CHAINED FOR LIFE

Several things occurred to me when I first saw Siamese Twins Violet & Daisy Hilton:

If they got picked at all for any sporting event, they’d HAVE to play on the same team.
One would be in trouble if the other had diarrhea.
Could they wear each other’s clothes?
What did the other twin do when her sister was on the toilet?
Were they able to dance the Twist?
Did they both have to undress when just one of them was making love?
Could they fit in the same bathtub or did they just stand and shower?

Now you know how my brain sometimes works.

This was not the first film the Hilton Sisters did. Some 20 years earlier they were featured players in Tod Browning’s classic, yet sometimes disturbing, FREAKS.

CHAINED FOR LIFE really concerns itself with the sisters having to deal with love and potentially getting married. The wedding night turns into a fiasco when the groom freaks out, so to speak, and leaves his new bride. Later, he is fatally shot by one of the sisters. The dilemma the judge in her trial has to face is that if the shooter is found guilty, can he really put her to death when the other twin is, for all intents and purposes, innocent?

The movie ends abruptly and, in my opinion, unsatisfactorily. A sequel was planned but never materialized.

They were still touring in 1968 but were stranded North Carolina when their manager ran off and left them there with no money. The sisters wound up working in a grocery store; one ran the register, the other bagged.

On January 4th, 1969, they didn’t show up for work. The police went to the residence and discovered both sisters dead (of Hong Kong flu). It was determined that Daisy died first and Violet passed no later than 4 days after her sister. They were 60 years old.