Following in Hitchcock's Wake

THOSE FEW important films that are also important moneymakers usually encourage quick, cheap, and successive imitation. In the sixties, the youth film and the tepid sex/promiscuity film became the obvious examples of such industry-wide stagnation. More elusive, perhaps, was the much wider range of films which merged violence with psychodrama after the model of Hitchcock's Psycho -- formula films where violence was often the only substance, films that Hitchcock wouldn't even deign to sneeze at. Exploiters like Strait-Jacket, the 1964 axe-murder movie, led later to box-office hits like The Boston Strangler (still playing in Boston drive-ins today), and also to superfluous and exploitative violence in films otherwise far removed from the world of sensational crime.

Luckily, exploitative imitation is usually recognized as just that. Class of '44, The God-children -- these current films are the straight-forward sycophants. Catering to its lower than lowest-common-denominator view of the public's mind, the film industry makes imitative films in waves following any big success. The films in each wave sell for a time, then the green subsides. After decades, this pattern has become so well established that most imitative waves of today are not cause for new concern but only minor emblems of the strait jacket bound around American film making.

In contrast to the more obvious cases, Sisters is an imitation come long after its wave has passed. As a result, Brian De Palma's film can hide its imitation of both Psycho and the exploiters of Psycho behind the more artistically acceptable term homage. De Palma thinks of his film in terms of homage, so Sisters is far more discouraging than a typical bandwagon exploiter. It deceives even the film maker -- a potentially good film maker at that. De Palma tries hard to lose his style amidst Hitchcock's. Fortunately, he doesn't succeed: his film still includes sections that are both effective and original.

IN 1968, De Palma made Greetings, a clever film about draft resistance that stood out above the typical youth films then being made. He has had as much trouble obtaining backing for films as most talented young directors, but he insists that Sisters is a film he had wanted to do for a long time, not a piece of commercial hackwork. The film appears under the American International Pictures label, and though that company is known mainly for its slick promotion of cheap sex, De Palma insists that the choice of a distributor was a business decision unrelated to his artistic intentions.

The film centers around murder committed by a schizoid, as does Psycho. De Palma tries to go Hitchcock one better by making his murderer the ultimate split personality: one member of a pair of Siamese twin sisters separated at the end of their adolescence. The way De Palma handles it, it's a clever idea, and it allows him to include a clever documentary film within the film which he made with the assistance of Jay Cocks, the young film critic for Time. Unfortunately, De Palma never treats the psychological facet of the girls' unusual predicament with any more depth than the freakshow fascination of the "human interest" picture spread which Life ran a few years back and which was De Palma's inspiration for the film.

But, one might say, we shouldn't expect any more from a thriller than thrills, any more from a shocker than shock. So why should the twin, played by Margot Kidder, be more than a woman who interests only because she switches her personalities on and off to fit the needs of the plot? The answer lies in the difference between Hitchcock's best films and the vacuity we expect in the typical film from American-International. As De Palma is fond of pointing out, Hitchcock at his best is much more than a technical master of plot and camerawork.

The murder in Psycho, for example, has an emotional impact to it that nothing in Sisters comes close to, because Hitchcock gives some importance to his characters. In Psycho, though it is not one of Hitchcock's very best, we see people on the screen, not just figures whose talk punctuates the violence. The first murder in Sisters occurs after the film is well underway, but this murder would have had the same impact on the audience if the film had started with the immediately preceding shot. To achieve this impact, the film draws only on our reactions to the visual events of a particularly gruesome murder (as does Psycho, though in a more dramatic and also less bloody way). Murder elicits no human feeling beyond gut level horror.

THIS SUPERFICIAL attitude toward the impact of violence carries through into the structure of the entire film. De Palma introduces humorous moments in order, he says, to make the violence more bearable. These moments he handles effectively (in fact, the TV quiz show parody that opens the film and the only slightly macabre humor throughout are very funny: this is De Palma being himself), but these moments are also evasive. The only reason they are so essential in the first place is that the violence in the film is not set in a context of characterization. The acts of characters in a Hitchcock film are at least as ghastly as in Sisters, but the portrayal runs deeper. In Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951, written by Raymond Chandler) Robert Walker plays a strange, unbalanced character who is frightening because he seems so real. Yet he seems so real partly because Hitchcock is also able to give him both a macabre and a comic dimension and to sustain both aspects throughout the film. In Hitchcock, the comic aspect is not used to add spice and make the film more palatable; it is integral in every way and is one reason that audience involvement with a Hitchcock film runs so much deeper and through so many more emotions than with Hitchcock's imitators.

And in this film De Palma is nothing if not an imitator. Despite the talk of homage, Sisters is not a film that serves Hitchcock, except in that a comparison of his better films (and there have not been any of those in recent years) with Sisters reveals once again what a master he is of his specialized form. Too many directors try to bestow cinematic homage these days -- by borrowing of personalized shots, glimpses of old movie posters, imitation of scenes or whatever. This is esoterica which film does not need.

Promoting for Sisters last week, De Palma told me he thought Truffaut's worst film making resulted from his admitted efforts to imitate Hitchcock. We both agreed that Truffaut's greatest homage was his book of conversations with Hitchcock. I hadn't seen Sisters then; now I think De Palma, too, should have put his homage into a book.