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lobby, Bud — dressed in a dark red sports jacket — makes short work of
Dwight, shooting the DJ point-blank in the head as he sits in front of a
typewriter on which Bud’s just typed another suicide note, “I’ve lived
with Dorrie’s killing on my conscience for far too long. Now that her
sister suspects, I know there’s no other way. Please forgive me for
everything.”
Later, when the police discover the note, the chief solemnly
pronounces, “Case opened again, case closed again,” then pays Ellen a
back-handed compliment for her “police work,” “You did it all, and if I
had known you were doing it. I’d have stopped you.” The chiefs not-sosubtle message is that “girls” shouldn’t try to be detectives, that — to
quote James Brown — “It’s a man’s world,” a sentiment that aligns the
law not only with Ellen’s callous father, whom the film intimates was
responsible for his wife’s death, but also the psychopathic Bud, whose
masculinity is murderously utilitarian.
Although Ellen promptly returns home in a chauffeured black
limousine, the long, cypress shadows on the gravel driveway outside her
father’s house hint it’s not quite over yet. And sure enough, as soon as
Ellen walks in the door, her father tells her someone’s waiting for her in
the den and — cue the stinger on the sound track — it’s Bud, dressed in
a cream-colored sports jacket and cornflower-yellow shirt, smiling as if
he’s just swallowed the canary. The character’s costuming may seem
anomalous here, but given Bud’s deceptive, chameleon-like nature, it’s
entirely a propos: just as the yellow shirt rhymes with Ellen’s towel and
bathrobe in the “diving” sequence, so the light-colored sports jacket
remembers the summer suit he was wearing when he murdered Dorrie.
The subsequent sequence in which Bud and Ellen ride in long
shot across a desert trail directly references Leave Her to Heaven and, in
particular, the celebrated passage where another Ellen on horseback
wildly strews her father’s ashes across a landscape the color of “dried
blood.” In a Kiss Before Dying, though, it’s not Ellen but Bud who’s in
love with her father or, at least, her father’s money. In the muted ochre
and umber landscape, it is Bud, dressed in tight matching denim-blue
pants and jacket — not Ellen, wearing a checked light-blue shirt over
khaki riding pants — who stands out. In this scene. Bud’s character
exhibits the sort of arresting color-accented costuming typically reserved
for the female star. In fact. Bud reverts to form here, wearing the “cool”
color he’s most associated with: sky-blue.
In the intervening time since the discovery of Dwight’s body,
Ellen has changed perceptibly. She’s not only finally reconciled herself
to her sister’s death but reached a rapprochement with her father. Bud