Sisters (Pressman-Williams Productions, American International Pictures, 1972)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Ironically, the next Brian De Palma film TCM showed last night, Sisters (1972), turned out to be a better movie – considerably cheaper and more raucous, but also a good deal less pretentious. It was made for an independent company called Pressman-Williams Productions and released through American-International – the ultra-cheap studio which organized in 1954 and figured out a way to keep the “B” movie going after the death of the studio system by marketing their product to drive-in theatres and merchandising it to teenagers by casting teen actors (or older actors they could kinda-sorta pass off as teens) and sometimes using the “T”-word in their titles (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein). By 1972 AIP (as it was abbreviated) was reaching towards respectability with projects like a remake of Wuthering Heights (most of the reviewers said things like, “Timothy Dalton is no Laurence Olivier, Anna Calder-Marshall is no Merle Oberon, and director Robert Fuest is no William Wyler”), but they were still giving up-and-coming directors cheap movies as career-makers. Brian De Palma wrote the story and script for this one, and he borrowed not only from Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Psycho but from Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, made in Britain a year before Psycho but also about a young man unwittingly trained by a parent to be a psycho killer – though in Powell’s film it wasn’t his mom but his dad who turned him crazy.

Indeed, the whole theme of Sisters is voyeurism: it begins with a scene from a TV show called Peeping Toms in which a woman using a blind person’s cane starts taking off her clothes in front of a young African-American man, and the show’s contestants are supposed to guess what he will do: “Stop, Look and Listen,” “Silence Is Golden,” or “Just Walk Away.” All the contestants say “Stop, Look and Listen” but the Black guy (who’s an unwitting set-up victim, though the woman was hired and paid to pose as a blind exhibitionist for the scene) keeps quiet through the scene, and later the show’s host brings them both on and, as prizes, offers her a complete set of kitchen knives and him a gift certificate for two at a fancy African-themed restaurant. The woman is Danielle Breton (Margot Kidder, top-billed and speaking with as terrible a French accent as Stanley J. Reyes in Obsession), and with no one else the man invites her to share his fancy dinner that night. They go back to his place, but just as they look like they’re headed for a sexual experience the man notices a large keloid scar on her side, and just then a woman who looks just like her comes out with a knife and stabs him. All this is witnessed through the windows of their adjoining apartments by Staten Island Panorama reporter Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), who reports it to the police – but the cops take a dim view of her because she’d previously published articles denouncing police brutality, and by the time she persuades them to go to the apartment where the murder has happened the woman and her ex-husband, Emil Breton (Bill Finley), have successfully covered up the scene and stuffed the victim’s body into a convertible sofa (whose mattress was conveniently missing).

The cops are convinced nothing happened and leave – De Palma shows us a bloodstain on the back of the couch but the cops miss it – and Grace, despite the opposition of her mother (Mary Davenport), who’s after her to quit working and find a man already, sets out to find the killer and learn what happened. She already has one clue; she’s overheard an argument between Danielle and another woman with a very similar voice, and she concludes that the apartment was shared by twin sisters, one of whom invited the man up while the other stabbed him to death. She finds a birthday cake the victim had ordered for the sisters and brought back just before he was killed, and he had had the baker, Louise Wilanski (an Grace is about to offer the cake to the cops as proof two people lived there, she trips and falls, and the cake is ruined. So she determines to find the killer herself and hires private detective Joseph Larch (Charles Durning, billed third) to help her. They see the sinister couch being loaded into a Global Van Lines truck – Emil plans to take both it and the killer up to Canada, where it turns out Danielle was originally from (her French-Canadian origins are supposed to explain Margot Kidder’s wretched French accents) – only when Grace traces Danielle it’s to an insane asylum where she’s taken for one of the inmates, bossed around, given unnecessary “treatments” and hypnotized into forgetting all about the murder by Emil, a staff physician there. Along the way she’s run into a Life magazine reporter. Arthur McLennan (Barnard Hughes), who did a story about Danielle and her twin sister, Dominique Blanchion (also Margot Kidder).

Apparently they were born conjoined (“Siamese”) twins, and at first their doctors tried to raise them together because they considered it too dangerous to try to separate them surgically. This plot twist is supposed to be a big surprise, but the original posters for the film gave it away, and the video within the film treats us to some pretty graphic and quease-inducing footage of conjoined twins of the past. Eventually Grace learns from an orderly at the hospital where the two were separated that Dominique didn’t survive the operation but her spirit continued on by haunting her still-living sister – though in a twist on top of the twist we learn that Dominique was actually killed with a lethal injection by Emil Breton, who had fallen in love with Danielle and even got her pregnant (the idea of one Siamese twin being able to have sex and conceive a child while the other is still attached to her and therefore neither can have a truly private love life is a recurring situation in the popular literature on conjoined twins), and while Danielle loses the baby to a miscarriage during the separation surgery, she survives while Dominique lives on only in her head – from which she periodically emerges to tell Danielle to knock off any man she’s interested in. The climax occurs in Canada, as the various parties converge on the asylum where Emil is hiding Danielle; Grace and her detective show up there and in the end Emil gets killed, Danielle ends up in the asylum and Grace nearly becomes an inmate there herself as all her normal actions are interpreted as just more signs of her craziness – as when she tries to use the phone to call a warning out and gets interrupted first by a germophobic inmate who insists on spraying it down with Lysol (a scene that no doubt plays differently now in the wake of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic than it did when De Palma wrote and filmed it in 1972!) and claims microbes can be transmitted through phone wires, then by an orderly who insists Grace is a patient who must be taken to her room and given sedatives.

Before he dies, Emil manages to hypnotize Grace into believing that there never was a murder and she hallucinated the whole thing – and she keeps on repeating that even after Emil is dead and she’s in police hands – while the final shot is a grimly ironic one of the detective on top of a telephone pole spying on the couch to determine who’s going to pick it up and this incriminate themselves – which, of course, ain’t gonna happen. Though it has its moments of De Palma grossness (mostly at the beginning and the end), Sisters is actually an engaging little vest-pocket thriller – and for a moment I thought De Palma was going to add Sam Fuller to the list of directors (along with Hitchcock and Michael Powell) he was, shall we say, referencing, since at one point I thought it was going to end with Grace driven hopelessly insane by her unnecessary “treatments” the way the lead of Fuller’s 1963 film Shock Corridor was a reporter sent to investigate misdeeds at a mental hospital who ended up driven crazy and incarcerated there himself. As he would do four years later with Obsession, De Palma reached out to Bernard Herrmann – a brilliant talent but also a very prickly man who was hard to get along with – to compose the musical score for Sisters, and when he screened the movie for Herrmann it was with temporary music laid in from Herrmann’s previous scores. Hearing his old music in this new context so totally disoriented Herrmann that he demanded De Palma take it off: he told the director, “I can’t watch your movie while I’m listening to Marnie!”