“Don’t you know the telephone is a good way to get germs through the wires? I never call... and I never answer...”
That has to be one of the best lines ever uttered in a film - Sisters (1973) was written and directed by auteur filmmaker Brian De Palma and was greatly influenced by Hitchcock, especially Psycho and Rear Window.
The story begins strangely enough with Danielle (played by a very young Margot Kidder) stars in a game /reality show called Peeping Toms - Wherein she is a blind woman that wanders in a locker room and begins undressing. Unbeknownst to her, Phillip Woode (Lisle Wilson) is there. Cut back to the game show and the contestants have to decide what Woode would do. After the game show, Danielle and Phillip decide to go have dinner. A drunken Danielle tells Phillip she is a model and sometimes actress, and not a real French but French-Canadian and Phillip tells her he is an advertising salesman. Then there is trouble from Danielle’s Ex-husband Emil Breton (William Finley). He tries to convince Danielle to come back with him and causes a scene. Phillip has Breton thrown out of the chic club they are dinning at.
Danielle brings Phillip home with her, and looking out the window, notices Breton is watching the apartment. He opts to pretend to leave so Breton too will leave, return to the apartment, via the backdoor. All goes well. Danielle tells Phillip she has a sister named Dominque, and tomorrow is their birthday. The camera pulls in as Danielle and Phillip begin to make love on the fold out couch, showing Danielle’s bizarre scar on her hip.
In the morning, Phillip goes and gets a prescription for Danielle, and decides to stop at a bakery and buy a birthday cake. He talks the bakery saleslady to write “Happy Birthday Danielle and Dominique” on it, even though she isn’t qualified. Phillip returns to the apartment. He places the cake in the refrigerator.
Phillip is brutally murdered with a butcher knife. First the blade is forced into his mouth, and then he is stabbed several more times. It was a shocking murder scene now, and had to have been even more so back in 1973.
The murder is witnessed by Grace (Jennifer Salt) from her apartment. Grace is a newspaper reporter, not well liked by the police for articles about police brutality, but I would suspect they didn’t like her for the abrasive personality she exhibits. Grace calls the cops, and Detective Kelly (the great Dolf Sweet - The Wanderers and more recognized for Gimme a break sitcom) really doesn’t want to believe Grace. In the meantime, Breton shows up and Danielle and he discuss the murder in French; deciding to protect Dominique by getting rid of the body in the fold out couch.
It’s obvious Grace is a single-minded person, and can only obsess over one thing at a time. She goes into Danielle’s apartment with Detective Kelly. She states out loud that she witnessed a young black man stabbed repeatedly, but who she saw kill Phillip was not Danielle, but someone that resembles her- A twin perhaps? Danielle says she has no twin sister. While Kelly is questioning Danielle, Grace discovers a birthday cake. Aha! Grace has caught Danielle in a lie. But Grace ruins the evidence when she slips and drops the cake on Detective Kelly’s shoes.
Breton has called a mover. Grace has hired a P.I. (Charles Durning strangely Durning won an Oscar same year for The Sting---and he is better known for costarring in a ton of films with Burt Reynolds—but I also remember him from Dog Day Afternoon) to help her find the body and prove guilt of Danielle and perhaps a twin sister. They bug Danielle’s apartment and find out the movers are taking the couch to Quebec.
Is this a horror movie?
I would say yes. Not only for the strange display of twins, but the Slasher elements, before Slasher films became popular.
Sisters was inspired by De Palma reading an article on the Soviet twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova As mentioned earlier, the Hitchcock films were also an inspiration, so much that De Palma was able to bring partially retired composer Bernard Herrmann to score the film, a staple of Hitchcock productions. There’s lots of juicy camera shots from De Palma, and you couldn’t expect anything less, especially the signature split screen. What’s more impressive than fluid camera movements is how such a young director could get solid performances. Everyone is good (even if Jennifer Salt was annoying as hell---I’m sure it was meant as a character trait for the film) and just might be Margot Kidder’s best in a movie. There are similarities to Polanski’s Repulsion; it still stands on its own.
The film was released through American International and chosen for the 1975 Venice Film Festival. It was given Home release in 1980’s by Warner. A special DVD was released by Criterion in 2003 with a wide screen digital transfer. Talk about flying under a radar, I had no idea it was remade in 2006 with Stephen Rea and Chloë Sevigny.
Mark Slade, HMS
Read the previous installment.