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"Where are the gimmicks?" The Rorschach blots behind the opening titles in due time become De Palma's demonic fetuses (Sisters), the camera glides from nocturnal cityscape to jumbled penthouse and collects clues (ticking clock, knocked-over lamp, shattered glass) before finding a stabbed corpse. A murdered doctor, identical twins (Olivia de Havilland), which one did it? "It makes no more sense to me than Chinese music," grouses the police lieutenant (Thomas Mitchell). The siblings take turns working at the magazine stand and flirting with co-workers, even the analyst (Lew Ayres) is dumbfounded to see them both in the same room at the same time. (Having the two in a lineup of suspects is something of a challenge, "I'm gonna hang numbers on their backs like football players!") The psychiatric paraphernalia is put to use, the word-association test that links "mirror" and "death," the polygraph needle that leaps at the mention of sisterly contention. The culprit is "very clever, very intelligent, but insane." A persistent Robert Siodmak theme (Cobra Woman, The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry), familial bifurcations and obfuscating surfaces in a crafty Freudian treatment. The case is thrown out by the district attorney but picked up by the shrink with the help of the flatfoot, who hates the very idea of a perfect crime. A matter of split screens and de Havilland's variations in gaze and posture, "reflections of each other. Everything in reverse." Fragmented femininity is the spectacle, shadowy doppelgängers become a beguiling threat to the masculine order that cannot tell which one is being kissed. A music box following a ruse announces the triumph of "normalcy." "It all seems symbolic of... something." Nunnally Johnson reworks his screenplay for the further refractions of The Three Faces of Eve. With Richard Long, Charles Evans, Garry Owen, Lela Bliss, Ida Moore and Lester Allen. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |