Anatomy of a Scene's Anatomy: Angie Dickinson Steams Up the Opening of 'Dressed to Kill'

In our weekly seriesAnatomy of a Scene's Anatomy, we're going to be taking a look at (in)famous sexscenes and nude scenes throughout cinema history and examining their construction, their relationship to the film around them, and their legacy. This week, the Police Woman herself, Angie Dickinson, gets super risqué—with some help from body double Victoria Lynn Johnson—during the opening moments of Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill!

In our Skin-depth Look at De Palma's career, we briefly touched on his 1980 thriller Dressed to Kill, but there is a lot to dig into with this controversial film. Thankfully we live in the day and age of home video and streaming, and we now have full access to De Palma's original vision for this film, but it wasn't always so easy to see the film as De Palma intended. He ended up making several changes to two major scenes in the film to secure an R-rating, the first of which is the film's steamy opening shower scene featuring what appeared to be a fully nude Angie Dickinson.

Dickinson was no stranger to nudity, having done multiple nude scenes in exploitation flicks like Big Bad Mama, Sam Whiskey, and Pretty Maids All in a Row, but this was her first post-Police Woman nude scene and it was arguably her most explicit nude scene ever. De Palma had originally offered the role to Ingmar Bergman regular Liv Ullman, who turned it down not due to the nudity required, but because of the character's incredibly violent end, which comes after an extra-marital dalliance at the end of the film's first act.

Dickinson took the role despite the nudity and violence, but ultimately convinced De Palma to utilize a body double for some of the more explicit shots in the film. Penthouse Pet of the Year 1977, the late Victoria Lynn Johnson, did most of the close-up shots of the character's breasts and bush, evenbleaching her own naturallyred pubic hair to better match Dickinson's hair color. Johnson ended up not receiving proper credit for this andthe film's producer, George Litto, encouraged Dickinson to insistthat she did not employ a doublewhile promoting the film. The ruse didn't last and before long, Dickinson happily shared credit for the scene with Johnson.

The film opens with Dickinson's character Kate in the shower, with her husband placed outside the shower, deliberately disconnected from her, and rather cheekily shaving with a straight razor, the weapon with which Kate will meet her end in roughly thirty minutes...

De Palma then does his idol Hitchcock one better by taking us inside the shower with Kate, with plenty of soft-focus nudity—all the rage in the pornography of the day—as we see that she's not only showering, but also pleasuring herself...

The fantasy sequence turns suddenly violent, however, as she is attacked by a mysterious man...

From here, we cut to Kate and her husband in bed, illustrating that everything we've seen has been a dream, a fantasy inside her headthat presages thebland and boring sex she will soon have with her husband. As she will explain to her psychiatristDr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) in a few minutes, her husband gave her "one of his wham/bang specials" earlier that morning. Rather than yelling at him in anger, however, she "moaned with pleasure at his touch," then adding, almost rhetorically, "isn't that what a man wants to hear?"

Kate is clearly of the breed of housewife who plays the role of a sexually satisfied woman when her husband's around, though she clearly yearns for more than he can provide sexually. Unlike many women in such a position, at least as they're portrayed on screen, Kate does go in search of this, playfully flirting with a stranger in a masterfully constructed scene set at a museum.

The series of events that eventually leads to her murder is as follows: She and the stranger head back to his place, though they can't even wait to get there and start fooling around in a cab. She wakes and leaves him a note thanking him for the wonderful afternoon, before discovering a letter addressed to her mystery man informing him that he—and she, in turn—has acquired a sexually transmitted disease. She flees his apartment, feeling ashamed and betrayed, before realizing she's left her wedding ring in his apartment. As she attempts to return for the ring, a mysterious blonde woman—whom we later discover is Dr. Elliott's alter-ego "Bobbi"—enters the elevator and slashes her to death with a straight razor.

Michael Koresky, theEditorial Director at Film Society of Lincoln Center, provided an impeccable analysis of the film for its Criterion release, brilliantly illustrating the playfulness with which De Palma subverts certain genre tropes surrounding the punishment of promiscuous women so prevalent at the time...

Unlike withPsycho’s Marion Crane, who gets an implicit carnal thrill from her thievery, Kate’s transgression is actually sexual. The fact that she is then murdered—like Marion, seemingly randomly and by a cross-dressing monster—is a pointed betrayal, a punishment of her for her sexual self-indulgence and of us for our complicity in her enjoyment, but with a violence so stylized and over-the-top that it clearly functions as a commentary on the misogynistic narrative conventions that dictate that a woman must be so chastised.

That all of this, combined with the opening scene, happens to a huge television star at the height of her fame in the film's first thirty minutes is one of several allusions to Hitchcock's Psycho. De Palma, however, is able to one-up his idol by getting more sexually explicit in 1980 than Hitch ever could in 1960. Couple that with the fact that this was Police WomanAngie Dickinson having sexual assault fantasies, luring a man into a sexual dalliance, and then being slashed to ribbons in an elevator and it's all the more shocking in retrospect.

I haven't even touched on the controversy surrounding the film's rating, which is covered quite nicely inthis featurette from the 2001 DVD release of the film—which has been ported over to the pristine Criterion release. De Palma and several members of the cast and crew, including Angie Dickinson, talk about the cuts that had to be made to avoid an X-rating, offering side by side comparisons of many of the scenes in question...