Family Plot (Universal, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Fear my husband Charles arrived home from work relatively early and the two of us were able to settle in and watch Alfred Hitchcock’s last movie, the 1976 comedy-thriller Family Plot. It’s not one of the Master’s most highly-regarded films, and it’s easy to see why.The cast -- Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane and Karen Black -- is good but hardly as charismatic as the people Hitchcock had worked with in previous generations. The story (based on a novel by Victor Canning called The Rainbird Pattern -- a horrible title no one even momentarily considered for the film; Hitchcock wanted to call it Deceit until the Universal marketing department did a poll and found that filmgoers hearing about a Hitchcock movie called Deceit would expect it to be about one member of a married couple murdering the other) is a reasonable assemblage of thriller tropes but hardly with the distinction of previous Hitchcock films. And the visual style is surprisingly “flat,” looking less like a Hitchcock movie than like one of the run-of-the-mill TV thrillers Universal, the producing studio, was turning out by the yard in the 1970’s. But, as Dwight Macdonald wrote about Sergei Eisenstein’s last film, Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, “the dying lion is still a lion.”

Family Plot is about two Hollywood losers -- phony spiritualist Blanche Tyler (Barbara Harris) and her boyfriend, cabdriver and aspiring actor George Lumley (Bruce Dern, who’d actually made his screen debut in a Hitchcock film 12 years earlier as the sailor in the flashback scene at the end of Marnie) -- who have the chance for a big score when one of her clients, Julia Rainbird (the marvelous Cathleen Nesbitt), offers Blanche $10,000 if she can find Rainbird’s nephew, who was conceived out of wedlock and put up for adoption almost immediately after he was born. Meanwhile, another couple, high-end jeweler Arthur Adamson (William Devane) and his girlfriend and reluctant assistant Fran (Karen Black, apparently a last-minute choice after Hitchcock wasn’t able to line up anyone else in time), are carrying out a series of meticulously organized kidnappings in which they have a special room in their house where they stash the victims (complete with a chemical toilet, unconnected to any water mains, for their victims to use during their captivity) and for whom they demand ransom not in money but in jewels. They are just in the process of releasing their latest victim, Constantine (Nicholas Colasanto), when their storyline begins, and there are some delightful scenes from Hitchcock and screenwriter Ernest Lehman (they’d worked together before on a far more consequential Hitchcock production, North by Northwest) of Constantine getting more and more exasperated by the multiple law-enforcement personnel that are asking him to tell the story of his kidnapping again and again when all he wants to do is get on with his life as a businessperson and make up for whatever time he lost when he was a captive. Hitchcock was famous for working comedy elements into his thrillers without the obvious and stupid expedient of a so-called “comic relief” character -- another nice touch is tha argument Adamson and Fran have over who’s going to clean out the toilet after their last victim has been released -- and for much of its running time Family Plot counts as a comedy, albeit a “black” one.

About half an hour into the film we learn what connects its two plot lines: Adamson, the super-criminal who runs a high-end jewelry store as a “front,” is also Julia Rainbird’s long-lost nephew whom George and Blanche are looking for to get Julia’s $10,000. In 1950, Adamson and his friend Joe Moloney (Ed Lauter) in the small town of Barlow Ridge, California where his adoptive parents were raising him conspired to burn down the house where Adamson had been raised, murder his parents in the fire and allow him to fake his own death and disappear. Now Moloney encounters George and Blanche, who threaten to uncover the elaborate deception he’s organized to make it appear Adamson died with his parents; George notices that Adam’s headstone is considerably newer than those of his parents (Moloney ordered it in 1965 and at that time he also petitioned for a death certificate, which he was denied because he couldn’t produce a body or any other evidence of death) -- a deduction that, along with his penchant for smoking a pipe, made me briefly wonder why no one ever thought of casting Bruce Dern as Sherlock Holmes (he would have made a good, if rather quirky, one) and finds that it was put up 15 years later. He also checks out the small town’s “Registrar of Births and Deaths” and sees a silhouette of a familiar-looking man through the office window -- it’s Alfred Hitchcock making the last of his celebrated cameo appearances, though he looked so decrepit by 1976 he insisted he be seen only in silhouette (and he told someone on the set the day the scene was filmed that he really didn’t like making those brief appearances in his films, but his audiences had grown to expect them so he felt he had to).

George and Blanche find that most of the people who knew the Rainbird nephew are dead, but one who isn’t is the parish priest who baptized him (odd, since his adoptive parents were Mormons -- we hear them referred to as part of the “Church of Latter-Day Saints” and the passage read at Moloney’s funeral after his car goes off the road as he’s chasing George and Blanche is from the Book of Mormon), who’s now the presiding bishop of a large Episcopal cathedral in San Francisco (“played” by the real-life Grace Cathedral, though it’s called something else and the interior was probably a set on a Universal soundstage). Alas, by a huge and hard-to-swallow coincidence, Adamson and Fran have chosen the bishop to be their next kidnapping victim. In Canning’s novel the bishop was kidnapped as he was going for a walk, but while they were working on the screenplay Hitchcock told Lehman that if you were going to do a movie scene in which a bishop was kidnapped, you should have it take place while the bishop was at the height of his role as a bishop: leading a High Mass in front of a full congregation. Eventually the two couples catch on to the others’ existence, and Adamson has his friend Moloney arrange a phony “meeting” that will give him a chance to sabotage Blanche’s car (a white classic-era Ford Mustang that becomes practically a character of its own), decommissioning both its gas and brake pedals just before George and Blanche have to drive down a long, winding mountain road. (The imdb.com “Trivia” page on this film says the sequence was shot on the Universal backlot, but it sure looks like the winding roads down Mount Tamalpais in Marin County I remember from growing up there.) The car ends up on its side, obviously the worse for wear, but it soon turns up again and one wonders how the poverty-stricken George and Blanche got it repaired so soon. Moloney meets his death when he finds that George and Blanche have run their car off the road and escaped with their lives; he drives his own car off the mountain while he’s chasing them and trying to run them over to finish the job.

George and Blanche ultimately learn Adamson’s address and crash the place right when he and Fran are getting ready to release the bishop, and ultimately Adamson locks Blanche in the secret room but George figures out how to get her out and lock Adamson and Fran in the room (which for some reason even they, who built it, don’t know how to get out of) and call the police. Then they realize they’ll get an even bigger reward if they can figure out where the jewels Adamson collected as ransom are hidden, and Blanche goes into a trance and points to the chandelier where Adamson had hidden the jewels and made them look like just more cut-glass chandelier pieces -- an obvious homage to the very first mystery story ever written, Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Purloined Letter.” Just when you think Hitchcock and Lehman have ended the movie with the old cop-out bit of the fake spiritualist suddenly developing real mediumistic powers, Barbara Harris stares at the camera and winks, letting us know that she deduced where the jewels would be and there was nothing supernatural about her revelation. According to imdb.com, that wasn’t in the script; Harris did it spontaneously as the scene was being shot, and Hitchcock, to his credit, liked it enough to put it in the final cut despite his usual distaste for actors improvising in his films. (Hitchcock is famous for saying, “Actors are cattle,” though when he was interviewed by Richard Schickel in 1976 for the documentary series The Men Who Made the Movies, Hitchcock said, “I did not say actors were cattle! I merely said they should be treated as cattle” --- which sounds to me even more insulting than the misquote.)

There are quite a few intriguing in-jokes in Family Plot, including Blanche’s home being located near a cross-street called “Bates Avenue” and the whole schtick of the raven-haired Fran being forced to put on a blond wig and a black leather pantsuit outfit with six-inch high heels to enact her part in Adamson’s plot -- reminding us of all those tales of Hitchcock literally remodeling his female leads to put them in the mold of the superficially icy but genuinely hot and sexy “Hitchcock blondes” of his previous films. There are also conflicting reports of just how aware and alert Hitchcock was during the shoot, since he spent a lot of it in his director’s chair apparently asleep, but according to Bruce Dern, even during a “take” where he appeared to be nodding off he would come to as soon as it was over and be aware of every little detail, including missed camera movements or twitches in the actors’ performances. Family Plot is a bit of a disappointment as a Hitchcock movie -- there aren’t any dazzling moving-camera shots (indeed, Dern praised him for his restraint in moving the camera) and there aren’t any of the moral ambiguities that had driven so many of his earlier movies (he had originally cast Roy Thinnes as the villain, then replaced him with Devane, but his is the weakest performance among the leads and I suspect Hitchcock never got what he wanted for the role -- but then again, if he had made this story in the 1940’s he’d have probably wanted to cast Cary Grant as the villain and would have got the same hissy-fits from producers and studio “suits” he got when he wanted Grant to turn out to be a murderer in 1941’s Suspicion), and as I noted above the visual style is surprisingly plain and TV-like. Still, I can think of other major filmmakers’ last credits which are far more embarrassing than Family Plot, which is a marvelously entertaining film even though someone coming to it who had never seen any of Hitchcock’s other films would wonder why he’s considered one of the greatest directors of all time.