Filmed by Gregory Sandor
Edited by Paul Hirsch
Original music by Bernard Herrmann
US, 1973, color and black & white, 35mm (print source: Academy Archives), 93 min.
Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning, and William Finley
De
Palma’s first fully “Hitchcockian” thriller follows a reporter who gets
a rear-window view of a murder. When she discovers that the woman she
saw commit the crime has a Siamese twin (now separated), she’s drawn
into a mystery that threatens her safety and sanity. While the
excellent score by Bernard Herrmann further underlines the film's debts
to Hitchcock, De Palma uses innovative split-screen photography and a
dazzling first-person nightmare sequence to make the case for himself
as a new, post-modernist “master of suspense.” -- Bryan Poyser