Sisters

Director Brian De Palma's oeuvre of psycho thrillers truly began with 1972's SISTERS, a film that to me has only improved with time, despite its period perfect evocations.  It is also the only film I can think of that makes Staten Island look fairly interesting.  It quite shamelessly references and lifts camera shots from earlier works, especially those of Alfred Hitchcock.  De Palma would continue this with films like DRESSED TO KILL and BODY DOUBLE, but SISTERS is far tighter, even as it goes slightly awry in its final act.   I can really nitpick the hastiness of the climax, and maybe some of the action leading up to it, but honestly, to carp about the film's absurdities is to perhaps misunderstand the Great Imitator's methods.

Margot Kidder rather beguilingly portrays Danielle, a French Canadian would-be actress with some pretty serious baggage.  Her ex-husband, Emil (William Finley) stalks her while she dates other men.  And she has a demented twin (and conjoined) sister named Dominique from whom she was surgically separated some years ago.  Both of these things complicate Danielle's time with a nice young man named Phillip (Lisle Wilson), who she met on a game show.   He manages to spend the night with her, but will be dead before noon the next day.  We see a woman who looks like Danielle attack him with a knife.  But was it actually Dominique? 

Meanwhile, a woman in an apartment one building over named Grace (Jennifer Salt), a newspaper reporter for an alternative rag, sees Phillip struggle and die in the window.   She convinces a pair of  disbelieving detectives to join her as she confronts her neighbor.  None find any evidence of the crime, which was tidied up by Emil during a lengthy, masterful split screen sequence that would become a De Palma trademark.  Grace, increasingly obsessed, hires a testy private detective named Larch (Charles Durning) to help her prove that a murder was committed.

I won't say any more.  Most of De Palma's movies depend on surprises.  There is so much here to enjoy.  The cast is wonderful.  Paul Hirsch's editing keeps things moving at a clip.  SISTERS gradually tightens the vise as we get to that wild third half hour.  I do prefer the earlier scenes, so tantalizingly portentious, but the subtext of this movie (mainly voyeurism, Women's Lib, feminism, etc.) is very nicely fleshed out during an extended dream sequence  late in the proceedings.  And De Palma's direction there and throughout the movie is just so, yes, dazzling.  An overused word, but really describes it.   He was quite a maestro, and unafraid to meld his fetishes with all the Hitchcock homages.  Buffs will have an even better time with this film.   

And the icing on the cake?  Besides the amusing and very welcome flurorishes of dark humor? Bernard Herrmann, Hitch's longtime composer came out of retirement to score this movie.  Memorable, it is.