In a follow up to last Saturday's movie post, I have another movie that the team of Ben Mankiewicz and Mario Cantone talked me into watching. Directed by Brian DePalma and starring starring Margot Kidder and Jennifer Salt, from 1973, it's Sisters.
Advertising salesman Philip Woode and Danielle Breton, a young French Canadian model and aspiring actress, are contestants on a Candid Camera-style television show.
They flirt and go out to dinner where there is an awkward moment when a weird dude named Emil shows up. There seems to be some confusion if Emil is her estranged husband or ex-husband.
What ever the case may be, it seems like a red flag to me but Phillip still accompanies Danielle to her apartment in Staten Island cause he's gonna get laid.
Red flag #2 presents itself when Danielle gets into an argument with her twin sister Dominique in the next room. Phillip doesn't see the altercation, just hears it and clearly Dominique is upset that Danielle has brought a man home. Phillip really should leave.
He doesn't.
And he never will.
He gets repeatedly stabbed by a crazed woman with stringly black hair. Bleeding out, Phillip crawls across the floor and writes "help" on the window with his own blood.
This crime has a witness.
Across the courtyard of the apartment complex, Grace Collier has watched the horrific spectacle play out. Grace calls the police who are somewhat recalcitrant to come out. It seems Grace is a report for a Staten Island newspaper who has written some less than flattering stories about the Staten Island police.
Detective Kelly finally arrives and goes to the apartment where Grace witnessed the murder.
Except...
No body, no blood. Just poor old confused Danielle who insists she has been alone in the apartment all this time.
Let's rewind.
Director Brian DePalma gets all artsy with us.
From the moment Graces picks the phone to call the cops, we get a split screen with Grace on one side while on the other...
Emil shows up, finds a distressed Danielle and the dude she had dinner with the night before. So Emil gets to work on the right side of the screen while Grace is pacing and fretting on the left side of the screen, waiting for the police to arrive.
By the time the two sequences join together for one scene, Emil has cleaned up all the blood, disposed of the knife and stuffed Phillip's bloody corpse in the folding sofa in Danielle's living room.
Naturally, the cops assume Grace is fucking with them for her own anti-police agenda or some shit but Grace knows what she saw and she is going to investigate this.
Grace hires a private investigator named Larch.
And now....
...the larch!
Sorry! Really, really old and obscure joke.
Anyway, Larch gets into Danielle's apartment where he finds out Emil is having the body stuffed sofa shipped somewhere. Larch is committed to following the couch to see where Emil is having it taken to.
Larch also finds a file which he gives to Grace. The file is from a place called the Loisel Institute and it's about Canada's first conjoined twins, Danielle and Dominique Blanchion. Grace learns the twins were separated but at a cost: Dominique died on the operating table.
(So you might be wondering who was Danielle arguing with that night in her apartment? Or you might not and just assume we're dealing with a split personality issue.)
Grace tracks Emil and Danielle to a mental hospital where Grace is trapped as a "new patient".
Emil sedates Grace and places Danielle on the bed beside her.
Emil promises to tell Grace everything. But he also hypnotizes here to remember an important message: "There was no body because there was no murder. I was mistaken."
Brian DePalma's getting artsy again.
In an extended black and white sequence, the drugged Grace hallucinates that she is Dominique.
Danielle and Dominique were conjoined twins. Danielle is in a sexual relationship with Emil and Dominique definitely does not approve. When Danielle becomes pregnant, Dominique flies into a homicidal rage and stabs her twin in the stomach. The brutal assault kills the fetus and leaves Danielle barren.
Oh my God! This is some sick messed up shit going on here!
The conjoined twins are surgically separated but Dominique dies and Danielle develops a split personality to keep her sister "alive". But her sister is a homicidal freak which is why Phillip's corpse is rotting away inside of a sofa on a truck heading towards Canada.
With Larch still following.
Meanwhile back at the mental hospital, "Dominique" emerges and stabs the shit out of Emil and now he's dead.
Then Grace claws her way out of her drugged stupor to find Danielle crying and clutching Emil's body.
Detective Kelly shows up and arrests Danielle for Emil's murder and he's coming around to believing that Grace had really witnessed a murder in Danielle's apartment after all.
But Grace is no help.
When questioned about the first murder, Grace call only say, "There was no body because there was no murder. I was mistaken."
Over and over again.
Meanwhile, the sofa is left outside of a remote train station in Canada.
Where Larch is nearby, still following the couch.
And we reach... The End!
And what the bloody hell was all that?
Man, the 1970's were weird!
Brian DePalma was an aficionado of director Alfred Hitchcock and it's certainly in display in Sisters.
The music score was by Bernard Herrmann who composed several film scores for Hitchcock.
Rear Window is clearly an inspiration with the plot revolving around a murder in one apartment witnessed by in another apartment across the way.
Hitchcockian touches like the blood stain that begins to form on the back of Danielle's sofa that gets overlooked by just this much by Grace and the police.
The "It's That Person Who Was In That Thing" Department
The role of Danielle Breton / Dominique Blanchion was performed by Margot Kidder who would portray Lois Lane in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies.
Jennifer Salt was Grace Collier and the whole time, I'm thinking I know her from something and it was in her role as Eunice Tate in the TV comedy series Soap (1977–1981).
Olympia Dukakis makes an uncredited appearance as Louise in the bakery scene. Dukakis would be nearly ubiquitous in movies in 1980's and '90's such as Moonstruck and Steel Magnolias.
Charles Durning was P.I. Larch and Durning has been in a bunch of things. Among just the films I have seen, During had roles in The Sting (1973), The Muppet Movie (1979), Tootsie (1982), Dick Tracy (1990), and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000).
He was also in in the Burt Reynolds's TV series, Evening Shade, as the town doctor Harlan Eldridge (1990–1994).
And of course his memorable role in Sisters as....
...the Larch!
