Family Plot (Alfred Hitchcock, 1976)

Is this a controversial film among auteurists? I would assume that diehard Hitchcock fans would argue that Family Plot is appropriately valedictory, showing the old master in a much looser, playful mood, manipulating the tropes of the genre he virtually invented. There are mysteries, MacGuffins, double-crosses, and the like, and Hitchcock plays them like a charming old melody, comforting in its familiarity. Of course, this is a matter of opinion, in the sense that the lack of effort the director shows here can also seem sloppy and tired, like the final season of an athlete who probably should have already retired.

Sadly, I find myself holding the latter view. Family Plot doesn't really work on either a formal or a narrative level, even though it's fairly obvious throughout what it's trying to do. Two story threads unspool and eventually intersect, resulting not just in suspicion and violence but outright confusion. The narrative engine of Family Plot is a misunderstanding that proves meaningless in the end, which I suppose could be thematically pertinent. Once certain decisions are set in motion, there is no hope of reversing them, despite the best intentions.

Then again, no one in this film is particularly noble. Fake psychic Blanche (Barbara Harris) and her cab driver boyfriend George (Bruce Dern) are trying to find the long-lost heir to the fortune of one Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt), to collect a $10,000 finders' fee. The heir, Arthur Adamson -- formerly Eddie Showbridge (William Devane) is a wanted man, a kidnapper and jewel thief who assumes that Blanche and George are hunting him down because of his crimes. Fran (Karen Black), Arthur's girlfriend, is his reluctant but pliable accomplice. 

It takes about half the film for all of this to really get going, and during that time Hitchcock alternates between Arthur and Fran tediously executing their heists, and Blanche and George quarreling over their own low-level scam. Harris and Dern, I think, are supposed to be funny. Blanche grunts and moans, pretending to receive guidance through the afterlife by a spirit named "Henry;" George does a lousy job of gathering information by posing as an attorney.

The script, adapted by North by Northwest screenwriter Ernest Lehman, doesn't really cover its bases. Why does George insist on smoking his pipe wherever he goes, when it makes his identity evident from a distance? When Maloney (Ed Lauter) is trying to run George and Blanche down, why don't they get off the road and run up the hill? Why does Arthur slip a gun in Fran's purse, when it's never used or even referenced again? Are we supposed to be amused, or even charmed, by the fact that Hitchcock resolves the plot with the deus ex machina of Blanche's psychic abilities? What was the backstory on Shoebridge's parents, who he murdered in a fire? Was he abused? Or just a bad seed, gone unaccountably evil once he was separated from his true family? And what's with the goofy, Pynchonesque surnames?

I don't want to come off like CinemaSins or some nitpicky bullshit like that, but these aspects of Family Plot bothered me because it's so cinematically average. The John Williams score, for example, is almost a Bernard Hermann parody, the jagged strings dropped in to goose some otherwise unspectacular scenes of driving in the mountains. And while I'm sure that the muddy cinematography looked much better projected in 35mm, the lackluster look of the film -- tans and tweeds and shadowed reds -- is comparable to any random 1970s TV movie of the week, or an episode of "Quincy, M.E." Rarely has Technicolor been so wasted.

But it's hard to know if any of this even matters. Throughout Family Plot, Hitchcock frequently signals to the viewer that we are indeed watching some kind of cracking thriller. At the same time, Family Plot seems to suggest that Hitchcock is parodying himself, offering some sort of lighthearted auto-critique. Is this a film about exhaustion, the untenable position of Hitchcock within the New American Cinema of the seventies? Is it a consideration of the blandness of contemporary Hollywood, the urban poetry of Vertigo replaced by a generic, cobbled-together "California"? Is it perhaps a consideration of the co-presence of humor and danger in our lives, Hitchcock himself laughing in the face of his own mortality?

Or is it just a sad, dull misfire?