Half Hitch

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SISTERS

Directed by BRIAN DE PALMA

Screenplay by BRIAN DE PALMA and LOUISA ROSE

Sisters is being promoted as a routine shocker of the kind that has made its distributor, American-International, rich and infamous. But it is something more--and more interesting--than that. It is a homage by a gifted, if erratic, young director, Brian de Palma (Hi Mom, Greetings), to one of cinema's genuine masters, Alfred Hitchcock.

The theme is Hitchcockian: a demonstration of the way private sexual obsession has a way of spilling over into public, with murderous consequences (Vertigo). There are innocent bystanders drawn dangerously into a closely woven criminal web (The Man Who Knew Too Much). Even the murder that is the film's central incident--a perhaps too ghastly knifing--reminds us of the famous shower-bath murder in Psycho, as does a splendid, spooky score by that film's masterful composer, Bernard Herrmann. More important than these specific references to glories past, however, is the Hitchcockian discipline De Palma brings to his storytelling, the delicate balance between humor and horror with which he permits it to unfold, the suspenseful way he lets the audience in on the plot's secret before his characters tumble to it.

De 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 problems of Siamese twins. De Palma's New York location work, as it has in the past, reveals facets of an overfamiliar urban landscape untouched by other film makers.

There is an appealing performance by Jennifer Salt as the investigative journalist whose cries of "Wolf, wolf!" go unheeded until it is almost too late, and Margot Kidder is touching and frightening as the most thoroughly split personality in movie history. Above all, however, Sisters reveals De Palma as capable of moving from the esoteric fringe of the movie world to its commercial center without sacrificing the exuberantly anarchic spirit that first marked him as a director worth watching. Sis ters provides moviegoers with the special satisfaction of finding a real treasure while prowling cinema's bargain basement. Richard Schickel

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