Cinema Speculation

Sisters

(1973)

Unlike most of the other Movie Brats (Scorsese, Bogdanovich, Spielberg) and their later-day additions (Joe Dante, Allan Arkush, and John Landis), young Brian De Palma didn’t grow up devotedly watching old movies on television. Nor did he keep scrapbooks, make notes, and keep files on index cards of all the movies he saw growing up (like Peter Bogdanovich and I did). You see, young Brian wasn’t a film geek, he was a science geek. Keith Gordon’s adolescent Peter Miller in Dressed to Kill, and in adult form, John Travolta’s troubled cinema technician Jack Terry in Blow Out represent the young Mr. De Palma.

In Blow Out Travolta’s Jack Terry might as well be describing De Palma himself when he was young to both Nancy Allen’s Betty Boop–voiced Sally and the audience: “It all started in school. I was the kind of kid who fixed radios, made my own stereo, won all the science fairs, you know the type.”

The young Brian didn’t really get into cinema until college, and even then it was under the guidance of New York theatre legend Wilford Leach. Brian De Palma doesn’t become interested in cinema till after he’s thoroughly explored theatre (apparently there existed one or two Brian De Palma–penned plays from that period).

But unlike Scorsese, Bogdanovich, and Spielberg, De Palma didn’t pray at the altar of movies.

To Brian film was an artistic means to an end.

Similarly, his attraction to Hitchcock shouldn’t be read as De Palma being overly invested in the mystery, suspense, horror genre. Even though Brian De Palma would be labeled “the Modern Master of the Macabre” (as the text reads over three-quarters of the Dressed to Kill one-sheet), it’s pretty clear he’s not an enthusiastic aficionado of the genre.

But while young Brian may not have been a student of the horror film genre, he was nevertheless drawn to it, because of its capacity for audience manipulation.

When young Brian discovered Hitchcock in school and started seriously examining him, it wasn’t Hitchcock’s themes that attracted him at first (save for voyeurism). It was Hitchcock’s cinematic technique, and his practical application of that technique inside of his scenarios, that turned on the young De Palma.

Hitchcock went in for big suspense set pieces, which he usually accomplished through cinematic virtuosity or daring surprises in the narrative. And Hitchcock either pulled them off . . . (the merry-go-round sequence in Strangers on a Train, Marion Crane’s murder in Psycho, the difficult murder of the KGB agent by Paul Newman and the farmer’s wife in Torn Curtain, The Birds in the playground) . . . or he didn’t . . . (the Mount Rushmore climax of North by Northwest, the rushed rooftop climax at the end of To Catch a Thief, the degrading handling of Anna Massey’s dead corpse in the “potato sack scene” in Frenzy).

For Brian—a kid who tore apart his transistor radio just to see how it worked—to take Hitchcock’s suspense set pieces and break them down to their individual components was, no doubt, attractive. But another aspect of Hitchcock’s technique, which was not the norm for most of the Old Hollywood picture makers, that probably appealed to the younger De Palma was Hitchcock’s Cinema First–Camera First shooting style. The normal classic Hollywood movie sought for the audience to ignore the camera. Better for you to commit to this exercise of wide awake dreaming, if you forget you’re watching a movie. So to emphasize or highlight the camera or camera movement was to call attention to the fact that the audience was watching a movie.

Why on earth would somebody want to do that?

Nevertheless, inspired by Murnau, Hitchcock, along with Max Ophuls, sought to give the huge 35mm cameras wings.

For all the huge movie stars that Alfred Hitchcock worked with, the 35mm film camera was always the real star of the show. Well, this approach to cinematic grammar suited the young student filmmaker. Brian De Palma didn’t want to become a filmmaker to shoot footage of people talking to each other. I’m sure Brian watched Rio Bravo in college too. But unlike Bogdanovich, Scorsese, and me, he probably didn’t dig it. He might have thought some of the lines were funny, but for the most part, I’m sure De Palma thought it was just a lot of Howard Hawks shooting footage of John Wayne talking to different people on that damn jail set.*

Same thing with The Searchers. I’m positive Brian thinks a whole lot of The Searchers is John Ford shooting John Wayne on a horse talking to Jeffrey Hunter.

And if he did think that, he’d be right.

But “Hitch” was different.

He was always Cinema First–Camera First.

Not the cinema of capturing actors reciting text.

Not the cinema of pretty pictures.

But an aggressive cinema that manipulated audiences with both its fluid visual grammar and its (at times) savage wit. De Palma’s attraction to Hitchcock was always far less personal than Bogdanovich’s appreciation for either Ford or Hawks, or John Carpenter’s attraction to Hawks, or Paul Mazursky’s attraction to Fellini, or John Woo’s attraction to Jean-Pierre Melville, or Scorsese’s attraction to Michael Powell, or my attraction to Sergio Leone, or Australia’s Richard Franklin’s (the second best to do Hitchcock-like thrillers in the eighties) genuine admiration for “Hitch” (like Bogdanovich, Franklin sought out the elder filmmaker when he was a young man).

Hitchcock’s cinematic fluency was what young De Palma was enthralled with and wanted to appropriate as his own, less the man. Also, because of Hitchcock’s commercial success, Brian realized filmgoing audiences accepted Cinema First–Camera First sequences more easily when they were done inside thrillers or horror films. A pure cinema approach is always an option for a thriller or a horror film the way it isn’t for other genres.

Along with Martin Scorsese (Who’s That Knocking at My Door), Jim McBride (David Holzman’s Diary), Shirley Clarke (The Cool World), Paul (not the diminutive singer-songwriter) Williams (Out of It), and Paul Morrissey (Trash), De Palma was one of the leading lights of the New York New Wave. Young Brian had directed three shoestring budgeted New York feature films by the time he experienced his first legitimate commercial success, the underground counterculture hippie comedy Greetings.

Greetings tells the sixties tale of three young men in Greenwich Village, Jon (Robert De Niro), Lloyd (Gerrit Graham), and Paul (Jonathan Warden), who are trying to dodge the draft (the film is called Greetings because that’s the first word that appears on the telegram the army sends you on your draft notice). Then the film breaks down into three different storylines following the three lead protagonists. De Niro’s budding pornography career trying to capture his Peeping Tom fetish on film, which he calls “Peep Art.”* Graham’s Kennedy assassination obsession. And Warden going on a series of computer dates.

De Palma made it in partnership with his cowriter and producer Charles Hirsch. The way Richard Linklater’s Slacker authentically captured Austin Weird before the phrase was put on T-shirts and sold at the Austin airport, Greetings was a sixties film that played like hippie notes from the underground. As many of the critics at the time remarked, it achieved an authenticity of a film made not just for a subculture but by it. In many ways, what Ragni and Rado did for Broadway by making Hair, De Palma and Hirsch did for film with Greetings. If a film version of Hair would have been attempted at that time, Brian De Palma would have been a leading contender to direct it. That’s how strong his hippie bona fides were (in fact, his split-screen filming of the Performance Group’s Dionysus in ’69 could have been his preparation for Hair).

While Martin Scorsese’s Who’s That Knocking at My Door barely received any theatrical release, Greetings, for an underground independent film, was just short of a phenomenon, especially in New York. It was the first film to star Robert De Niro, and it established both Gerrit Graham and Allen Garfield as two powerhouses in De Palma’s stock company. It generated a sequel, Hi, Mom!, that brought back De Niro, Graham, and Garfield, and added Jennifer Salt to the mix.* But one of the things that turned on its late sixties film-savvy audience is the cheeky way young De Palma took Godard’s experimentation of film grammar (with a tiny sprinkle of Richard Lester) and played it for laughs. De Palma even engages in a full-scale spoof of cultural icon Blow-Up in the service of lampooning the Kennedy assassination conspiracy.

One of the things that separated the New York New Wave from their French counterparts was the New York guerilla filmmakers were usually segregated into their own neighborhoods. The characters in the French New Wave movies all walked or drove down the streets of the same Paris. At any point Charlie (Charles Aznavour) of Shoot the Piano Player could have bumped into Arthur or Franz (Claude Brasseur and Sami Frey) from Band of Outsiders in a café off the Boulevard St. Germain.

The hippie Greenwich Village draft dodgers of Greetings, the Canal Street sharkskin-wearing Italian-American tough talkers of Who’s That Knocking at My Door, the black Harlem gang members of The Cool World, the Alphabet City strung-out junkies of The Connection, the Factory freaks of Flesh, Heat, and Trash, the Long Island high school kids of Out of It, and lonely apartment dwelling David Holzman might as well inhabit different New Yorks. I mentioned that once to Scorsese and he agreed, “They were from different countries.”

Despite having said that, the hippies in Greetings break out of their neighborhoods in a way unthinkable for the characters in Scorsese or Morrissey’s movies. Way before Ken Shapiro would shoot himself, guerilla-style, singing and dancing his way down Madison Avenue in The Groove Tube as amused passersby gape at him on camera, De Palma would stage big run-and-gun scenes in front of larger public places without a permit. The famous four-minute-long one-take of De Niro and Allen Garfield in front of the Whitney Museum (the most hysterical sequence in the film; when it comes to great acting partners for De Niro, before Harvey Keitel, there was Allen Garfield). Gerrit Graham’s long-lens assassination in front of the Met. With De Palma’s early films you get a real sense of the New York acting scene back then. The performers are almost all young, class-attending, small theatrical production–performing actors of the West Village scene. De Niro, Garfield, Graham, Finley, Salt, Jill Clayburgh, Charles Durning, Jared Martin, Margo Norton, Rutanya Alda, Peter Maloney, Roz Kelly, and many others that didn’t do too many movies, concentrating more on the theatre. And that includes the black Living Theatre actors who scared the living shit out of the white crew on Hi, Mom! for the Be Black Baby sequence (“Those guys were scary,” De Palma confirmed to Cinefantastique magazine).

Taken as a collective, they all fill the frame with a late sixties zeitgeist authenticity.

After the success of Greetings, De Palma and Charles Hirsch wrote a sequel, Hi, Mom! (at one point called Son of Greetings) that followed the adventures of De Niro’s character Jon (once he returns from Vietnam). First he tries to turn his Peep Art into a commercial enterprise, getting the backing of smut film producer Joe Banner (returning Allen Garfield). And later he joins a black radical theatre group called The Living Theatre in their off-off-Broadway production of Be Black Baby. And eventually he drifts into urban terrorism.

While Greetings was a zeitgeist explosion of its time captured on film, Hi, Mom! is one of the top five movies in De Palma’s canon (the others being Carrie, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, and Scarface). It appears, at the beginning De Palma planned on designing it like the first film with three (sorta) competing storylines. Jon’s attempt to turn his Peep Art into a real movie, Gerrit Graham’s (a different character than Lloyd) involvement with the black radicals, and housewife Laura Parker’s 8mm Housewife Diary film, which plays almost like a spoof of David Holzman’s Diary. But after losing much of the Parker storyline in editing, it became a movie clearly and singularly about De Niro’s character.

To me, every single thing in the movie works.

It was as if the first film was a smorgasbord of every effect De Palma and Hirsch could come up with and accomplish. But after its success, De Palma went through the first film, analyzed the most successful elements, and expanded on them. The first film had three protagonists. Hi, Mom! focuses on De Niro, the most compelling of the three, keeps Graham (the funniest), and loses the least interesting, Jonathan Warden. Realizing the Allen Garfield scene made the audience laugh the most, he brings back Garfield (seemingly playing a more successful version of the same character), and builds the film’s whole first half around him. I also think there’s a realization on De Palma’s part of what a truly gifted improvisational actor Garfield was, and he utilizes him for the benefit of the second picture. In both Greetings and Hi, Mom!, it’s Garfield who writes the text of the scenes through his hilarious improv gifts.

Like a rodeo rider on a bucking bronco, it’s De Niro’s job during these scenes to hang on for dear life.

But it’s the Be Black Baby set piece that makes the movie unforgettable. Suffice to say, no scene in a movie will come anywhere near it till thirty years later during the third act of Takashi Miiki’s Audition.

So how did a hippie counterculture satirist turn into “the Modern Master of the Macabre”?

I’d speculate it was commercial necessity that was the mother of Hitchcockian invention.

Greetings was such a success that Warner Bros. brought De Palma out to Hollywood to make their “tune in-drop out” satire Get to Know Your Rabbit, starring Tom Smothers (one of the real zeitgeist comedy stars of the era). But after finishing Rabbit, (which is really funny), the studio put it on the shelf for three years. After the bad studio experience of Rabbit, De Palma realized, by 1970, the sixties hippie aesthetic was dead on arrival. But De Palma’s entire identity was tied to that aesthetic. What was required was both a reinvention of self and a commercial genre of cinema he could survive and hopefully thrive in.

But what genre would that be?

For a filmmaker with such an iconoclast reputation, De Palma was acutely aware of the commercial concerns of the marketplace. Some could say to a fault. By this time De Palma had been making movies for almost a decade. He’d already shot five movies. Francis Ford Coppola might have been a mentor to Lucas, Scorsese, and Milius, but to Brian De Palma he was a peer. De Palma had seen directors come and go. He knew in this industry nothing was more important than to keep being allowed to make movies. Also, despite his troubled relationship with Warner Bros., he didn’t want to go back to the shoestring, run-and-gun world of independent filmmaking. He liked having permits. He liked shutting down the street with police control. He liked being able to afford a crane. And the only way to keep in business—unlike Jim McBride, unlike Shirley Clarke—was to make commercial movies people wanted to see.

As he warned me, after he saw and was (surprisingly) impressed with Reservoir Dogs, “Quentin, don’t get too esoteric with your subject matter. If you want to be allowed to keep making movies, you’ve got to give them a Carrie every once in a while.”

Consequently, he claims that’s why he didn’t ultimately make Schrader’s script for Taxi Driver when he had the chance. He didn’t feel it was commercial enough. Later he changed that: He felt Marty would do a better job with the material. But I think he told the truth the first time.

So if De Palma’s going to move into more commercially viable, less esoteric pictures, what direction does he move?

Action movies?

Well, that’s ultimately where he did move in the eighties and nineties. But back in the seventies, making action movies meant making movies with Charles Bronson, Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, or Burt Reynolds.

I can’t really picture De Palma being fulfilled doing that. Also, it’s doubtful those old salty dogs would have the patience to sit around on the set waiting for Brian to execute his rococo camera moves. But I can see a world where Brian De Palma directs The Groundstar Conspiracy, or Freebie and the Bean, or Crazy Joe, or Schrader’s original script for Rolling Thunder, or Three Days of the Condor. I can see De Palma making a great version of Death Wish, but probably with someone like Peter Falk or George C. Scott as its star (what a fucking dynamite picture that would have been!).

But Brian De Palma found a commercial niche/genre he could make his own, that wasn’t action films, and was related to horror films, but not exactly the same thing.

De Palma’s study of the techniques of suspense that Hitchcock employed is as well known as his ultimate dissatisfaction and outright disdain for all of Hitch’s movies after Psycho (even The Birds).

I believe it was the emergence of Roman Polanski with his film Repulsion when De Palma began to be intrigued by the idea of doing a new modern type of thriller.

The Polanski movie worked.

But where a Hitchcock movie worked to entertain, Polanski’s movie worked to disturb. Hitchcock could disturb too. But ultimately, only up to a point. With Polanski, disturbance was the point.

So in this new cinematic landscape, Polanski’s Hitchcockian thriller—by way of Buñuel—struck a chord with audiences, critics, and no doubt young Brian.

And then when Polanski followed it up with Rosemary’s Baby, De Palma must have thought, “Well, that’s that then. Hitchcock is dead and the world has a new master of terror and suspense, and his name is Roman Polanski.”

At the time Polanski, Peckinpah, and Ken Russell represented a cinematic trifecta of provocation, with Roman proving the most popular and the most commercially successful (by far).

But then, right at the very height of his success, a horrible thing happened to the Polish auteur’s wife and unborn child: The Manson Family. Then suddenly, for the next few years, Roman would be sidelined out of the picture due to the tragedy.

Polanski’s absence left a hole. A hole another classy horror film practitioner could possibly fill.

I also think the American release, reaction, and relative commercial success of Dario Argento’s Italian giallo The Bird with the Crystal Plumage proved an inspiration for De Palma. Like Repulsion, it too used the “Not since Psycho” tag on its one-sheet and newspaper ads. Not that I think the snobby De Palma overly admired the Argento thriller. But I do think it’s possible that the film did illustrate a modern seventies way to do a horror film that utilized Hitchcockian suspense techniques. Even the fact that Argento committed to staging Hitchcockian set pieces, I think, intrigued De Palma. And the way the ad campaign implied a connection to Psycho, but with rougher, more violent implications, must have seemed like a good commercial idea to the young director. Now, while I’m certain De Palma didn’t hold Argento in the same regard he did Polanski, there still was something impressive about Bird with the Crystal Plumage that could not be ignored. I can also imagine part of De Palma’s inspiration to forge a career executing Hitchcockian set pieces was his frustration at how inept he felt the highly praised Hitchcock homages from the French New Wave were. Particularly messieurs Truffaut and Chabrol. I can’t imagine De Palma appreciating even a relatively decent one like Chabrol’s Le Boucher (probably chalking it up to a thrill-less thriller). But I can absolutely see De Palma being appalled at Truffaut’s amateur, clumsy fumbling of The Bride Wore Black. As well as being dismayed by the affectionate praise heaped on it by the New York film critics (probably the only thing De Palma and Bogdanovich ever agreed upon). It’s doubtful a master filmmaker like De Palma was ever charmed by Truffaut’s Ed Wood–like amateur bumbling even under more appropriate conditions. But in the service of a Hitchcock-like thriller, backed by Bernard Herrmann music? It must have left young De Palma puking in the aisle. I can hear him ranting to Jennifer Salt, “How do you do a Hitchcock film without any cool shots? How do you do a Hitchcock film where the camera is unimportant?”

So with Polanski abdicating his throne, Argento pointing the way, and Truffaut and Chabrol demonstrating there was both a market and an audience for Hitchcock homages, young Brian started his career as a genre horror filmmaker. With the intention of eventually being labeled the New Modern Master of Macabre, which he eventually accomplished. But as opposed to other genre masters, while De Palma liked Hitchcock thrillers and possessed undeniable talents in that area, I don’t believe he made them out of love. I believe he made them to corner a market on a commercial niche he could call his own. If he could be known as the heir to Hitchcock, then—like Hitchcock—he could make film after film.

Leone and Corbucci made westerns because they loved them.

Hitchcock and Bava and Argento made thrillers because they loved them. While De Palma liked making thrillers (for a little while, at least), I doubt he loved watching them.

Hitchcockian thrillers were for him a means to an end. That’s why when he was forced to return to the genre in the mid-eighties, they were so lackluster. Ultimately he resented having to make them and was bored with the form.

Hitchcock’s Frenzy might be a piece of crap, but I doubt Alfred was bored making it.

But back in the early seventies when De Palma was shedding his hippie love beads, he saw not only a genre in cinema that would attract audiences and in which his cinematic talents could thrive and expand. He also saw a hole smack dab in the middle of a genre the young filmmaker felt he alone was equipped to fill.

Armed with a good commercial script (cowritten with Louisa Rose) that accomplished all his Hitchcockian-thriller goals, it was now time to figure out where he was going to set Sisters up. After the bad experience of Get to Know Your Rabbit, De Palma was weary of dealing with another major studio. This film couldn’t suffer any clueless studio interference. If Sisters was going to work, it had to be unequivocally a Brian De Palma movie.

He first approached Martin Ransohoff, who was running Filmways and making television shows like The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres (“This has been a Filmways presentation, darling.”), and films like The Americanization of Emily and The Fearless Vampire Killers. Why would De Palma, with his leeriness of studio interference, go to Ransohoff, the man who fired Peckinpah off of The Cincinnati Kid and took The Fearless Vampire Killers away from Polanski and monkeyed around with it?

Well, a few years earlier (1967), Ransohoff began dipping his big toe into counterculture cinema by purchasing the boutique distributor Sigma 111 Corporation. Sigma 111 mostly released foreign films like Closely Watched Trains and Cul-de-sac. But Ransohoff also released three of De Palma’s New York films, Greetings, Dionysus in ’69, and Hi, Mom! And the way Sigma 111 turned Greetings into a New York box office hit was the reason De Palma had a legitimate film directing career. So based on that friendly relationship and patronage, De Palma initially sold his screenplays to both Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise to Ransohoff.

The original plan was for Filmways to go independent by having their own distribution company, Sigma 111, theatrically release both films. But that plan never transpired. Instead, Ransohoff ended up pretty much shutting down Sigma 111 and concentrating on producing movies for the major studios (Catch-22, Fuzz, See No Evil).

Then De Palma’s worst fears of studio interference came to pass when somehow his scripts were moved from Ransohoff to his rival at Filmways, Ray Stark (Ransohoff and Ray Stark fucking hated each other’s guts). Stark was one of the biggest producers in town—he was also one of the town’s biggest bullies, and he was responsible for mangling more films than an El Paso drive-in movie projector. Immediately Stark got to work putting his grubby mitts on Sisters, insisting that Raquel Welch play the Margot Kidder role of Danielle and Dominique (though maybe Stark could have delivered De Palma’s original casting choice for the Janet Leigh–like movie-star victim role that surprisingly exits the picture after the first act: Sydney Poitier.)

Around this time, when De Palma was dating Margot Kidder and living with Jennifer Salt(!), the Out of It director Paul Williams (not the diminutive songwriter), started hanging around their house. Williams had started a company with his producing partner Ed Pressman called Pressman-Williams Enterprises, and had just made a movie that ended up on Roger Ebert’s top ten of the year list, The Revolutionary, starring Jon Voight, who, after Midnight Cowboy, was a bona fide movie star. So, through Paul, Brian became friendly with Ed Pressman and convinced Ed to buy his scripts back from the clutches of Ray Stark, with Brian even putting up his own money from Get to Know Your Rabbit to facilitate the process, and with Pressman ultimately financing Sisters completely, then selling it to American-International Pictures as an independent pickup (it’s Ed Pressman who owns Sisters today).

Sisters was De Palma’s first stab (snicker-snicker) at both Hitchcock homage and meta-Psycho reworking. The critical pull quotes on the poster and in the newspaper ads strategically evoked Psycho. But everything else sought to lure the same audience that was drawn to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. And Sisters ended up doing exactly what it set out to do. It accomplished De Palma’s entry into commercial Hollywood filmmaking and it did well enough to justify future films from the auteur. But it also garnered good notices that emphasized the director’s cinematic bona fides, marking young De Palma as a rising talent to watch.

Pretty much everything a calling card movie is supposed to do, it did. And while, especially compared to his better thrillers (Carrie, Dressed to Kill, and Blow Out), Sisters hasn’t aged that well (both Repulsion and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage satisfy decades later in a way that Sisters does not), in 1973 it was damned impressive. Compared to the other low-budget horror films to come out that year, Sisters played like a really classy picture.

In the film, a man and a woman, Phillip (Lisle Wilson) and Danielle (Margot Kidder), who meet on a TV game show, go out to dinner afterwards. They hit it off and go back to her apartment where they make love. The next morning she reveals that she lives with her twin sister (Dominique, who we overhear—but don’t see—arguing with Danielle behind a door) and that today is their birthday. The idea is that the couple (Phillip and Danielle) are going to spend the day together. She sends him on an errand to the pharmacy to fill a prescription. While he’s out Phillip stops off at a bakery and buys a birthday cake and has it inscribed “Happy Birthday Danielle and Dominque.”

All this has been a Psycho-like setup to set the stage for a big showstopping murder sequence, where Dominique kills poor Phillip (despite Psycho’s classic status, does anyone really miss Marion Crane once she exits the picture? By comparison, Phillip’s death is heartbreaking).

Then the narrative switches to a reporter, Grace Collier (Jennifer Salt), who lives in an apartment across the street from the two sisters and witnesses the murder from her living room a la Rear Window. The film has a bunch of different elements. Longstanding De Palma stock company regular William Finley playing another creepy red herring. Charles Durning officially becoming a member of De Palma’s stock company when he gives the film’s best performance as a detective Grace hires to help investigate the murder. Gruff Dolph Sweet plays the first of De Palma’s sarcastic police detectives who is more suspicious of our protagonist than of the killer. Like Hi, Mom!, there’s media-inside-media moments (game shows, news documentaries), as well as Siamese twins, insane asylums, a lot of great Bernard Herrmann music, split-screen sequences, and the first of De Palma’s split personality killers. The weakest part of the film, aside from one of the two female leads, is the script, which is more structure than story.

Sisters established the method of Hitchcock homage that the director would later become known for. Which was to take the story points or structural elements from Hitchcock’s most famous thrillers and—even more than Polanski or Argento—commit to full blown cinematic set pieces that invoked the master—except these suspense set pieces usually led to more violent and gorier outcomes than they did in the Hitchcock fifties.*

In Sisters, De Palma takes the structure of Psycho: victim Phillip and killer Danielle are both presented in the film’s first act as sympathetic protagonists, all building up to the big murder scene, where the film’s two audience-identifying characters are revealed to be murderer and murder victim. In the early sixties audiences were generally fooled into thinking Norman’s mother—not Norman—was the killer.

But in 1973, after a slew of movies had made the Psycho rip-off a genre unto itself, audiences were more likely ahead of De Palma when it came to his big reveal that Dominique was really Danielle. But in De Palma’s subversive sixties way, the murderer is a white female and the victim is a black male. Upon revealing this switch to the audience, the film continues to follow Psycho’s structure of having a new protagonist enter the picture (a witness to the killing) who then begins investigating the murder. However, the way this new character—Staten Island newspaper reporter Grace Collier—witnesses the murder is taken from both Hitch’s Rear Window and the director’s own Hi, Mom!

Something else introduced in Sisters that De Palma would hold on to in some of his other thrillers is the split-personality methodology of the killer. Margot Kidder is Danielle, and she’s also her dead sister Dominique. But, like Norman Bates, she herself is unaware of the personality split. And like Norman Bates with his mother, she can engage in conversation between the two personalities without ever being the wiser.

With as little regard as he held for Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, he still tore a page out of François’ book by getting Bernard Herrmann, the composer most identified with Hitch, to compose the score to Sisters. And it’s easily Herrmann’s best score of the seventies (only the score for Roy Boulting’s Twisted Nerve comes close), including a stabbing string section meant to evoke Psycho during Phillip’s bloody death. But it was De Palma’s masterly demonstration of camera pyrotechnics, and his clever use of split-screen and cinema-within-cinema (or TV-within-cinema) that blew away the cinematic techniques employed in the other Psycho-like thrillers of that year. Of which there were a lot, mostly coming out of England from Hammer Studios.

But as much as De Palma was adopting the cinematic grammar of Alfred Hitchcock and the story points from some of the master of suspense’s scripts (split personality murderer, murder witnessed through apartment window), he still carried over some of the trappings from the counterculture satires of Greetings and Hi, Mom! With Brian’s earlier movies he had established his own vision of New York City (usually centered around Greenwich Village and Manhattan). Sisters takes place in a New York recognizable as De Palma’s New York from the earlier pictures.

Also in Sisters, like Greetings and Hi, Mom!, De Palma engages in media satires like the crazy game show Peeping Toms that starts the film. Like most of De Palma’s media satires, as New York Times critic Vincent Canby pointed out, what’s so funny about them is how authentic they seem. The racial satire of Hi, Mom! is dragged into his Hitchcockian thriller (which all by itself places it apart from Hitchcock’s work).

The casting of a black male (Lisle Wilson) as the victim of the big set piece murder sequence isn’t satire, but actually a progressive stroke. The satire comes in when the film’s amateur detective Grace Collier speculates that the cops refuse to investigate the killing because the victim is black. “Those racist pigs won’t do anything about it.” But the film clearly shows that’s not the case, and Salt’s character, a muckraking intrepid reporter for a local Staten Island newspaper, who writes opinion essays with headlines like “Why We Call Them Pigs,” is a blithering idiot.

But the film’s funniest racial joke is when the Peeping Tom contestants Wilson and killer Kidder are given two free dinners at Manhattan’s African Room. Where black males in tuxedo tops and grass skirts serve as waiters, which when it comes to ridiculous theme restaurants in movies, ranks right up there with Joe Dante’s Canadian-themed restaurant in Gremlins 2 (a Mountie-costumed waiter asks Zach Galligan, “Can I get you another Molson’s?”).*

But Sisters’ real claim to fame, aside from establishing the template for the other Hitchcockian/De Palma thrillers to come, is the film’s buildup to Wilson’ set piece birthday-cake butcher-knife murder, still one of the most accomplished sequences of De Palma’s filmography. The problem with Sisters as a thriller, however, is once the big murder moment and the successful cover-up section is through . . . so are the thrills. De Palma (and cowriter Louisa Rose) only wrote half a movie, the Wilson/Kidder section. The Jennifer Salt section is simply De Palma trying to wrap the movie up as quickly as possible without spoiling the goodwill generated by the film’s dynamic first half. The best moment in the film’s second half is a faux media moment. Reporter Grace Collier watches a TV documentary on the Blanchion Siamese twins (Danielle and Dominique) that could have been made for Hi, Mom!’s ITTV documentary series.

The problem with the film’s second half is twofold. De Palma doesn’t create any other real suspense sequences. And the other problem is Jennifer Salt’s performance as Grace Collier. De Palma tries to present his women’s-lib reporter protagonist as a pigheaded, self-righteous ass. And he tried to have fun with that aspect of the character. In her first scene with Charles Durning’s detective, you can tell she’s supposed to be exasperatingly foolish. And if you pay attention you might even notice that a couple of her lines are written to be funny. But Salt’s delivery just bulldozes over any comedic intent. So instead of being comically foolish, Salt’s Grace Collier just comes across as idiotic. Before Pauline Kael would begin to champion De Palma’s thrillers, she panned Sisters, primarily due to Salt’s performance. And for the record, I’m a big fan of Jennifer Salt’s earlier performances in De Palma’s movies.

However in 1973 when I saw Sisters in Tennessee at the South Clinton Drive-In, on a double feature with another bizarre American-International film, Little Cigars (a film about a gang of dwarf bank robbers led by curvy blond bombshell Angel Tompkins), I thought it was sensational and the filmmaking thrilling. I had never seen a split-screen sequence before. For years, as I thought about different movies I’d like to make, they always included elaborate split-screen set pieces inspired by De Palma’s later use of that device. But I’d eventually do only two: A pretty decent one in Jackie Brown, but it turned on a narrative reveal rather than cinematic razzle dazzle. But when Daryl Hannah walks down the hall of the hospital in Kill Bill vol. 1, whistling Bernard Herrmann, then it slides into a split-screen, it’s almost as if Brian De Palma has seized control of the movie for a moment.

After the success of Sisters, De Palma and Pressman would make Phantom of the Paradise together, starring Brian’s college roommate William Finley as The Phantom and Paul Williams (yes, the diminutive songwriter) as the evil Phil Spector–like record producer Swan. The duo were initially set to do the movie with American-International Pictures, who were very happy with the De Palma-Pressman team after Sisters. But when the studio balked at the budget that De Palma was asking for, the director and producer again went it alone, both men using their Sisters money to grubstake the film’s preproduction. Eventually they snagged a real estate developer named Gustave Berne, who had invested in three horror films around that time (Theatre of Blood, Asylum, And Now the Screaming Starts!), and he put up the $750,000 they needed to make the movie (apparently they needed more, because early on the crew’s checks bounced every week, and the production was always on the verge of being shut down).

But the funny part about the De Palma-Pressman association is that both Sisters and Phantom of the Paradise were Pressman-Williams Enterprises presentations. Which means both Paul Williamses were involved with the making of Phantom of the Paradise.*