's office. De Palma drops his lead an act in, splits the story in two, and lets the camera do the lying.