FAMILY PLOT (67)

Directed by: Alfred Hitchcock (1976)

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

The Pitch: The lives of two couples intersect when a fake medium takes on the job of finding an old woman's long-lost heir.

Theo Sez: Second viewing (after many years) for Hitchcock's final film, and it's alarming how much of the plot I'd forgotten - though not, perhaps, overly surprising, for it builds to dismayingly little after a fine, mysterious opening (there's something very modern - or at least very 90s - about the way it follows first one set of characters then the other, veering off from one to another via a chance encounter a la SLACKER). That the action sequences are unconvincing hardly matters - the main attraction, for the viewer and (obviously) for the director as well, lies in the careful, almost mathematical set-ups, the sense of characters controlled by forces greater than themselves ; Hitchcock just sits back and observes (most obviously in details like the God's-eye shot in the cemetery, tracing the paths of Dern and the woman he's pursuing as they get closer and closer, and finally meet), clearly enjoying himself. What does matter is the way the film gradually loses its edge, making one couple increasingly villainous and the other increasingly likeable, turning bland and conventional. The obvious sting in the tail would be for the couples to realise they have more to gain by working together as criminals and charlatans than for the police to be called in and crime to be punished ; but that doesn't even seem to have occurred to anyone.