Sisters

The Seventies saw the rise of a new breed of film makers - once dubbed the Movie Brats, or, as Billy Wilder called them, "the kids with the beards" - a cine-literate generation who had grown up on movies and TV. They formed the vanguard of a new Hollywood, and, although they initially rejected the old studio system in favour of independent guerrilla-style film making, they were respectful of those that had gone before them. Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, John Milius, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma were starting to make names for themselves, and for a few brief years - before corporate merchandising tempted many of them over to the dark side - Hollywood was an exciting place to be a movie maker.

If George Lucas took his inspiration from the Hollywood serials, Spielberg couldn't decide whether he wanted to be John Ford or Frank Capra. John Milius was either the new Howard Hawks or Sam Fuller. Scorsese - with his encyclopedic knowledge of American cinema - was happy to reference just about everybody from D.W.Griffith to Douglas Sirk. Out of them all, perhaps only Francis Ford Coppola was his own man, in thrall to no discernible influence (with the exception of Antonioni for The Conversation). Brian De Palma, of course, wanted only one thing: to be the new Hitchcock. He would, in fact, make a small career out of an almost obsessive imitation of some of the director's great works: Obsession for Vertigo, Dressed To Kill for Psycho, Body Double for Rear Window. The film that set him on this path was Sisters, and what better way to pay homage to Hitchcock than use Hitchcock's composer?

Actually, it was the editor Paul Hirsch, who had used the music from Psycho as a temp track while cutting the film, who convinced De Palma that Herrmann was their man. The initial meeting when they screened their rough cut for the composer was not auspicious. They had left some of the temp scoring on the soundtrack and, when the Marnie theme filled the screening room, Herrmann flew into a rage. He finally calmed down only to blow his top again when De Palma and Hirsch explained that there was to be no title music. "I will write you one title cue," Herrmann told them. "One minute and twenty seconds long. It will keep [the audience] in their seats until your murder scene. I got an idea using two Moog synthesizers." Herrmann was on board.

The music he wrote to accompany the main title images of a pair of demonic looking foetuses delivered on his promise - nothing else in the entire movie lives up to its raw savagery. The score oscillates between a swirling cacophony of wailing Moog, blaring horns and shrieking strings and quieter - but no less chilling - interludes of childlike melodies on the glockenspiel.

The soundtrack is available on the Southern Cross label (B000056WOD). One of the cues is also available on the Ghosts of Bernard Herrmann (ILL 313002), a compilation of the composer's greatest hits arranged for solo piano - a curio of an album, but highly recommended.