Family Plot (1976)

12/29/06

So with the final of Hitchcocks films we come to the final entry in my series on the 15-disc Hitchcock DVD set. Family Plot is a fairly complicated film structeraly, there are infact two storylines, one more prominate then the other, that come to intersect towards the movies end. The primary storyline follows a sham psychic played by Barbara Harris. This 'psychic', whose name is Blanch, is hired by the eldery Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) to track down her late sisters illegitament son, who was secreted off as a baby to avoid tainting the prominate family with scandel. Blanch relies on her lover George (Bruce Dern), a cabdriver and want-to-be actor, to conduct the leg work in the search for the by now fourty-something heir.

The second storyline concerns the heir, only he dosn't know he came from wealth, in fact he's a thief. Raised as a Shoebridge, but having long gone by the alias of Adamson, this character (played by the great William Devane) and his wife and/or lover Fran (Karen Black) have recently begun to supliment their income by holding important people hostage for diamonds. So when Adamson and Fran discover that some unknown party is trying to trake them down, they just asume it's becasue of their crimanel activites, and try to have them put off or bumped off. The screenplay was adapted by North by Northwest scrib Ernest Lehman, from a book by Victor Canning. After work was done on this film, Hitchcock had work begun on a screenplay for his next project, which was to have been called The Short Night. Unfortunatly work on that project was later called off by Hitchcock on account of his old age, Alfred Hitchcock then passed away in the spring of 1980.

Note: In the corse of the film it is reveled that the burial expanses for Adamsons adoptive parents were payed by something called: 'Christ Church of the Latter-day Saints'. This is but one of the suposedly 'Mormon themes' that crops up in Family Plot, and was explored this last summer in a presentation given at the annual Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City.