THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
PAST MASTER THE SCREN As in previous films, so in Family Plot, Alfred Hitchcock makes a signature appearance during one of the early scenes. A silhouette standing behind the frosted glass in an...
...On our first encounter with Blanche, she is altering her voice like a ventriloquist in order to delude a client into believing she hears a voice from the dead...
...Likewise, as Arthur and Fran later kidnap a bishop right out from under the noses of his congregation, they notice George in the back of the church, where he's waiting only because Blanche's client happened to mention the bishop's name once...
...The sort of virtuosity of the direction that has made many other Hitchcock films unique just doesn't occur this time...
...But Arthur continually tries to elude George's and Blanche's approaches because he thinks they are on to his kidnapping racket Family Plot embodies the relationship between the two couples in a series of chance meetings where the attention of the camera itself switches from one couple to the other...
...She sits across a small living room, as erect and nervously alert as a mouse in a box with a snake...
...In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), for instance, a sweet, small-town girl (Teresa Wright) almost becomes the victim of her own namesake, a favorite uncle (Joseph Cotten) who is a cosmopolitan bluebeard...
...Reluctantly she surrenders a word, a nod of affirmation or denial, an oblique reference, but nothing more...
...At one point, during a chase scene, we think the film has truly come alive at last...
...In Family Plot, no equivalent resource of technique maker the characters matter to us in a comparable way...
...If she would only say, Look, here's what's been going on, here's who's responsible, and taged the car tries to run them down sis they make their w,ay on foot from the wreckage...
...Unfortunately, the appearance is an apt one too, for it is as a mere shadow of bis former self that we see Hitchcock in this movie...
...No doubt homicide detectives, counter-intelligence agents and other professional interrogators occasionally feel this way, too, the difference being that they are normally so insulated from inquiry themselves they can go right ahead and do it...
...She doesn't know...
...The other couple is Fran (Karen Black) and Arthur (William Devane...
...The discordant fact is that she, herself, is in a position to ensure all those things will happen...
...In the new film there are two couples who mirror each other...
...Since Hitchcock's movies have always made a morbid joke of death in order to fend off his own fear of it, he may have intended such a joke here in his appearance as a shadow, a disembodied shade...
...These manipulated images are what give Psycho its power both to terrify and delight, but Family Plot doesn't accumulate imagery like this with which to affect us...
...But it doesn't...
...A silhouette standing behind the frosted glass in an office door has, we suddenly realize, that unmistakable Hitchcock profile...
...It's one thing to be put off by someone who is a genuine adversary...
...As a rule the pairing is between a criminal and his victim, the former reflecting the latter through a kind of perversion much as the devil does God...
...In Psycho a whole series of shots of circular forms blinding headlights, a peephole in a wall, water swirling down a toilet, a spraying shower nozzle, a tub drain, etc...
...A typical scene in the movie takes place with a secretary for the Committee to Re-Elect the President...
...He has been especially fascinated' with the way in which the guiltiness of two characters might coincide...
...invites himself into her house for a cup of coffee...
...While Blanche commits her crime by speaking in a variety of voices, Fran commits hers by aot speaking at all The two couples are DoppelgSngers, however, by virtue of pursuing not only nefarious careers, but each other as well...
...She is a spiritualist and medium who bilks clients with fake revelations from the dead, and he is a part-time cabby who does her research for her...
...What has turned us on is a. similarity to Cary Grant's pursuit by an airplane in North by Northwest, which was also scripted by Family Plot's screenwriter, Ernest Lehman...
...On our first encounter with Fran, she is collecting a ransom from some men to whom she says nothing in order to prevent their being able to identify her...
...Since at least as long ago as Murder (1930), Hitchcock's films have tended toward plots that contain Doppelgangers pairs of characters whose lives and actions mirror each other in some curious way...
...The outline is recognizable, but there isn't any of that detail which can make a Hitchcock film great Certainly the concerns that shape Family Plot are familiar ones in a Hitchcock movie...
...I kept thinking about this throughout All the Presidents Men, in which Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, .playing Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, ask frightened secretaries artful questions and receive terrified answers...
...In Family Plot, a seance Blanche conducts with an old woman puts George on the track of the woman's long-lost heir, who is of course Arthur...
...In Shadow of a Doubt Hitchcock's long shots done from a boom isolate the heroine at just those moments when some increased certainty of her uncle's crimes has further isolated her from her family...
...Along with everything else in Family Plot, its best moments come off only as the ghost of Hitchcock past COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JK...
...It's a similarity that is only plot deep, too...
...Compared to Hitchcock's best work, Family Plot is indeed a silhouette...
...He wants to throw down his notebook, bare his teeth, grab somebody by the shirt collar and shake him till his eyes roll...
...After Blanche and George have had a harrowing crash in a car with loosened brakes, the confederate of Arthur's who saboThere comes a moment when a reporter can't stand it any longer...
...Whereas Arthur and Fran steal victims away from their loved ones, Blanche and George restore loved ones to their victims...
...The potential for such effects is there, but it remains only a potential, family Plot stays nothing more than a plot a plot of the sort sympathetic to Hitchcock's art, but one into which Hitchcock has not really insinuated himself...
...The agony of that movie for me for two hours I felt like I was trying to thread a needle in a twilit room was that furious frustration which comes with receiving one empty or evasive answer after another...
...He is an expensive jeweler with a sideline in kidnapping, and she is his mistress-accomplice...
...As George drives Blanche back from the seance in the opening scene, they are so engrossed in discussing how to find the missing heir that George's cab nearly hits a pedestrian, who turns out to be Fran on her way to collect a ransom...
...You don't expect people to impeach themselves, and it doesn't bother you when they don't...
...The joke would be so much richer, though, if the film itself had more substance...
...Hoffman...
...The Doppelganger premise here is classic Hitchcock...
...Hitchcock establishes the reciprocity the first time we meet the heroines...
...All this crossing over and double-crossing makes for a pleasant spoof, but a strictly conventional one...
...The painful thing, for a reporter, is to be refused an answer for no good reason at all, from sheer cussedness or timidity...
...In Psycho (1960), for example, it is just a coincidence that the motel owner (Anthony Perkins) kills a guest (Janet Leigh) who has herself committed a crime, and die investigation of her crime leads to the discovery of Ms...
...He wants to shout and turn red and shock his victim into an abject state of trembling fear in which everything he knows will come pouring out without further coy or timid prevarication...
...A few minutes into the sequence, though, we realize that our enjoyment is as much the work of deja vu as anything...
...Every time these people chance upon each other like this, somebody disappears first Fran getting away clean from collecting her ransom, then the bishop being kidnapped, and now Blanche being kidnapped too just when she thinks she's doing Arthur a good turn...
...But she won't talk...
...She hopes Hoffman will find out all about it, that he will publish what he learns, that the wrongdoers will be undone...
...Finally, when Blanche tracks down Arthur at home he ignores her knock because he's just getting ready to collect the ransom for the bishop, but as he opens his garage door Blanche happens to be standing outside blocking his car as Fran blocked George's cab at the crosswalk earlier...
...She does not approve of what has been going on down at CREEP...
...What plots involving DoppelgSngers obviously afford an opportunity for is coincidence, and that is what Hitchcock has always exploited in them...
...Reporters must close their eyes, breathe deeply, bring their breaking voices under control and try putting the question another way...
...culminates in the murder scene in a tight close-up of the victim's dead, visionless eye...
...The first is Blanche (Barbara Harris) and George (Bruce Dern...
...His health is not good, and he may have figured that this film, which is his fifty-third, will be his last...
Vol. 103 • May 1976 • No. 10
