Program Notes
Jacob Vaughan
Former Austin Film Society Director of Programming
Inspired
by a 1966 Life magazine article about a pair of Russian Siamese Twins
named Masha and Dasha, Brian De Palma’s first fully realized homage to
Alfred Hitchcock is a shocking blend of those now well-known De Palma
ingredients of voyeurism, death, and bright red Tabasco sauce – uh, I
mean, blood.
Masha and Dasha prove to be worthy subjects of De
Palma’s gaze. Aside from being conjoined at the hip, the commie cohorts
were apparently normal in all other respects. However, as they grew
older, the two drifted apart in mood and temperament. One continued to
be happy-go-lucky while the other slipped into a deep depression. It’s
the kind of story that De Palma would be drawn to more and more later
in his career. He would leave the quirky, counter-culture material
behind and venture into horror, sometimes comic-horror, story telling.
Grace
Collier, played by Jennifer Salt (who currently produces and writes for
the television show Nip/Tuck), is a young/hot columnist for the local
paper who witnesses a murder. Charles Durning is the private detective
who helps her investigate the murder and the comic reliever that helps
the audience chuckle every now and then. Just how long is he going to
wait for that couch to be retrieved at the train station? A very long
time, one only hopes. William Finley, one of De Palma’s constant
collaborators throughout the early days, is the diabolical doc with at
least one pratfall up his sleeve.
But it is Dominique and
Danielle – both played by a charming and very sexy Margot Kidder five
years before she would be known by a generation as Lois Lane – who are
the troubled twins at the center of De Palma’s PSYCHO-driven,
VERTIGO-induced, and ROPE-entangled thriller. Why the Hitchcock
reference, you ask? Ask away; nobody has quite figured it out. De
Palma lays out his reasoning thus:
“Basically I wanted to make a
movie in the Hitchcock mode in order to work on my own problems as a
story-teller. It was also a study in the realization of precise
visualization. I was trying to work in a pure cinematic style – doing
everything with drawn shots and figuring out how all the pieces of film
were going to fit together, then writing the story and making the story
evolve from the image.
…
My earlier films had been very loose and
all over the place, and as happens in that kind of situation, the parts
had been better than the whole. So SISTERS was a very conscious
attempt at making something which was uniform by trying to work within
a very tight story form.”
Indeed, SISTERS draws on Hitchcockian
cinematic syntax – the introduction of a character and then having them
killed off 40 minutes into the picture (PSYCHO); taking a person who
witnesses a murder and then involving him/her in solving the crime
(REAR WINDOW); a corpse hidden in plain sight (ROPE). What’s
interesting about SISTERS, and what makes it a compelling time-capsule,
is that we get a glimpse of the De Palma visual style while it’s still
a work-in-progress. His use of split screen is attenuated and yet
feels new and intriguing. Prior to SISTERS, split screen had been used
primarily in documentaries, most notably in the film WOODSTOCK. De
Palma was one of the first filmmakers to use it in narrative film.
Later in his career it gets a bit wacky. The same is true for his use
of slow motion. SPOILER ALERT: When Dominique/Danielle stabs her new
boyfriend, we catch a bit of slow motion, a film effect that he will
use (some would say, overuse) in later works such as CARRIE and
BLOWOUT.
Of course, the biggest giveaway that SISTERS is
inspired by Hitchcock is the music score by Bernard Hermann. In 1973
Hermann, who had composed the music for most of Hitchcock’s films up
until Hitchcock threw out his score for TORN CURTAIN, was rumored to be
dead. However, De Palma tracked him down in London and convinced him to
take a look at the film. In an interview that he gave to Richard
Rubinstein, De Palma says that Hermann berated the director for waiting
forty minutes to kill off his main character. De Palma replied that
Hitchcock had done the same thing in Psycho with Janet Leigh. “YOU are
not Hitchcock,” Hermann yelled. “For Hitchcock they will WAIT!”
It
would seem that there’s even more to the Hitchcock/De Palma connection
than meets the eye. Consider De Palma’s “origin story”:
“My
emphasis on horror isn’t arbitrary or exploitative. When I was a child
in Philadelphia, I was thrust up against the reality of physical pain,
disease, the terror of the operating theater. My father was an
orthopedic surgeon and I used to watch him operate. I was fascinated
by his complex and, at times, gruesome operations.”
Hitchcock
too, at a young age, was exposed to life’s dark realities. One day the
young Alfred brought home a report card with poor marks. Naturally,
his father had a policeman friend put the boy in jail for ten minutes.
Hitchcock, of course, couldn’t have known it would only be for ten
minutes and therefore spent the rest of his life with a fear of
authority and distrust of the police. The two directors’ childhood
experiences seem to echo each other.
De Palma’s previous film,
GET TO KNOW YOUR RABBIT, was a disappointing big-studio experience
starring Tom Smothers. Both Smothers and Warner Brothers proved to be
challenging collaborators (Smothers reportedly did not like the film,
deciding in the middle of production to disappear for two days). The
film was not a commercial success and subsequently De Palma sought
independent financing for SISTERS. Armed with a $500K budget – with
$250K deferred – the film is visually rich and the actors, even the
minor ones, seem to be having fun with their parts. Kidder is
fantastic as the French-Canadian Danielle; her French-Canadian accent
is irresistible and sounds pitch perfect (at least to this stupid
American).
Ultimately, the Hitchcock riff-off-athon in
SISTERS, as well as in OBSESSION and some of De Palma’s later films,
gets a little tiresome; Hitchcock simply did it better. On the other
hand, what De Palma brings to the table from his own bag of tricks is
often fascinating, intense, and sometimes (as in the case of PHANTOM OF
THE PARADISE) jaw-dropping insane.
SISTERS is De Palma working
something out, moving into a more structured approach, setting up an
exercise for himself and growing as a storyteller. The films of his
early years are his most experimental period. SISTERS is a watershed
moment in that period.
Jacob Vaughan lives in LA, pays
entirely too much in rent, watches too many movies about Nazis, and is
currently editing ANGEL OF DEATH starring Zoë Bell.
Sources
Brian De Palma: Interviews
Edited by Laurence F. Knapp
2003, University Press of Mississippi
“My Films Come Out of My Nightmares”
Charles Higham
The New York Times, October 28, 1973
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