As a movie-mad film student in the 1960s, Brian De Palma made anarchic, low-budget, independent movies under the influence of the French new wave.
Through them, he introduced his discovery Robert De Niro to his friend Martin Scorsese, but their interest today is minor and historic. Then in the early 70s he edged into the mainstream with feature movies that pursued another nouvelle vague fascination, Alfred Hitchcock, but even more directly and obsessively than Claude Chabrol or François Truffaut had done. These have endured. The first of them, for American International Pictures (the exploitation studio long associated with Roger Corman productions), was the sensational Sisters, influenced by watching bloody operations conducted by his father, a Philadelphia surgeon, and initially inspired by reading about some Russian conjoined twins in Life magazine.
Drawing directly on three Hitchcock movies (Psycho, Rear Window and Rope), it opens with two main characters meeting on a TV panel game called Peeping Tom (a reference both to the Michael Powell movie and to voyeurism, a recurrent De Palma subject). It also features a characteristic score by Hitchcock's long-time collaborator Bernard Herrmann, who also wrote the music for De Palma's Obsession, a reworking of themes from Vertigo.
Set largely on unfashionable Staten Island, Sisters features a major character stabbed to death early on, a troubled twin (Margot Kidder, later to star as Superman's girlfriend, Lois Lane), that Hitchcockian figure, the intrepid amateur sleuth (Jennifer Salt, whose name "Grace Collier" is a homage to Grace Kelly), and some perverse psychiatry in a Psycho and Spellbound vein. The succession of references stops just short of the risible, while the use of the split-screen to show scenes from different angles and the elaborate tracking shots indicate the arrival of a prodigious new stylist forging an original signature.
This DVD/Blu-ray disc includes numerous extras including "What the Devil Has Joined Together", an informative visual essay on De Palma by Justin Humphreys.
