| Penny Folger |
Family Plot plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, May 1st, through Sunday, May 3rd. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock’s final feature film, turns 50 this year, and while often overlooked, it’s a delightful and, dare I say, light comedy? But how could the director so often associated with murder have made something… cute? (Fortunately, we still get kidnapping and cemeteries.)
Like Stephen King, Hitchcock made a career out of harnessing childhood fears and creatively blowing them out of proportion. The director was briefly locked in a real jail cell as a child at his parent’s request. But what was meant to be a warning about what happens to “naughty little boys” culminated in a lifetime of creative neuroses brought to the big screen.
Hitchcock always had a macabre sense of humor. This is evidenced by the cameos he made in his films, and the bumpers, sometimes with props, he recorded for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. You can see it in the way two innocent old men playfully theorize all the ways to commit murder in Shadow of a Doubt, providing comic relief against a backdrop of real murder. And while not “laugh out loud” funny, there’s a certain delight in the unexpectedness of Cary Grant being targeted at a cornfield bus stop by a biplane in North by Northwest. Hitchcock said this kind of cleverness derived from his attempts to avoid cliché.1
But Plot feels like a departure for someone whose film career was fueled by fear and not comedy. It’s a zany PG rated caper whose depictions of crime feel more reminiscent of Walt Disney’s That Darn Cat—another film about kidnapping—than Psycho. Plot would feel at home in the canon of the Disney live action films of the 1960s. Even John Williams’s memorable score for the film is strikingly whimsical. It has the feel of a Disney movie about magic, or maybe witches. This was early in Williams’s career, and it’s oddly sandwiched between his more acclaimed work on Jaws and Star Wars, but resembles neither.
Family Plot was also made in a completely different era culturally than the more formal, straightlaced decades in which Hitchcock had previously worked. Said Karen Black, one of the leads of Plot about the 1970s, “At that particular point in the history of film, people were throwing up a lot in films. And they were sweating and drooling and improvising, and walking off camera…. So his style was very different.”2 It’s hard to believe that Plot was released after Taxi Driver and the first two Godfather films. Its sensibilities almost make it feel like an antiquated throwback within its own time period.
The screenplay was by Ernest Lehman with whom Hitchcock also collaborated on North by Northwest, though there was apparently a tug of war created by their differing sensibilities: “Lehman wanted the film to be sweeping, dark and dramatic, but Hitchcock kept pushing him toward lightness and comedy.” Hitchcock apparently won because Family Plot feels much zanier than his previous works, which is a large part of its charm. There’s a scene with an out of control car, and one where the leads speak with their mouths full of hamburger that seem played for comedy. “He laughed out loud in the hamburger eating scene,” reminisced lead Bruce Dern about Hitchcock.3 At one point, Dern is even shirtless but still wearing his cab driver’s cap. (This was the 70s, after all.)
In the 1970s, shirts seemed optional.
Family Plot is more overtly funny than its 50 years of predecessors but by all accounts, the book upon which it is based, Victor Canning’s The Rainbird Pattern, is much darker. When asked about his involvement with it, Hitchcock stated, “I read the book twice, perhaps. And never looked at it again.” He said ironically, “Good literature does not make good pictures.”4 I haven’t read the book but the movie’s plot is convoluted in the way that film noir plots and parodies of that genre often are, like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or The Big Lebowski.
The story features two sets of couples and flip flops between them until they eventually intersect. Though it was based on a property he did not write, this aspect of the story is what Hitchcock was most drawn to. “What interested me about Family Plot was that it was two sides of a triangle, meeting at a certain point.”5
The more goofy, relatable pair are the questionably psychic medium Blanche played by improv veteran Barbara Harris, and Dern as George, an out of work actor turned taxi cab driver turned strangely adept amateur private eye! Their sexual banter is striking and comical but also perhaps indicative of this new era in which Hitchcock was working.
Blanche and George argue on the porch when he doesn’t want to sleep over:
Blanche: “What are you saving it for, a rainy day?”
George: “Honey, you never know when you’re gonna need it.”
Dern has all of the zingers, complaining to Blanche, “I’m sick and tired of having you hang me by the crystal balls.” Also, the culminating “You’re not gonna have to worry about my performance tonight, honey—as a matter of fact, on this very evening, you’re gonna see a standing ovation!”
There’s even weird innuendo going on in the background. At one point at a diner, a priest seems to be meeting up with a beautiful woman in a red dress, using a gaggle of school children he’s brought with him as a cover.
Said Dern about Hitchcock, “He loved the risqué. That’s why he liked me in Family Plot, because I threw caution to the wind, so to speak and was unpredictable.”6
Hitchcock and Dern had become friendly when the latter appeared in Marnie. Dern asked Hitchcock, “Why would you want me to play this part?” Hitchcock replied, “Bruce, I never know what you’re gonna do next.”7 Dern was also more affordable. The first choice for the role was a post-Godfather Al Pacino, who had a much bigger price tag. Said Dern, “I was about 15th on the list.”8
The healthier onscreen relationship appears to be Blanche and George’s. Yes, they squabble, but Black’s character Fran seems controlled by William Devane’s sinister jeweler Arthur Adamson, the true villain of the film. If anything, Blanche is the top to Dern’s bottom. (This is illustrated quite literally in one scene where he ends up with one of her sandals on his face!) Hitchcock thought this was apropos because according to Dern, “Hitchcock said women always walk on men. They walk all over them.”9 An interesting comment considering Hitchcock’s penchant for bullying his female stars. (Hello, Tippi Hedren.)
Corruption by degrees: menacing smile courtesy of William Devane.
If Adamson is the film’s villain, Fran, a reluctant co-kidnapper, feels like its conscience. Some have criticized her performance as seeming out of sync with the rest of the cast, and Hitchcock reportedly had a difficult time working with her, but she is arguably the most sympathetic of the film’s four central characters. Fran is the only character not driven by greed. Blanche’s fake psychic has dollar signs in her eyes—you can almost see them animated in green as they widen, like something out of an old Warner Brothers cartoon. George has no qualms about chasing the money either, as Blanche’s right hand man. This may be because Blanche and George are working class, a notable departure from the classier, more upscale Grace Kellys and Cary Grants of Hitchcock’s previous films.
Even Adamson’s evildoing is driven by his desire to accumulate stolen diamonds. (Despite being a professional jeweler—apparently workplace proximity was not enough.) In contrast, Fran cooks gourmet meals for their hostages and seems to want out of this lifestyle entirely, but she’s in a dysfunctional relationship with Adamson. Devane is somewhat of a Jack Nicholson type, which is ironic considering Nicholson was up for the Dern role. Nicholson and Devane opposite each other would have felt almost like The Dark Mirror, in which Olivia De Havilland plays identical twins. Anyway, in a film populated by con artists, we’re asked to sympathize with the least offensive of the lot, because everyone is inevitably corrupt in this movie—even priests in diners!
There is a wink at the end of the film that feels like it could be both Hitchcock’s farewell to his audience and a comment on his entire career, though it wasn’t necessarily meant to be either. The film’s poster contains an image of Hitchcock winking instead of Harris, even using the same eye.
The wink that would conclude Alfred Hitchcock’s career.
The goodbye would seem more intentional had Hitchcock known this would be his final film. When asked in a 1976 press junket if there would be a 54th film by Alfred Hitchcock he replied, “Definitely yes.”10 (Plot is number 53.) While Hitchcock and his devoted wife and collaborator Alma were in varying degrees of ill health during this era, they were planning another film that never got off the ground.
As Hitchcock’s final film, Plot is not universally loved or even talked about. Some modern filmgoers seem to find it dated or unfunny, but I would point out that comedy works best in a packed theater and not viewed alone on a small screen. Said podcaster Elric Kane about seeing the film’s famous runaway car scene with an audience, “I was in a theater at the New Beverly (Cinema) and people were falling out of their chairs laughing.”11
I myself always found Plot to be charming and a good palate cleanser following Hitchcock’s previous film, the grittily brutal, R-rated Frenzy. It’s a nice film to discover or revisit while home sick with a bowl of soup, or better yet with an appreciative crowd of film fans at Trylon Cinema!
Footnotes
1 Alfred Hitchcock Press Conference: “Family Plot,” Bobbie Wygant Archive, 1976.
2 Laurent Bouzereau, director. Plotting ‘Family Plot,’ 2001.
3 Plotting ‘Family Plot.’
4 Alfred Hitchcock Press Conference.
5 Alfred Hitchcock Press Conference.
6 Plotting ‘Family Plot.’
7 Plotting ‘Family Plot.’
8 Plotting ‘Family Plot.’
9 Plotting ‘Family Plot.’
10 Alfred Hitchcock Press Conference.
11 Elric Kane, “Episode 5: MacGuffins,” Pure Cinema Podcast, March 13, 2017.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon