(Photo: Philippe Le Guay)

To coincide with Paramount Home Video's new 4K release of the 1986 film Dragonslayer, Cinema Retro's Todd Garbarini caught up with the film's director, Matthew Robbins. 

By Todd Garbarini

Matthew Robbins is a film director whose experience in the industry goes back over fifty years. Born in New York City and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University in 1965 with a BA in Romance Languages, he formed friendships with Academy Award-winning film editor and sound mixer Walter Murch (The Godfather, 1972) and Academy Award-nominated cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion, 1979). While a student pursuing his MFA at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, he met future film director George Lucas who enlisted Mr. Robbins to work on his student film, Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB (1967), which was later made into the feature film THX 1138 starring Robert Duvall and Donald Pleasence.

Well into his mid-twenties when he came into The New Hollywood (aka the American New Wave or Hollywood Renaissance), his professional career began during one of the most original and fruitful decades in American Cinema, the 1970s. Along with his USC writing partner Hal Barwood, they scripted the real-life 1969 escapades of ex-convict Robert “Bobby” Dent, 22, and his wife, Ila Fae Dent, 21, into The Sugarland Express, hailed by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael as “one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies,” as directed by Steven Spielberg and released in 1974. Both Mr. Robbins and Mr. Barwood made brief appearances as two of the World War II pilots returning to Earth from the mothership in Mr. Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).

After writing The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976) and MacArthur (1977), Mr. Robbins made his directorial debut while co-writing Corvette Summer (1978), a comedy that pitted Mark Hamill and Annie Potts against a ring of car thieves. Next, he embarked on his most audacious outing yet – the fantasy film Dragonslayer, the second film made a co-production with Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney after Robert Altman’s Popeye in 1980. Starring Peter MacNicol as Galen, apprentice to the wizard Ulrich (Sir Ralph Richardson), who must battle the dragon Vermithrax Pejorative following Ulrich’s death, Dragonslayer has had a poor representation on home video over the decades. All that has changed now, thankfully, as Paramount Home Video has restored and released the film in native 4K Ultra High Definition on Blu-ray and Standard Blu-ray. The result is glorious. I spoke with Mr. Robbins recently about this new restoration.

Todd Garbarini: Dragonslayer is one of my favorite movies from childhood. I fell in love with Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack’s King Kong from 1933 and had seen a lot of the Ray Harryhausen stop-motion films prior to that. When I saw your film, I thought, “Wow, they really have come a long way.” I was so impressed with the almost seamless juxtaposing of the special effects and the live action and full-size dragon. In the years since, I’ve had the film on every conceivable home video format, but the picture always seemed very dark and murky, even the letterboxed laserdisc. The new 4K UHD Blu-ray is just so beautiful, you can now really enjoy the amazing production design, cinematography, gadgetry, matte paintings and the incredible Vermithrax Pejorative, a dragon so bad-ass that he has a surname!

Matthew Robbins: Yes! I have been very carefully avoiding seeing this movie for about forty years because it looked so wretched. They worked so many miracles with the new technologies of today to fix one egregious problem after another (on the new 4K release). So, the fact that you are so conscious of the difference here before and after, it means a lot.

TG: I would say it almost looks even better than it did in the theater. Any movie that requires this amount of visual design to create a world that does not exist, the intricacies and nuances, the optical effects, the matte paintings and the go-motion with blur, it is truly an art and collaborative effort. I am a real proponent of the real-world special effects. I have loved reading Cinefex, Cinefantastique, Starlog and Fangoria for decades and it is amazing how much time and effort goes into a film such as this. It is very gratifying to see these movies get their due as none of them have ever been properly represented on home video due to the limitations inherent in those technologies. It is wonderful that younger audiences can really benefit from seeing Dragonslayer in this new 4K ultra high definition. It is my understanding that this movie got the go-ahead because of the popularity of the Dungeons & Dragons imagination game.

MR: That’s right. When Hal Barwood and I drummed up this story, we had been very much present when George Lucas was creating ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) for Star Wars in 1976 when it was being set up at the warehouse in Van Nuys with John Dykstra. We were at that facility, and then he brought it up to Kerner Boulevard, here in Marin (County) where I live, and we specifically created Dragonslayer to get all that horsepower attached to something other than star fields and spaceships. So, it was like turning loose Phil Tippett! Dennis Muren was super charged up because he got a new sandbox to play in. In terms of what you mentioned before, we were aware of Dungeons & Dragons, but we weren’t playing the game.

TG: Neither was I! I have no idea why, either. I loved fantasy, and close friends of mine were very much into it, but I just was never asked by them. I did love the 1978 Ralph Bakshi cartoon of The Lord of the Rings with that wonderful score by Leonard Rosenman.

MR: Well, speaking of Lord of the Rings, Hal was very influenced by Tolkien. He was a fan of Lord of the Rings and got me acquainted, and I thought it was great.

TG: So many people have been influenced by Tolkien. George R.R. Martin credits him for his Games of Thrones novels.

MR: Exactly! I was a big fan of Fantasia with Mickey Mouse and the sorcerer. So, there’s that, and so we combined all those elements, and then we went out with our agent to find a buyer for this thing. While we were waiting, he came back with this news that both Paramount and Walt Disney were both interested. Our first meeting about the film was with Michael Eisner, who was the president of Paramount at the time. He pointed to his desk, and he had a stack of scripts about dragons that they had tried to develop based on their awareness of the Dungeons & Dragons game. So, the fact that people were playing that game in droves really helped us get the project off the ground. As far as I know, people still play it. That’s some of the origins of Dragonslayer.

TG: Was that a long process in your opinion, to your recollection, or did it all kind of come together fairly quickly?

MR: It came together fairly quickly compared to, say, (Guillermo Del Toro’s) Pinocchio.

TG: I had spoken to Robert Wise in February 1994 about my favorite film of his, 1963’s The Haunting, and he talked about Elliot Scott, his production designer. He did such wonderful work on that film, as well as Arabian Adventure (1979), The Watcher in the Woods (1980), Labyrinth (1986) and two of the Indiana Jones films. His work on Dragonslayer was no less stunning.

MR: Oh, I’m so pleased you’re asking about him. He was the dean of production designers. When we went over there to England to put together a crew, everybody was busy. I had actually met some of the people that George (Lucas) had used on Star Wars and Sir Ridley Scott had used on Alien. And so, we were very ambitious, and they were all busy, and they kept saying, “Why aren’t you in touch with Scotty?” I didn’t know who they meant! Everyone else had been kind of either directly his acolytes or had been influenced by him. He was a remarkably talented and experienced individual, and this was only my second picture. He was one of those people whom I relied upon and he helped me tremendously. He would say things like, “I’m gonna put this here for you, and you can do the thing,” or “It’s not attached to the rest of the castle, but then you have this here, and your transition is easy.” He took me in hand. He was a senior presence and a very lovely man. I was quickly sort of in awe of him, really. I remember when we had met and we talked about it, and then I’d had a meeting with him in the art department at Pinewood (Studios), where he was working, and he had a staff. He was a beloved figure and he came in with rolls of paper. He put them out on the desk, and he had drawn some preliminary ideas about how he thought we might have the interior of Ulrich’s Castle. But, I had something else in mind, something very different. So, I said, “Well, I don’t know if this is exactly what I want, because I thought maybe…” and before I could even finish, he took all the papers and he crumpled them up, and he threw them away. And he said, “All right, we’ll start over.” I was just appalled because these beautiful drawings, you know, had just gone to waste! I thought that we were going to discuss it! (laughs) He just scrapped them! I still have a vivid memory of that. I felt very much like what they call the imposter syndrome. How could I have done such a thing? He was one of my favorite people on that movie.

TG: How about cinematographer Derek Vanlint? He was a veteran of television commercials, just like Sir Ridley Scott and they had done Alien together. He brought a wonderful and original look to that film as well. Was he your first choice?

MR: Yes, and he had a cadre around him as well. He was hard charging, very demanding. His nickname for me was “Pet”. (laughs) He was a really gifted cinematographer. I was not experienced enough to know when I was asking for the impossible. He tried to tell me now and then, “We’ll get you as close as we can get.” He was remarkable. I had not had much experience with using more than one camera on set at once. So, I learned, sometimes to my dismay, that I wasn’t free to put the camera just anywhere, once the master was lit. I learned a lot. You can tell it was my second movie, as it was on a vastly bigger scale than my first film. I was running to keep up sometimes.

TG: Were you a fan of movies growing up, and do you recall the first movie you ever saw?

MR: I was afraid of movies when I was growing up! I was very easily frightened by not even scary movies, but films that had a lot of drama or suspense in them.

TG: I was, too. I remember hiding behind my grandmother’s chair while a documentary on Alfred Hitchcock was on and there was a scene playing from Dial M for Murder. My father had told me that the strangler gets killed by a pair of scissors and I was beside myself.

MR: It made me very anxious. I can remember when I was very little, my father was very interested in classical music, and he had a lot of classical LPs. He would put on classical music and I would get scared. They would say, “Well, what’s scary?” And I would say, “Well, this…,” and the fact that music could have things in a minor key, an orchestra music, it meant that it was a score to what was happening in the house! It was background music to what we were living. So, if we were in the kitchen and the music was in the living room, but my mother was at the stove or something in the kitchen, I just felt that something terrible was going to happen because Dimitri Tiomkin was behind this and it was portentous. I was very interested in movies, even though I was very scared of them. I can’t remember literally the first movie I ever saw, though. My neighbors had a television set, and I saw some movies there, such as the Bela Lugosi movies. They were scary. I would leave and then listen at the door. That’s what my grandson does today. One of my grandchildren is exactly like me with regard to being afraid of movies. He’ll flee from the room, and then he’ll linger because he can’t stop, you know?

TG: Are you going to show them Dragonslayer? Caitlin Clarke was my introduction to the female form. (laughs)

MR: (laughs) My grandchildren are too young to see Dragonslayer. (pauses) But one day, soon, they’ll see it!

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By Todd Garbarini

April Wright is a film director whose credits include the documentaries Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the American Drive-In Movie (2013), Going Attractions: The Definitive Story of the Movie Palace (2019) and Stuntwomen: The Untold Hollywood Story (2020), all of which can be viewed JustWatch.com. Like all of us cinephiles, Ms. Wright was not just a fan of movies but also a lover of the experience of going to see a movie, especially at the drive-in. Ms. Wright and I are similar in age and her enthusiasm for the drive-in dates back to her childhood, a familial outing which became a much-anticipated and frequent event during the summer months. I cannot make that claim, unfortunately, as I have attended the drive-in only a handful of times in my life.

Ms. Wright’s latest film, Back to the Drive-In (2023), looks at a dozen remaining drive-ins across the United States and the owners who are, quite honestly, struggling to keep them going. It’s a poignant look at an American pastime that has slowly become an endangered species.

Todd Garbarini: I loved your film. I’ve been a movie fan all my life and I love drive-ins, as well as big and beautiful movie theaters. Clearly you share my enthusiasm.

April Wright: Yes, absolutely. I had a movie family in a way. My dad had an 8mm camera and reel-to-reel editing equipment for that in the basement. I did understand a little bit of the nuts and bolts of filmmaking even when I was a kid. We watched lots of movies. There was a neighborhood movie palace down the street from my house in Chicago that my brother and sister ended up working at. I was able to see a lot of movies. I’ve been interested in movie palaces, just because they were so big and ornate. Now you watch movies at home or on your smartphone and that showmanship is changing and I just don’t really understand why. I like making movies to remind people about what a cool experience it can be seeing a movie as an event and an experience.

TG: Do you remember the very first movie you saw in either a drive-in or in a movie theater?

AW: I really don’t because it was just so commonplace that we saw a lot of movies, so I don’t have any “first-experience” memories. I kind of remember seeing Song of the South as a kid and I remember Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I’m sure I saw some of the Herbie the Love Bug films. Escape to Witch Mountain, I remember seeing that one at a drive-in. I love horror films and I saw them, too. One thing I remember vividly is when Carrie was on television, and my mom telling me I couldn’t come in the room. Of course, I really wanted to, and I snuck downstairs. I looked in right at the end where the hand comes out. It scared me, but it made me really curious. When I was older and I saw the whole movie, it’s one of my favorite films of all time. It intrigued me in a way, just planted that seed since she made it even more forbidden, like, “You can’t watch this!” (laughs)

TG: You’ve made a documentary about movie palaces.

AW: Yes! One of the interviews in that movie is shot at the Loew’s Jersey City. We shot that in 2017. That’s a gorgeous theater. I love it. When that reopens, it’s going to be really great. That theater’s interesting because at one point in time, they had split it into three theaters during the multiplex era.

TG: What?! Are you serious? I had no idea…

AW: Yes, so on the main floor, they split it right down the middle. You had half of the main screen on the left and the other half on the right. They covered the balcony so that they had a third screen up there and they took all that out, which is incredible that they were able to remove all that partitioning. Right down the street is The Stanley Theater which is now home to the Jehovah’s Witnesses. We got to go in there during the Theater Historical Society tours that we were on. That one is gorgeous, too. It’s an atmospheric theater and they used to have a blue sky and twinkling lights on the ceiling in most of them. Then it would look like a little town around you as if you were outside. It’s impeccably maintained, it’s gorgeous, but they painted their ceiling white, so it looks like you’re up in the heavens or up in the clouds when you’re in there.

TG: I’m jealous because in my area, I had a handful of movie theaters that I went to over the years, and now they’re all gone. One of them was the Plainfield Edison Drive-In. They had a double feature of Black Christmas and Psycho, The Velvet Vampire, Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural, etc. It opened in 1957 and closed in 1984, the year before I obtained my driver’s license!

AW: I don’t know if you know this, but the very first drive-in ever was in New Jersey.

TG: Yes, that was Camden. The founder was Richard Hollingshead.

AW: Yes! His son is in my first documentary talking about how his dad invented it. It opened in 1933, so this year is the 90th anniversary of the drive-in, which is pretty cool.

TG: Hard to believe. In fact, what I liked about your new film, Back to the Drive-In, is that you have the Delsea Drive-In in Vineland, NJ, the only remaining drive-in in the state.

AW: Yes. I went down there. We shot more, but they said, “Oh, we don’t want to be in it that much.” Some people like being on camera and don’t. A lot of the drive-in owners are part of the United Drive-In Theater Owners Association, there’s a group. They have an annual conference in Florida. I went to it in February of 2020, which is right before COVID. I knew I wanted to do a follow-up (to my previous film about drive-ins), and at that point in time, I thought I wanted to just go really in depth with perhaps three families. I said to them there, “Does anybody want to be part of this film?” There were some other drive-ins that had wanted to be part of my next film that weren’t in my first one, and so I had a few potential ones. Then a month later, COVID hit, and even though drive-ins were open, I still felt like states were changing the rules and everything was still weird for a little while. I waited, but then the more that COVID was going on and then drive-ins started getting all this attention, I thought that this is a layer to my story that I never could have anticipated. It made me expand that instead of just showing a few families in depth and what they do. I wanted to show not only that, but what was COVID doing to it? It made me want to have a bigger cross-section. I needed to see what was going on and go to some really old and some fairly new drive-ins. I wanted to go to some big ones with seven screens, and I wanted to go to the single screens out in different states. I tried to just pick every type of factor to represent. The weird thing was, as soon as I got on the road and went to a few of them, I realized they were all telling me the same story. They were all struggling. Everybody was just trying to get through this period. They were small businesses, family-owned, and they were just trying so hard to keep them going because they really care about what it provides to their community. That’s how it came about. I was going to do it anyway, but then the way I decided to do it evolved because of COVID.

TG: What I find interesting is, in the movie, they say, “We ask you to keep your mask on while you’re in the car.” We forget how bad it really was back then during the height of COVID.

AW: Yes. I think that might have been a California drive-in, too, because California was more rigid than other places. California was definitely in a program wherein if the numbers were high, the rules were stricter. If the numbers went down, then it got released. That might have been at a moment when the numbers were high. I know because although I’m from Chicago, I live in Los Angeles.

TG: I haven’t been to LA since 2008. I have gone to more drive-ins as an adult while out on business than I ever did when I was a child. It just kills me to see this type of thing dying out. I look at the theaters that used to be around here on CinemaTreasures.org and there is no evidence that these places ever existed.

AW: I know. When you see a horror movie at a drive-in and you can look over to your right or left, and there’s a forest right next to you, that’s an extra layer of film! That’s like 4-D!

TG: Who are some of your favorite directors?

AW: One of my favorites is Brian De Palma.

TG: Oh, I love him. I just saw the new Dressed to Kill 4K Blu-ray and it’s beautiful.

AW: I really like pretty much all his films, just the way he shoots them. I like the split-screen stuff. I think they all hold up. He had great actors and all of them and just, yes, I think he’s a great filmmaker. Like even the Mission Impossible series, I still think the first one is the best one that he directed.

TG: Do you like William Friedkin?

AW: I do. Actually, we’ve met and chatted before because he’s also a fellow Chicagoan. I love The French Connection. That’s probably his best movie, my absolute favorite. I went to a screening of that at the Academy where he was there doing Q&A and just some of the stuff that he did because he came out of documentaries first. For him to do moving shots the way he did and just the grittiness of it, I mean that was something on the newer side when he shot something that way. Yes, I really love that. I love all John Carpenter’s stuff, for sure. Richard Linklater. I love (Steven) Soderbergh’s work because he’s just made such a wide array of movies, big movies but also small and experimental, some that he shot on videos cameras. He tries different things. I really like them as filmmakers as well. Amy Heckerling has such a great body of work and Penelope Spheeris. She started in documentaries. I actually just went to see her doc a few days ago, the first Decline of Western Civilization, about punk and she was there for Q&A. I love Nicholas Cage, too. Thrillers and horror are probably my number one. Of course, I do like documentaries as well, especially if they’re about subjects that you can learn something about. The Shining is one of my favorites of all time. Also, I love John Landis. I’m from Chicago, and he shot some things there like The Blues Brothers.

TG: How much footage did you shoot for Back to the Drive-In?

AW: Quite a bit. I had a crew to help me in Los Angeles when I was here, but the rest I actually did by myself. I had my primary camera, I had my drone, and then I had a GoPro, which I did time-lapses from empty daytime to evening. Between those three, it gave me enough to cut together, but I usually got to each drive-in in the afternoons, you would start maybe at three in the afternoon, capturing all their preparation, and then stay until late, usually two in the morning. It was basically almost twelve hours of footage for each one, because I would just get there and be shooting non-stop. Then the logical way to put it together, I thought it might be by subject, but once I looked at it, I realized, no, it’s got to be chronological. Just one big arc of the afternoon, the prep, and then opening the doors, and then the snack bar, and then getting the movie on screen, and then the breather once all that’s done became the way to tell it.

TG: I miss the aura and aroma of the theaters I went to as a child.

AW: Yes, it’s true. Movie theater smell. When I go to old theaters, too, a lot of times you walk into them and your reaction is, “Oh, there’s a good old movie theater smell.” Also in the projection rooms, if they’re where they have all that old equipment, that’s a certain smell because the film and the oil and all that had a smell, too. That’s almost gone now because they had to convert them to clean rooms for the digital projection. You must have a climate-controlled, very fancy environment for those. A lot of the drive-ins still have both projectors.

TG: Do you have an all-time favorite movie?

AW: Rocky.

TG: Did you see it in the movies when it first came out?

AW: I did. Even though I was a little kid, my mom saw it and she wanted to take us to see Rocky. That’s probably part of it. Also, I realized after I’ve been a filmmaker for a little while, some of the things I like or I’m drawn to – and Carrie falls into this, for sure – is that I really like underdogs and people who shouldn’t win but somehow do. That’s a theme in the films that I like. For Rocky, obviously, that is one of the best underdog stories. It’s not even the message of winning. It’s just going the distance, of course. The story of making it is an underdog story, too. The fact that Stallone can be a semi-nobody struggling actor and come up with this and write it and create such an iconic character that lives on is inspiring as well. I love that movie. It is my all-time favorite. If you want to talk horror, my all-time favorite is Carrie.

TG: I was sorry to see your film end because I just wanted to see so many other people talking. I’m sure you’ve probably seen The Last Blockbuster, the film about, literally, the last Blockbuster Video, which is in Bend, Oregon. In some ways, your movie reminds me of that film because I say, yes, there are no more video stores to go to. I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me.

AW: Thank you very much. I’m glad you liked the movie!

Back to the Drive-In can now be seen streaming on iTunes, Amazon Prime, Google Play, and Vudu.

By Todd Garbarini

Brian De Palma’s Dressed to Kill (1980) is one of the director’s best and most entertaining works. It also appears to be ahead of its time in some ways while simultaneously paying homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), something Mr. De Palma also did to great effect with his excellent 1973 Staten Island-lensed thriller Sisters, a film that Stephen King loved so much that he championed Mr. De Palma to make his own novel Carrie into the 1976 film of the same name. His 1976 romantic thriller Obsession was also inspired by the Master of Suspense, specifically Vertigo (1958).

Filmed in the autumn of 1979 and released on Friday, July 25, 1980, Dressed to Kill pits Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) as a woman who is bored and sexually frustrated in the Big Apple as she looks to spice up her unexciting afternoons. Her teenage son Peter (Keith Gordon, who would play Arnie in John Carpenter’s Christine in 1984 before becoming a film director) is a computer geek at a time when being a computer geek meant being male and having zero sex appeal (he has built a computer that carries binary numbers; he is also adept with booby traps and other forms of technology). Kate is under the psychiatric care of Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine) for her frustrations and attempts to seduce him during a session but is rebuffed.

An afternoon trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York results in the film’s most talked about scene wherein she is “picked up” by a stranger who never says a word, and playfully entices her in an extended and wordless “chase” in the museum which ends with illicit sex in the backseat of a taxi and climaxes (no pun intended, of course) with the quickest female orgasm in cinema history. Kate ends up spending the evening with her mystery man in his swanky Front Street apartment, only to discover surreptitiously that he has a venereal disease. This leads her to rush off in haste and be unceremoniously dispatched by a razor-wielding nut job in a carefully orchestrated elevator murder sequence that is intercut with the introduction of Liz Blake, a call girl played by Nancy Allen, who witnesses the murder.

Kate’s son is obviously shattered by his mother’s death, although we only see his stepfather very briefly – at the start of the film during a “wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am” sex scene with Kate, through the shower as he shaves, and later after Kate’s murder when Peter is at the police station. Detective Marino (played brilliantly by Dennis Franz) tries his best to get what info he can out of Liz and Dr. Elliott, but Peter teams up with Liz to find the killer themselves who appears to be a man dressed as a woman, with long blonde hair and dark sunglasses. The obvious tip of the hat to Psycho, complete with Ms. Dickinson’s death scene a third of the way through the film (making her a modern-day Janet Leigh), should give a clue to the killer’s real identity.

There is a great deal of sexual tension and graphic violence in Dressed to Kill, so much so that when the film was released 43 years ago it was initially given an X rating by the MPAA. Jack Valenti, who was president of the MPAA at the time, had stated prior to the film’s release that the political climate in the U.S. had been shifting to the right which in turn meant more conservative attitudes toward sex and violence (those of us who lived through the Meese Report days know this all too well). Interestingly Zombie (1979), the Italian Lucio Fulci gross-out film, was released the same day as Mr. De Palma’s film, unrated and with a similar caveat that appeared on the poster of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead two years earlier since newspapers would not run ads for X-rated films. So, violence was certainly still acceptable on the big screen, as long as it was rated accordingly. Some of the dialogue in the film was also sexual in nature and had to be altered, but the cuts that were made for the theatrical version have all been reinstated on the latest home video releases of the film. Currently, wherein XXX-rated hardcore pornography is just a computer mouse-click away, just about anything in Dressed to Kill seems tame in comparison.

Mr. De Palma has consistently received critical flak for “ripping off” Alfred Hitchcock, but this time he manages to create and sustain a visual style all his own. Even Vincent Canby liked the film, which is saying a lot! Had Bernard Herrmann still been alive (the great musical collaborator of Mr. Hitchcock), he no doubt would have been commissioned to write the score, having already delivered two excellent scores for Mr. De Palma’s Sisters (1973) and Obsession (1976), the latter of which is sumptuous and gorgeous, clearly one of his best. His successor proved to be quite formidable. Pino Donnagio, who wrote brilliant music for Don’t Look Now (1973) and Tourist Trap (1979), delivers another great piece here, and has gone on to work with Mr. De Palma on many other films.

Dressed to Kill has been released in many formats since its theatrical release. Warner Home Video released it on VHS in the big clamshell box at least twice; Image Entertainment released a somewhat letterboxed laserdisc; and MGM/UA released it on both DVD and Blu-ray in a special edition, as did The Criterion Collection. Now, Kino Lorber has added this title to their ever-expanding and impressive roster of classic titles. This new edition is loaded with new and exclusive extras while porting over some from the aforementioned MGM/UA releases:

Disc One is Dressed to Kill in 4K UHD. This is hands-down the best that the film has ever looked. I recall purchasing the Image Entertainment letterboxed laserdisc in 1990 and being very disappointed in the transfer. I would not have guessed that I would have to wait 33 years to see this vast improvement.

Disc Two is a standard Blu-ray that contains the following supplements:

Strictly Business runs 17:26 Nancy Allen talks about how the script came about and how an executive saw Suzanne Somers in her role! I would have loved to have seen that, with Mr. Roper (Norman Fell) as the killer.

Killer Frames with Fred Caruso runs 8:13 and is a look at the work of associate producer and production manager Fred Caruso who worked on Midnight Cowboy (1969), Husbands (1970), The Godfather (1972), and later on Blow Out (1981) and several other films for Mr. DePalma.

An Imitation of Life with Keith Gordon runs 14:15 and is an engaging discussion about how Mr. Gordon got cast in the film and played Angie Dickinson’s son who was originally envisioned as a sexually unaware ten-year-old. Mr. Gordon decided to play it as an older teenager who has been up all night, tired, etc. and to his credit, Mr. DePalma agreed. He also discusses how he saw them shooting the murder scene and it looking ridiculous, but the way that it was edited made all the difference.

Symphony of Fear, 2012 Interview with Gordon Litto by Fiction Factory runs 17:36 and the producer talks about how he saw Brian DePalma’s Sisters and began his professional relationship with the director.

Dressed in White, 2012 Interview with Angie Dickinson by Fiction Factory runs 29:53 and is an onscreen interview. Brian DePalma contacted her while she was promoting Claude Pinoteau’s Jigsaw in Canada in 1979. She talks about Michael Caine’s hilarious sense of humor; the celebrated museum sequence took four days to shoot; the subtlety of Bobbi’s first appearance onscreen (something that I missed over and over again); the difficulties of shooting the cab sequence; the elevator set; and suggesting to Ann Roth the costume designer that she wear a white coat.

Dressed in Purple, 2012 Interview with Nancy Allen by Fiction Factory runs 23:04. Ms. Allen discusses starring in Carrie following her early onscreen cameo opposite Jack Nicholson towards the end of Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973); the sensual movement of a camera being similar to a dance; working again with Keith Gordon (they had previously collaborated on Brian DePalma’s Home Movies the previous year); Ann Roth’s costuming on her; the editing of Jerry Greenberg, the Oscar-winning cutter on William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971); the uncomfortable lingerie outfit; and auditioning for Dario Argento’s Inferno in New York in 1979 and not wanting to shoot underwater (that role went to Irene Miracle)

Lessons in Filmmaking, 2012 Interview with Keith Gordon by Fiction Factory runs 30:46. Mr. Gordon discusses his experiences on the film and how it was an excellent course in film school with a master filmmaker. He watched the elevator murder sequence being shot and thinking how silly it looked, only to be blown away by the way it was cut together in the final film.

The Making of Dressed to Kill runs 43:51 and is a 2001 documentary shot in standard definition which includes recollections from the cast and crew.

Slashing Dressed to Kill runs 9:49 and is a 2001 look (shot in standard definition) at the changes that needed to be made to the film in 1980 in order to secure an R-rating.

Unrated/R-Rated/TV-Rated Comparison from 2001 that is exactly what the title implies.

An Appreciation by Keith Gordon runs 6:05 and is a 2001 featurette (shot in standard definition) wherein Mr. Gordon talks about the impressions that Kate’s character has as she is in the celebrated museum sequence and the subliminal images in the film.

1980 Audio Interview with Michael Caine runs 4:50, and he discusses how much he loves shooting in New York and his-then recent move to California.

1980 Audio Interview with Angie Dickinson runs 3:30 and she talks about how the film should receive a double “R” rating because of its sexual content. Fun stuff!

1980 Audio Interview with Nancy Allen runs 14:30 and she speaks at length of how much she prefers to work on smaller films with lower budgets than big, budgeted films, such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941, as the crew was too numerous in size for her to remember who worked on the film.

Dressed to Kill Radio Spots

Dressed to Kill TV Spots

Dressed to Kill Teaser Trailer and Theatrical Trailer

Trailers for Play Misty for Me, And Soon the Darkness, Eyes of Laura Mars, Happy Birthday to Me, and Not for Publication round out the package.

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By Todd Gararini

We are all faced with challenging situations in our lives, but one would hope that we face nothing like the scenario that Thomas Babington “Babe” Levy (Dustin Hoffman) does in John Schlesinger’s Marathon Man, the film version of William Goldman’s novel of the same name and who was the film’s screenwriter. The movie opened in New York on Wednesday, October 6, 1976. Babe is a Ph.D. candidate selected to be in an exclusive class of five students at Columbia University taught by a professor (Fritz Weaver in a terrific cameo) who knows that Babe’s father committed suicide following his being investigated during the Joseph McCarthy-era witch hunts. He urges Babe not to turn his research into a personal crusade to clear his father’s name, something that Babe is wrestling with.

Babe is an avid runner and times himself daily while running through Central Park, presumably to compete in the New York City Marathon. He is verbally ribbed by the guys who live across the street from his apartment. His brother, Henry “Doc” Levy (the excellent Roy Scheider), passes himself off to Babe as an oil company executive, but in reality is a diamond courier for an infamous Nazi war criminal named Dr. Christian Szell (Laurence Olivier, who was nominated as Best Supporting Actor), who has been hiding in South America while living off of diamonds he stole from Jews during the Nazi occupation in Europe. Szell shares a safe deposit box with his brother who lives in New York, however the latter dies in an accident involving an oil truck. This complicates matters for Szell as he must come out of hiding to get his diamonds, running the risk of being recognized by Auschwitz survivors.

Babe meets and falls for a research student named Olga (Marthe Keller), who is fluent in German and French and they begin a romance which takes Babe deeper into the mystery of his brother’s affiliation with Szell. The overall film may not make one hundred percent sense, and there are plot holes large enough to drive an oil truck through, however it is terrifically entertaining and so far ahead of contemporary thrillers that I suggest one overlook these flaws. For a basis of comparison, its most obvious cinematic antecedent in terms of atmosphere is Alan J. Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) with Warren Beatty. William Devane also is terrific as Janeway, Doc’s friend who comes to the rescue and needs to get pertinent information from Babe.

Marathon Man was the first Dustin Hoffman film that I saw when it aired on CBS in October 1980 and for a while Szell’s ominous inquiry to Babe when he is captured by Szell’s henchmen (Richard Bright and Marc Lawrence), the infamous “Is it safe?”, became part of the lexicon and a cultural reference that even appeared in Joe Dante’s Gremlins (1984) when one of the titular creatures jokingly brandishes a dental drill. The film requires active viewing for first-timers as there are double-crosses in abundance and if you blink you might miss them. Viewers may dig deeply with questions about the plot, but my only concern is where did Szell obtain that nifty killer wrist knife that he uses on Roy Scheider and Fred Stuthman (the survivor who recognizes him at the end of the film)? That is a nice device that can come in handy (sorry) during ponderous corporate meetings and heated disagreements with political adversaries.

Marathon Man has been released before on video cassette, laserdisc, CED (remember those?!), DVD, Blu-ray, and is now available in a two-disc set from Kino Lorber, which keeps releasing great movies in equally great special editions.

(Photo: Paramount)

Disc One contains the film in 4K UHD, scanned in 4K from the original 35mm camera negative. I personally cannot see a noticeable difference between this and the standard Blu-ray on my 4K television, though it might be on a much larger screen. There are no extras on this disc.

Disc Two is a standard Blu-ray derived from the same 4K scan and down-converted to standard HD, and the disc has extras ported over from the original DVD release, with some exclusive extras this time around to add additional value. For the first time in any format, there is an audio commentary by film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson and it is feature-length. It is a joy to listen to and I am grateful that they took time to discuss the great contribution of composer Michael Small’s score for the film. A veteran of terrific film music for Klute (1971), The Parallax View (1974), Night Moves (1975), and an unused score to The China Syndrome (1979), his score for Marathon Man is characteristically icy, creepy and sinister. There is also a good deal of info regarding the cast and crew, particularly screenwriter Goldman and director Schlesinger. They also quite correctly point out that the original movie poster add campaign, which strangely consisted of simply the words, “A thriller,” would have benefitted greatly with “Is it safe?” instead.

The Magic of Hollywood…Is the Magic of People runs 21:14 and is a wonderful behind-the-scenes look at the making of the film while it was in production, ported over from the 2001 DVD. Much of the footage is of Robert Evans talking about catching lightning in a bottle and getting his first casting choices to come along for the ride. Input from Dustin Hoffman, Laurence Olivier, John Schlesinger and Marthe Keller bookend footage of the final confrontation between Babe and Szell on a Los Angeles backlot set!

Going the Distance: Remembering Marathon Man runs 29:07 and is a 2001 piece from the DVD of the time and contains interviews with the cast and crew.

Rehearsal Footage runs 21:06 and is my favorite extra which includes Dustin Hoffman’s, Roy Scheider’s, and Marte Keller’s explorations of their characters. This is very interesting as much of it was shot before and during the release of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws, the blockbuster that Mr. Scheider starred in, before principal photography commenced in October 1975 and finished around February 1976. Marathon Man also has the unique distinction of being the second motion picture to employ the use of the then-new Steadicam.

Rounding out the extras are the theatrical trailer, ten TV Spots and two radio spots.