DRESSED TO KILL vs. FOUR FRIENDS
TALE OF THE TAPE
Year Released
1980 - 1981
Director
Brian De Palma - Arthur Penn
IMDB
7.1 - 6.7
RT
84 - 86
Dressed To Kill
What I Liked: Strong performances here by most of the leads, including what might be one of Michael Caine's finest, and Angie Dickinson impressing in her time on screen. The supporting cast works. The cinematography is extremely well done, as I hope some of the shots above show, minus one of the things I'll be discussing in the next part of this review. As an exercise for building suspense, although the twist is one of the most obvious ones I can ever remember, it works in large part, even though I had several quibbles with the film.
What I Disliked: If you were looking for logic, you might as well check out now... unfortunately, I like my thrillers with a little bit of logic, so that's something that really worked against the film here. The Hitchcock apings are obvious and in abundance, and honestly, I'd rather just watch the CINECAST!ing Hitchcock films rather than see someone else half-assing his work. A lot of the dialogue is extremely clumsy, for example, in the interrogation scene, where Caine and Franz try to work miracles around some really piss poor written stuff. For a few times in the film, a call-back is used, as seen above, and these really didn't fit the rest of the tone and just felt out of place. To be honest, the rest of these criticisms fall small compared to my next one. Nancy Allen is absolutely CINECAST!ing DREADFUL here. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why it's rarely a good idea to give your spouse a part, especially when they're expected to carry a portion of the film. If they can't do it, the movie suffers, and you get booted in round one of the 80s bracket.
Four Friends
What I Liked: Craig Wasson is very good here, the kind of good where you wonder what the hell happened to his career and why he never really went anywhere. The music wasn't nearly as heavy handed as sixty films that followed it, and that is a very good thing. The supporting characters largely fill the film with depth and warmness, and most of them I preferred seeing to the leads, if that meant anything. When you were supposed to be shocked, I was genuinely shocked, and although not all of the film worked for me, a large part of it did.
What I Disliked: What is this, the night of the weak female leads? Jodi Thelen, while being very nice to look at, did nothing for me in her portrayal of the loopy Georgia, often taking it to the point of annoyance, leaving it hard to find any real compassion for the character. The film feels very much more like an assortment of random shorts rather than a feature at points, with several of the moments feeling heavy handed and artificial. The film seemed like it ran too long, or too long without some of the voiceover that was featured in some parts... it was a film that half-way through, I was really expecting to like more when it was over. As it ended, it was just kind of forgettable, nice, but nothing I'd expect to be a Cinderella story in the bracket.
Verdict: Four Friends. Although I didn't love it, I still found it the better film here, although
