Sisters (1972)
(Blood Sisters)
Country: US
Technical: col 92m
Director: Brian de Palma
Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, William Finley, Charles Durning
Synopsis:
An actress takes a co-worker home to her apartment, under the watchful eye of her 'husband'. However, all is not what it seems, as it turns out that she is the more stable half of a pair of formerly conjoined twins.
Review:
The first of De Palma's films to self-consciously riff on Hitchcockian elements ('rip off' would be another way of putting it) is a strident affair, almost akin to a student work in its ostentation and naivety. The basic setup (likeable - black, notice - main character turns out not to be so when he is 'offed' at the end of reel two, and 'Vera Miles' takes over) recalls, of course Psycho: Herrmann's score, the Knife, the laborious puritanism of the 'sister' character; one shot even quotes the Arbogast murder directly; it is tempting, finally, to align Phillip's 'daring' to sleep with a white girl with Marion's mortal sins of theft and fornication, as opposed to the fresh breeze of racial tolerance seem to herald, and it would be just like De Palma to enjooy the irony of that mistaken assumption: to this day, it is hard to find an American film in which such coupling takes place. Then we jump to Rear Window, with Salt's character swearing she has seen a murder, but where is the body? Finally, we end up with something like Todd Browning's Freaks meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In the meantime we have De Palma's tiresome preoccupation with dumb, loudmouthed cops, itself a vestige of Hitch's own self-avowed phobia of policemen. Throw in some very un-chocolate sauce-like blood and light relief in the form of Durning's enthusiastic private dick and you have a just about complete picture. And yet... it merits a star simply by virtue of its unrelenting, split-screen, audacity. Note: the Twin Towers are visible in about three shots (they had only just been built but had not yet opened their doors).
(Blood Sisters)
Country: US
Technical: col 92m
Director: Brian de Palma
Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, William Finley, Charles Durning
Synopsis:
An actress takes a co-worker home to her apartment, under the watchful eye of her 'husband'. However, all is not what it seems, as it turns out that she is the more stable half of a pair of formerly conjoined twins.
Review:
The first of De Palma's films to self-consciously riff on Hitchcockian elements ('rip off' would be another way of putting it) is a strident affair, almost akin to a student work in its ostentation and naivety. The basic setup (likeable - black, notice - main character turns out not to be so when he is 'offed' at the end of reel two, and 'Vera Miles' takes over) recalls, of course Psycho: Herrmann's score, the Knife, the laborious puritanism of the 'sister' character; one shot even quotes the Arbogast murder directly; it is tempting, finally, to align Phillip's 'daring' to sleep with a white girl with Marion's mortal sins of theft and fornication, as opposed to the fresh breeze of racial tolerance seem to herald, and it would be just like De Palma to enjooy the irony of that mistaken assumption: to this day, it is hard to find an American film in which such coupling takes place. Then we jump to Rear Window, with Salt's character swearing she has seen a murder, but where is the body? Finally, we end up with something like Todd Browning's Freaks meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In the meantime we have De Palma's tiresome preoccupation with dumb, loudmouthed cops, itself a vestige of Hitch's own self-avowed phobia of policemen. Throw in some very un-chocolate sauce-like blood and light relief in the form of Durning's enthusiastic private dick and you have a just about complete picture. And yet... it merits a star simply by virtue of its unrelenting, split-screen, audacity. Note: the Twin Towers are visible in about three shots (they had only just been built but had not yet opened their doors).
(Blood Sisters)
Country: US
Technical: col 92m
Director: Brian de Palma
Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, William Finley, Charles Durning
Synopsis:
An actress takes a co-worker home to her apartment, under the watchful eye of her 'husband'. However, all is not what it seems, as it turns out that she is the more stable half of a pair of formerly conjoined twins.
Review:
The first of De Palma's films to self-consciously riff on Hitchcockian elements ('rip off' would be another way of putting it) is a strident affair, almost akin to a student work in its ostentation and naivety. The basic setup (likeable - black, notice - main character turns out not to be so when he is 'offed' at the end of reel two, and 'Vera Miles' takes over) recalls, of course Psycho: Herrmann's score, the Knife, the laborious puritanism of the 'sister' character; one shot even quotes the Arbogast murder directly; it is tempting, finally, to align Phillip's 'daring' to sleep with a white girl with Marion's mortal sins of theft and fornication, as opposed to the fresh breeze of racial tolerance seem to herald, and it would be just like De Palma to enjooy the irony of that mistaken assumption: to this day, it is hard to find an American film in which such coupling takes place. Then we jump to Rear Window, with Salt's character swearing she has seen a murder, but where is the body? Finally, we end up with something like Todd Browning's Freaks meets Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? In the meantime we have De Palma's tiresome preoccupation with dumb, loudmouthed cops, itself a vestige of Hitch's own self-avowed phobia of policemen. Throw in some very un-chocolate sauce-like blood and light relief in the form of Durning's enthusiastic private dick and you have a just about complete picture. And yet... it merits a star simply by virtue of its unrelenting, split-screen, audacity. Note: the Twin Towers are visible in about three shots (they had only just been built but had not yet opened their doors).