Alfred Hitchcock (1976)

Hitchcock’s last picture and very poor it is too.  Of course it has its place in history just because it was his swansong but I don’t know if his inveterate admirers cherish it for other reasons.  (Fans of particular directors have been known to claim their late works as distinctively brilliant:  in the hope of disarming criticism that the films betray a serious loss of energy and are hopelessly inferior to the master’s best work, the ardent supporters will say they show a supremely confident and playful command of the medium.)  Family Plot, adapted by Ernest Lehman from a Victor Canning novel called The Rainbird Pattern (a more attractive title), seems meant to be fleet-footed and light-hearted but it’s rather clumsy and tediously arch.  The main characters – a fake medium, her con-artist taxi-driver partner, a murderer/kidnapper/jewel thief and his repeatedly disguised sidekick-girlfriend – may sound promising on paper; and the people playing them – Barbara Harris, Bruce Dern, William Devane and Karen Black respectively – are probably all better actors than many of those Hitchcock used in some of his more famous pictures.  The trouble is that none of them has a transcendent star personality to fall back on and, except for Harris, they don’t have a lot of charm either.  (Harris’s sham psychic routines are entertaining – putting on voices, peeping furtively through her fingers to check if her client is watching.)

And the plot just isn’t inventive or fast-moving enough to compensate.  Ernest Lehman, in the only other screenplay he wrote for Hitchcock, gave him the wherewithal for one of his finest films, North by Northwest, so it’s all the more regrettable that he’s so far from repeating the magic here (especially in view of what seem very clear nods to North by Northwest in a sequence which includes a dizzying car ride, a threatening dusty, empty road and the medium and her man being threatened by a distant automobile relation of the crop duster).  There are sequences needed to move the plot forward – the title’s double meaning also refers to a burial plot – which are so feebly unconvincing that you wonder if the whole thing is a spoof of comedy-thriller mechanics.  Yet the film has no life on that level either – and the music by John Williams, although it sounds like pastiche Hitchcock, isn’t as enjoyable as the real thing (which, in Bernard Herrmann’s best scores, usually had a strong streak of humour anyway).  With Cathleen Nesbitt, Ed Lauter and Katherine Helmond.

30 March 2010