July 25, 2025
Screenshot/YouTube
'Dressed to Kill,' released 45 years ago, follows Angie Dickinson through the Philadelphia Museum of Art in an eight-minute scene.
The 1980 thriller "Dressed to Kill" may not have the same reputation as other movies in director Brian De Palma's filmography. (He did, after all, helm "Scarface," "Carrie" and "Mission: Impossible.") But one particular scene sent critics swooning at the time, and still comes up in retrospectives: the extended, wordless sequence inside the art museum.
The eight-minute sequence follows bored housewife Kate (Angie Dickinson) through the galleries as she trails and dodges a handsome stranger. It's supposed to take place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the exterior shots are, unmistakably, of uptown Manhattan. Look a little closer at the interior, however, and you might recognize the winding halls of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
PMA posed as the Met for the movie, released in theaters 45 years ago today. It was natural choice for De Palma, a Philly native who graduated from Friends' Central School and won the Delaware Valley Science Fair with his homemade computer. Despite his scientific pedigree – his dad was also an orthopedic surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University – he ultimately chose to tinker with film reels, not motherboards.
The director, who would later use the city as his backdrop for "Blow Out," leaned on his hometown for "Dressed to Kill" when New York shut him down.
“We scouted the sequence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but they didn’t like the script," De Palma later recalled. "They thought it was in bad taste. And because I grew up in Philadelphia, we were able to move the interior to the Philadelphia Museum of Art."
De Palma said he got the "visual idea" for the scene from his trips to museums as a college student. After visiting PMA, taking photos and obsessively tweaking his storyboard, he was ready to film.
Viewers will notice art on the walls that would've been contemporary for the time. Kate sits on a bench in front of "West Interior," a 1979 piece by Alex Katz that is no longer on view but still in the museum's collection. As she glances around the room, her eyes fix on "Reclining Nude," a 1976 portrait of a gorilla by Tommy Dale Palmore. It also remains at PMA, though off display. As she chases the stranger through the museum, "2 Priory Walk" by Jennifer Bartlett is visible.
Dickinson remembered the scene as a tricky bit of choreography, emotionally and physically, in the book "The De Palma Decade."
"As serious as the scene is, it is also humorous, because it gets desperate," she said. "At first, she is intrigued. And then she finds him rude. Now, she’s going to confront him but can’t find him. And technically, it was so complicated, and complex to do – in fact, I was (at times) holding a rope attached to the camera, so I would stay in focus as I walked."
The scene made an instant splash when the movie hit theaters on July 25, 1980. Roger Ebert called it "absolutely brilliant." Critics at the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other publications also singled out the sequence in their reviews.
Even as other aspects of the film – namely, the trans villain played by Michael Caine – have received renewed scrutiny, the museum chase has endured. De Palma later likened the production of the sequence to setting up a "chess game" for the audience.
"You've got to know the board," he said. "And you got to know what the pieces can do. And you got to stay within that logic."
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