Sisters

A journalist says she watched a murder through a window in the building opposite; when the police arrive there is no body and no blood. As she keeps digging, it emerges that a model named Danielle was one of a pair of separated conjoined twins. Brian De Palma made split screen his signature here, using two simultaneous events side by side as the whole engine of the suspense. There are also tracking shots running over six minutes, for which De Palma cited Max Ophüls and Hitchcock's Rope. The script came from a real case. De Palma read a 1966 Life magazine article about the Soviet conjoined twins Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, and what struck him was the photograph and the account of psychological problems developing as they aged. Margot Kidder plays the twins and Jennifer Salt plays the journalist Grace Collier. Bernard Herrmann wrote the score. De Palma and editor Paul Hirsch had been cutting to Herrmann's old scores, and though semi-retired he admired the screenplay enough to take it. On a 500,000 dollar budget it took a million in US and Canadian rentals and became a cult film. Robin Wood called it one of the great American films of the seventies. Who it is for: viewers who love De Palma's formal tricks and his Hitchcock references. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the treatment of conjoined twins indefensible now. The film uses that entirely as horror material.