Family Plot (1976)

Film: Family Plot (1976)

Stars: Bruce Dern, Barbara Harris, William Devane, Karen Black

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: Harris was nominated for Best Actress at the Golden Globes, but couldn't translate that to an Oscar citation.

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Barbara Harris-click here to learn more about Ms. Harris (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We are celebrating Barbara Harris all month long on the blog, but as we are seeing a film that was released within several months of Freaky Friday, our movie from last week, we're going to take a little break this week from discussing Harris's career (since we're in roughly the same spot), and instead focus on our other star of the year, Alfred Hitchcock.  I will admit that a new job & the jolt of being back in public has made it difficult to keep up with all of my goals of 2021 (anyone who hits all of their goals every year, teach me your ways), and one of the projects that kind of fell by the wayside was our Sunday Leftovers series.  Though I saw a lot of Hitchcock films this year, I still have twelve remaining so we will not have the synergy of me finishing Hitchcock's filmography completely this week with his final picture.  I will eventually get to those twelve remaining (non-lost) movies, but alas we will just have to chalk off my goal of finishing all of the Master of Suspense's greatest masterpieces a different day.  Today, we will bid adieu to Hitchcock, though we still have one more week left of star Barbara Harris, who continued making movies after they intersected on Family Plot.

(Spoilers Ahead) Our movie is focused on a couple, psychic impersonator Blanche Tyler (Harris) and her long-time boyfriend George (Dern) who are trying to find the long-lost nephew of a wealthy woman who is dying, and wants to give him her fortune before she dies.  Blanche & George try to track down this nephew, Edward (Devane) whom they originally assume is dead when George sees his grave, but they soon discover that he faked his own death and is living as Arthur Adamson.  He's doing this because he and his girlfriend Fran (Black) are involved in a criminal enterprise where they kidnap dignitaries and demand jewels as ransom.  These two intersect, with Edward & Fran assuming that Blanche & George are investigating them due to their involvement in crime, when in reality they are trying to give them a large sum of money (a classic Hitchcockian bit of black comedy).

Family Plot is good.  I think it gets a bit of a bad rap because it's Hitchcock's final film, and because it's not Vertigo (to be fair, few films are).  The movie is silly and occasionally the fun kind of twisty, but it probably needed a starrier cast to work better.  Black & Devane aren't able to pull their characters off the screen quite well enough, and in both cases we need them to pop more to make the contradiction to Harris/Dern's more fully-fledged romance feel sharper.  Harris is the best in show (though at this point, you have to question when is she not?), and John Williams taking up the baton from Bernard Herrmann (his only work with Hitchcock) works well as Williams has enough talent to make Family Plot's score standout.

Hitchcock would attempt to make one more picture, a spy film called The Short Night, that made it to pre-production but not much further (if you want to daydream, some of the stars considered for the film included Sean Connery, Clint Eastwood, Catherine Deneuve, and Liv Ullmann...I prefer the strange combination of Eastwood & Deneuve in terms of actors I think Hitchcock could've made magic with).  Both he and his wife Alma had a series of health problems, and while he made public appearances, they became less frequent.  Hitchcock was knighted in 1980, but was in so ill health he couldn't accept the designation from the Queen, and would die three months later.  We'll talk a little bit more about Hitchcock in a week when we do a recap of this season of Saturday with the Stars, but it's nice to know after Family Plot that he didn't end on a dour note, even if it wasn't also a triumphant one.  Next Saturday, we're going to conclude our month-long look at Barbara Harris when we see what happened beyond her brief period as a leading lady, and a movie where she'd star alongside an iconic blonde of an era beyond Hitchcock.