Sisters (Pressman/Williams Enterprises, American International Pictures, 1972 or 1973)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 26) I got home from the “Twilight in the Park” concert at 8 p.m. and a half-hour later watched a surprisingly good movie: Sisters (1972 or 1973 – I’ve seen both dates), directed by Brian De Palma from a script co-written by him and Louisa Rose. TCM was showing Sisters as part of a night devoted to movies about twin siblings, one good, one evil. Among the others they programmed are Roy William Neill’s The Black Room (1935), a period horror film in which Boris Karloff plays good and bad brothers named Gregor and Anton de Berghman; and Bette Davis’s two twins movies, Curtis Bernhardt’s A Stolen Life (1948) and Paul Henried’s Dead Ringer (1964). Sisters was reportedly inspired by a Russian magazine Brian De Palma saw that contained a feature about two conjoined (so-called “Siamese”) twins in which one of the twin sisters was smiling and the other looked sullen. I was a little nervous about watching Sisters because I’d heard that it was a pretty gruesome horror film in the modern gross-out manner, but it turned out to be far more sophisticated than that, much more a thriller than a horror film even though it has two big horrific sequences, one at the beginning and one at the end. It begins with a spoof of so-called “reality” TV shows in which a pair of contestants are set up in a compromising situation – a nice-looking young Black man, Phillip Woode (Lisle Wilson), is set up to watch a young woman, Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder, top-billed), undress. Phillip has been told Danielle is blind, even though she really isn’t, and the big question is will he watch her strip or turn away? The two panelists on the show both guess he’ll keep watching and ogle her, but instead he does the gentlemanly thing.

The two are awarded prizes for their participation; Danielle gets a set of kitchen knives and Phillip a complementary dinner for two at a restaurant called the “African Room.” Danielle asks Phillip to take her on his dinner date, and they do that but end up in an argument with the wait staff and head back to her place, where they presumably make love. Danielle spends time in her bathroom where she opens a bottle of red pills and pours out three of them, taking one and leaving two others on the side of her sink. Phillip accidentally knocks over the loose pills and they go down the drain. Later Phillip hears Danielle having an agitated conversation with her twin sister Dominique (also Margot Kidder), though it’s unclear whether Dominique is actually there or Danielle is just hallucinating her presence and talking to herself. Danielle sends Phillip out to get her more of her meds, and without them she literally ends up losing consciousness on Phillip’s floor. Phillip takes his own sweet time about getting back, having decided that since Danielle has mentioned that it’s her birthday, he’ll buy her a cake and get it decorated with both her and Dominique’s names. When he gets back with the cake, suddenly he becomes a murder victim as either Danielle or Dominique stabs him repeatedly. Then Danielle’s mysterious ex-husband, Émile Breton (William Finley in an odd makeup that makes him look like the young John Waters), helps Danielle clean up after the murder and stuffs Phillip’s body into a folding couch. (Apparently De Palma had an argument with his producer over whether you could really stuff a body into a folding couch; the producer insisted you couldn’t, and De Palma shot the scene in one take to prove that you could.)

Alas, the murder has been witnessed by Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt, who was roommates with Margot Kidder at the time), a reporter for a local paper in Staten Island. She reports it to the police, who were too openly antagonistic to her based on her previous articles attacking police brutality, so she decides to investigate it herself. She’s so anxious to find out more about the case that she blows off one of her usual Thursday lunch dates with her mother, Louise Wilanski (Olympia Dukakis, uncredited) and hires a private detective, Joseph Larch (Charles Durning). Ultimately Grace learns that Danielle and Dominique were conjoined twins (something we’ve already found out from the surgical scar on Danielle’s thigh where the two women were separated). The operation that separated them was performed by Arthur McLennen (Bernard Hughes) after Émile started an affair with Danielle but got anxious to get rid of Dominique because she was always literally in the way. The film builds to a climax at the sanitarium where Émile works, where he incarcerates Grace and hypnotizes her into believing that no murder happened and it was just a figment of her imagination. We’re also given contradictory indications of just how and when Dominique died; at first we’re told she survived the operation, later that she died on the operating table, and still later that she made it through the operation but Émile killed her later on purpose.

Danielle eventually murders Émile and the cops are ready to arrest her for Phillips’ murder as well, but even though Émile is dead his influence on Grace has survived him and she keeps repeating the message about the case Émile instructed her to say: that there’d been no murder and it had all been a figment of her imagination. Danielle is arrested for Émile’s murder but seems to have got away with Phillip’s – though there’s a great final scene with Joe Larch posing as an electrical lineman and watching the couch that still contains Phillip’s body to see who claims the couch and why. Before showing Sisters, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz mentioned how often Brian De Palma has been accused of copying Alfred Hitchcock, and it’s certain that there’s a lot of Hitchcock influence in this film. It’s equally certain that Hitchcock himself was influenced by prior directors, notably Fritz Lang (Lang’s 1928 silent thriller Spies contains key plot points Hitchcock recycled in his mid-1930’s films The 39 Steps, The Secret Agent and Sabotage, and the resemblance was strong enough British film critics in the 1930’s often referred to Hitchcock as “our Fritz Lang”).

Sisters certainly uses some of Hitchcock’s ideas and plot devices, but it works so creatively with them that it’s a strong and quite moving film in its own right, not just one built on recycled ideas from the Master of Suspense. I liked Sisters quite a lot more than I’d expected to, and I found it absolutely gripping and beautifully done. Sisters would be an extraordinary work by any criterion, and one of the most powerful things about it was the musical score contributed by Hitchcock’s frequent collaborator, Bernard Herrmann. The opening theme sounds like someone mixed the main title of Vertigo to include electronic instruments (but which ones? Theremin? Ondes Martenot? An early synthesizer?). Apparently Herrmann was recommended to De Palma by his editor, Paul Hirsch, who’d used Herrmann’s soundtracks for Hitchcock for his “temp tracks” (pre-existing music laid in at an early stage of a film’s editing to judge how it might work with a final score). De Palma liked it so much he accepted Hirsch’s suggestion that he hire Herrmann to compose his ultimate score.