276. The Sister In Law

276. The Sister In Law (1974)
Director: Joseph Ruben
Writer: Joseph Ruben
From: Cult Cinema

Robert returns home after traveling the US to find his brother Edward’s life falling apart. As the situation becomes clearer, Robert may end up suffering for all of Edward’s mistakes.

Robert has been bumming around the US but has now returned to his parents’ house in West Chester. His sister-in-law Joanna is there to inform him of how life has progressed in his absence. His brother Edward, after selling a novel to great success, has had his next book rejected. He’s lost all his money gambling and now he and Joanna are getting a divorce since he’s living with a new, younger, girlfriend, Deborah. Shortly after Edward comes by the house to meet up with Robert, Robert and Joanna hook up.

Edward is a bagman for the mob and is supposed to pick up and deliver $300,000 worth of heroin from Canada. Unfortunately, the weekend he’s supposed to make the delivery, he has a meeting in LA. He asks Robert to make the trip for him, but tells him he’ll just be smuggling jewels. Robert is reluctant, but finally agrees when Edward says Deborah can go too.

Robert picks up the package, checks it, and finds out it’s heroin. Deborah has noticed they’re being followed. They ditch the tail and then Robert dumps the heroin into a stream. He hooks up with Deborah and then calls Edward in LA to say, “I’ve had your wife, your mistress, and I threw your heroin into a mountain stream.”

Edward comes home and now has 48 hours to come up with the money. He doesn’t and gets told by the mob boss that there’s a contract out for him. He gives Robert the keys to his Jaguar and watches from his apartment as some mob guys follow Robert and Deborah. Edward and Joanna grab a cab and head to the airport. Finally the mob forces Robert off the road, drags him from the car, and, because one of the mobsters is the guy who handed the heroin off to Robert in Canada, kills him thinking he’s Edward. Meanwhile, Edward and Joanna catch a plane to France, not looking back once. THE END.

For being called The Sister In Law, the titular sister-in-law isn’t in the movie much nor is she much of the plot. The title should have been, The Deadbeat Brother. Everything stems from Edward being an irresponsible prick and ruining everything around him.

Granted, this is better than what the movie initially seemed to be. With that title and then the first act of the movie being Joanna trying to seduce Robert, I thought this was going to be much closer to The Teacher in terms of lazing in sexual taboo. That impression wasn’t helped when Deborah is introduced to the movie. Edward brings her by the house to meet Robert and Joanna, and there’s immediate jealousy between everyone. Joanna thinks Deborah is pursuing Robert, Edward suspects Robert is trying to hook up with Deborah, and small fights break out. That the movie switched over to the mob plot was kind of a relief.

Unfortunately, it was still kind of boring. The movie’s not made with the perfunctory banality of a Marimark Production, but it lacks any sort of umph. Characters don’t seem to have any qualms about their moral choices nor are they really forced into any compromises. There’s no lead-up to Robert being seduced by Joanna, no period in the film for you or him to wonder if this is really happening. The third scene he’s in, which reads as the day after he returns, Joanna asks him to bring her a drink and is just naked. He doesn’t offer any resistance either, never noting that this is kind of weird.

The movie has one interesting moment. When Edward is in LA for the meeting, it seems like he’s pitching a script. The producers ask him if he expects the audience to care about this “selfish son-of-a-bitch” and it’s seems like the film is trying to be a bit self-aware. Only, is the “selfish son-of-a-bitch” Edward who’s writing a thinly-veiled story about his life but trying to cast himself as the victim, or is it Robert, the, I guess, hero of this film? While he’s more sympathetic than Edward, he’s still a bit off—sleeping with his sister-in-law and then his brother’s mistress. In between those moments, he says he can’t do anything bad, even if he tries, and throws a wine bottle out of a 16th-storey window. No one gets hit which is supposed to prove his point, but it’s a moment that moves him from being an innocent dropped into the weird head games of Edward and Joanna to being just a different shade of bastard when compared to Edward.

The weird family relations could have worked as a novel. Likewise, if they’d instead focused on the poor financial decisions of Edward throughout and made the consequences of that the center of the film, it’d have been a lot better. As it is, the movie’s not particularly interesting, not too inventive, and kind of dull. To it’s credit, it’s only 80 minutes, but that’s not enough to make it a recommend.