Tonight‘s Halloween film was one from a few decades back. Frani and I watched Brian DePalma‘s Sisters featuring Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt. This film was early in the career of DePalma, after some oddball comedy attempts, but all the elements of what makes a DePalma movie a DePalma movie are present. Split screen editing, voyeurism, and a twist towards the end are key ingredients.
Oh yeah, and William Finley.
Brian clearly borrows heavily from Hitchcock, and in this case he even utilizes his music producer known specifically for the shower murder music in Psycho, Bernard Hermann. Hermann is A man who was so full of himself he was blown off by William Friedkin in minutes during a discussion of Hermann scoring one of his films.
No, Sisters is not really scary and derives heavily from Rear Window at the outset. Then a mystery develops that a small time reporter finds herself enveloped in. The acting is solid and Herman’s score is very good, but the movie sometimes gets just a little bit too weird for me, especially as it’s winding up. I’m not exactly sure what the ending had to say, especially the final shot.
It’s always nice to see Charles Durning and Barnard Hughes, even if they are in small roles. Olympia Dukakis even makes an uncredited appearance.
Particularly in the area of technology, this movie seriously dates itself. Sometimes I wonder if filmmakers ever thought that we would even have a future, when I see what passes for “state of the art” at the time of a shoot. That being said, it’s far better than attempting to forecast the future with production design as in a film like Soylent Green. The mark is often missed so badly and almost embarrassingly, that it’s worth a chuckle.
Is Sisters a Halloween film? Certainly not, but it’s definitely worth checking out to see where DePalma was headed. This film was clearly his leaping off point.
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