Word: twins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...might say, we shouldn't expect any more from a 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...
...Palma's story is about a woman who survives an operation that separates her from her Siamese twin. She turns schizophrenic in an effort to keep her dead twin's spirit alive, then is allowed to roam dangerously free by the doctor who performed the operation. He in turn is both guilty about and possessive of the human accident he created. It is a weirdly plausible and marvelously original plot. So are the parodies that enliven the film: a lunatic TV game show that caters openly to voyeurism; an earnest and dimwitted documentary explicating the medical and psychological...
With all the intensity, there is something more. Baseball's deepest fascination lies in twin aspects of the game: records and time. In other sports, the past is a laugh. Teen-age girls are breaking Johnny Weismuller's old Olympic marks. The four-minute mile has been shattered beyond repair. Pole vaulters, broad jumpers, skiers, quarterbacks, golfers, chess players-they have all rewritten the record books until yesterday's hero is exposed as a man with feat of clay. Only baseball has retained so many of its idols. No one has come close to Joe DiMaggio...
There are still a few Jesuits who perpetuate the Walsh syndrome: Father Daniel Lyons, columnist and founder of the right-wing Catholic newspaper Twin Circle, still hammers away at the containment theme. But he now has an articulate group of opponents within the order. Father Aldon Stevenson, who recently returned to his post at the University of San Francisco after a trip into Mao's China, cited the Communist Chinese as exemplary "anonymous Christians" that Western Christians could well emulate. "People are valued above things," says Stevenson, "and neighbors love and help each other. There is hope in abundance...