Word: hitchcock
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...also important moneymakers usually encourage quick, cheap, and successive imitation. In the sixties, the youth film and the tepid sex/promiscuity film became the obvious examples of such industry-wide stagnation. More elusive, perhaps, was the much wider range of films which merged violence with psychodrama after the model of Hitchcock's Psycho -- formula films where violence was often the only substance, films that Hitchcock wouldn't even deign to sneeze at. Exploiters like Strait-Jacket, the 1964 axe-murder movie, led later to box-office hits like The Boston Strangler (still playing in Boston drive-ins today), and also...
...more artistically acceptable term homage. De Palma thinks of his film in terms of homage, so Sisters is far more discouraging than a typical bandwagon exploiter. It deceives even the film maker -- a potentially good film maker at that. De Palma tries hard to lose his style amidst Hitchcock's. Fortunately, he doesn't succeed: his film still includes sections that are both effective and original...
...murder in Psycho, for example, has an emotional impact to it that nothing in Sisters comes close to, because Hitchcock gives some importance to his characters. In Psycho, though it is not one of Hitchcock's very best, we see people on the screen, not just figures whose talk punctuates the violence. The first murder in Sisters occurs after the film is well underway, but this murder would have had the same impact on the audience if the film had started with the immediately preceding shot. To achieve this impact, the film draws only on our reactions to the visual...
...film centers around murder committed by a schizoid, as does Psycho. De Palma tries to go Hitchcock one better by making his murderer the ultimate split personality: one member of a pair of Siamese twin sisters separated at the end of their adolescence. The way De Palma handles it, it's a clever idea, and it allows him to include a clever documentary film within the film which he made with the assistance of Jay Cocks, the young film critic for Time. Unfortunately, De Palma never treats the psychological facet of the girls' unusual predicament with any more depth than...
...thriller than thrills, any more from a shocker than shock. So why should the twin, played by Margot Kidder, be more than a woman who interests only because she switches her personalities on and off to fit the needs of the plot? The answer lies in the difference between Hitchcock's best films and the vacuity we expect in the typical film from American-International. As De Palma is fond of pointing out, Hitchcock at his best is much more than a technical master of plot and camerawork...