Miserably paced thriller, not just because of the slowness and distension of every individual scene, but also because of the rhythm-and-rhymeless placement of the dramatic climaxes. The movie gets off on the wrong foot with a Dial Soap wet dream (Angie Dickinson steaming up the shower by fondling a body purported to be her own, but a very bad match for her face and date of birth), and it soon goes irrecoverably astray in a ludicrously protracted sexual sniffing-out scene in a New York art museum, with the starving Dickinson starting out as the intended picker-upper and ending up as the pickee. The payoff to this swooningly erotic episode (as she looks through the man's desk for a memo pad on which to scribble a thank-you note, Dickinson comes across a Department of Health certificate declaring him a V.D. carrier) is such a howlingly cruel awakening as to make the razor-slasher outside the elevator seem almost an anti-climax. The violins in the background keep imploring you to feel something, but the movie is less often involving than simply embarrassing. And as expected in a Brian De Palma movie, there is a virtual rash of cheating and stealing (principally, of course, from Hitchcock). With Michael Caine and Nancy Allen. (1980) — Duncan Shepherd