Although my journey through the Alfred Hitchcock oeuvre has not been strictly linear or chronological, I decided to save his final film for my final review. It’s a pretty good one to go out on, even if I have to disagree with Roger Ebert, who wrote in his review of Family Plot that “it’s a delight for two contradictory reasons: because it’s pure Hitchcock, with its meticulous construction and attention to detail, and because it’s something new for Hitchcock—a macabre comedy.” He’s wrong on the latter account because this wasn’t the director’s first foray into overt comedy, as the disastrous The Trouble With Harry had premiered two decades earlier, and with regards to the former, there’s nothing about it that’s quintessentially Hitchcock. It’s a good movie, but it’s also one that feels like it could have been helmed by virtually anyone.
Phony psychic Blanche (Barbara Harris) makes her living using information that her cab driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) digs up about her clients. As the film opens, she’s just landed a potential whale; elderly spinster and sole heir to a great fortune Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) has asked Blanche to find her long-lost nephew, an illegitimate child that she forced her sister to give up for adoption to avoid scandal some forty years prior. Rainbird hopes the younger woman’s psychic prowess will avert the kind of attention that private eyes and newspaper announcements would stir up. As the pair of con-artist lovebirds depart her mansion, they almost run over a woman in a long overcoat and sunglasses (Karen Black); we later learn her name is Fran, and the story follows her for a time as she strides into a police station and accepts delivery of a ransom in the form of a gigantic diamond. Without speaking a word, she directs a waiting helicopter pilot to the location where a kidnapped businessman is awaiting rescue, and she absconds with the brains of the operation, a seemingly respectable jeweler named Arthur Adamson (William Devane). George does some great amateur gumshoe work and eventually tracks down the missing Rainbird heir, who was adopted under the name Edward Shoebridge, only to learn that the man supposedly died in a fire in 1950 alongside his adoptive parents, but there’s more going on here than meets the eye.
The production of this film was troubled. Initially, Hitchcock hired Anthony Shaffer to pen the screenplay. Shaffer was on a run of hits at the time, having drafted Hitch’s Frenzy and the stellar Laurence Olivier/Michael Caine two-hander Sleuth, both released in 1972, and had followed those up with 1973’s The Wicker Man and Murder on the Orient Express, which was the first of four Hercule Poirot adaptations he would write over the course of fifteen years (including Death on the Nile). Allegedly, while Shaffer was out of the country on holiday, his agent made excessive demands of the production, which led Hitch to instead enlist Ernest Lehman, who had collaborated with the director seventeen years earlier on North by Northwest. Hitchcock’s health was in decline at the time, and he suffered a heart attack that required the surgical implantation of a pacemaker in late 1974, but in later interviews, Lehman remarked that the man was already diminished even before this, such that he stated that during early story meetings he no longer wanted “to do creative battle with this legendary and physically weakened man.” Behind-the-scenes material found on the movie’s DVD also indicate that Hitchcock was growing so exhausted with the production that he began to cut certain corners, and it does, unfortunately, show. Some driving scenes are so poorly composited that you can actually see the light of streetlamps through an actor’s face. The film’s big set piece, in which Blanche and George barely escape from a sabotaged car before the saboteur abandons all subtlety and starts to chase them down, is a combination of the opening drunk driving scene and the later cropduster attack sequence from North by Northwest but fails to be as exciting as either part of the earlier film. Of further detriment is the supposed comedy of the scenes where Blanche is doing her schtick; it isn’t funny, and lands with a thud.
There are still high marks here, though. After decades of working with John Williams, whom I have to identify every time I write about him as “the actor, not the composer,” Hitchcock does finally collaborate with John Williams the composer, fresh off of the previous year’s Jaws. In an interview on the DVD, Williams recalls meeting with Hitchcock and working on a particular scene in which Arthur is visited by one of his accomplices, a murder-happy mechanic named Maloney (Ed Lauter), who slips out of the window when Arthur is called away by detectives seeking information about the ransom diamond. Hitchcock directed Williams to have the music stop as the camera moves to the open window, so that the silence conveys his absence, and Williams recounts the anecdote in a way that denotes fondness and awe. It’s sweet, and the soundtrack that Williams composed is a good one, especially in the comedy sequences that work. The best of these is probably Blanche’s attempts to find “A. Adamson,” who might be the supposedly dead Edward Shoebridge (e.g. the Rainbird nephew). Comedy ensues as she goes through the phone book and first meets a woman, then a Black man, then a man who is too young (and a twin to boot) before finally arriving at the jewelry store. It’s a fun bit, and effective at getting the audience to relax a bit before the thriller elements kick into high gear, as Arthur and Fran drug her and lock her in their basement cell when she comes knocking, assuming that she’s there to blackmail them for a portion of the profit from their kidnapping schemes.
Narratively, this is something of a cozy mystery, which appealed to me greatly as a longtime Murder, She Wrote fan. When Blanche isn’t being one of the more annoying Hitchcock protagonists, she and George have a very fun dynamic as an investigative team. She takes information that he gathers and works it into her fortune telling sessions to prompt Julia Rainbird to remember certain details that George can then trace down. George himself is a likeable everyman detective and demonstrates a shrewd wit, like when he notices that despite sharing a death date, Edward Shoebridge’s headstone at the titular family plot is of a different material than his adoptive parents’. The film is perhaps overreliant on narrative coincidence. It’s a neat trick for George to nearly hit Fran with his car early on and then have the camera follow her, and it’s also convenient that Adamson happens to be Edward Shoebridge/Baby Boy Rainbird. That George tracks down the clergyman who baptized Edward and that said parson is now an archbishop who happens to be Fran and Arthur’s next kidnapping victim is perhaps a bridge too far, especially given that George arrives to meet him at the same time that the kidnapping is actually taking place, in front of an entire congregation, no less!
It’s forgivable though, given that this still works as a cohesive narrative despite the failing health of its director. It’s a relatively high note to go out on, and one gets the feeling that Hitch knew this was going to be his last hurrah by the time the film wrapped. At least he sent us off with a wink and a smile.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
