Word: hitchcock
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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...
...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...
...kind that has made its distributor, American-International, rich and infamous. But it is something more-and more interesting-than that. It is a homage by a gifted, if erratic, young director, Brian de Palma (Hi Mom, Greetings), to one of cinema's genuine masters, Alfred Hitchcock...
WEDNESDAY: The Paradine Case. (1948) Hitchcock in the courtroom for a murder trial with Ann Todd as a mystery woman being defended by able Gregory Peck. Lavish production form David O. Selznick. CH.5...