Hitch's Final Plot

A celebrated director’s final film is rarely his or her most shining moment; most don’t end their careers on as high a note as Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments). No one cites Charlie Chaplin’s A Countess from Hong Kong or Billy Wilder’s Buddy Buddy among those auteurs’ greatest triumphs. Alfred Hitchcock’s last film may not be among the very best for the Master of Suspense, but the years have been kind to it. Viewed today, it’s a highly entertaining cap to one of the most brilliant careers in cinema. 

Though Family Plot (1976) is not in a league with the Master’s prodigious catalog of masterpieces— including but not limited to Rebecca, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho and The Birds—it’s arguably as good as lesser efforts such as I Confess, Stage Fright, Torn Curtain and Marnie. Hitchcock’s swan song is at turns mystery adventure, psychological thriller and comedic romp. His penultimate film, 1972’s Frenzy, had featured no recognizable box-office stars in its cast, and its frank treatment of a British serial killer’s sexual perversions and violence was not an audience pleaser (though remarkably ahead of its time and now a cult classic). 

For Family Plot, Hitchcock returned to a more middlebrow, tried-and-true formula that includes charismatic stars, romance, dark humor and a diamond heist subplot as its de rigeuer “MacGuffin” to add some sparkle to the proceedings. (The MacGuffin is, of course, a plot device that acts as a catalyst for the protagonist’s journey, often unimportant to the overall storyline, used most famously and pointedly by Hitchcock.)

The wonderful Barbara Harris

Family Plot is dominated by a delightfully zany performance by the brilliantly quirky Barbara Harris (Freaky Friday, Nashville) as a phony psychic who sends her detective boyfriend (a surprisingly likeable Bruce Dern) on wild goose chase to find a missing heir and claim a $10,000 reward. Harris, a Method actor and stage veteran (On a Clear Day You Can See Forever)  whose star rose and burned briefly in the 1970s, is one of Hollywood’s forgotten stars now, but every film performance she gave us is a gem. This is no exception, and she displays real chemistry with Dern, better known for playing dark and troubled characters (Bloody Mama, Coming Home) but refreshing and winning here as a charming average Joe. (Dern had played a bit role in Hitchcock’s Marnie 10 years earlier.)

Barbara Harris and Bruce Dern

Cathleen Nesbitt (An Affair to Remember) is effective as the elderly spinster who sets the search for her long-lost nephew into motion. William Devane, a ubiquitous TV presence in the 70s and 80s, is appropriately oily and menacing as the avaricious kidnapper, jewel thief and cold-blooded murderer who turns out to be the one they’re all looking for. Reliable character actors like Ed Lauter (Thirteen Days, The Artist), Katherine Helmond (Soap, Brazil) and Marge Redmond (The Trouble with Angels) make the most of their somewhat oddball bit parts, giving the story dimension and color. 

Cathleen Nesbitt

Ed Lauter and Katherine Helmond

Also a standout is Karen Black as Devane’s paramour and partner in crime, who transforms herself into a mysterious blonde to aid him in his dastardly doings. (Note the tongue-in-cheek reference to the director’s own “Hitchcock blonde” motif.) Strangely, this final Hitchcock also happens to be one of Black’s last “A” pictures. After her star-making turn in Five Easy Pieces, she reached her career peak right here in the mid-’70s with performances in The Great Gatsby and Day of the Locust. But beginning with Airport ’75 and Trilogy of Terror, Black had already begun to slide into the abyss of the grand guignol, with more horror films to her credit than anything else. Her turn here as a Hitchcock femme fatale is a memorable one. 

Karen Black

William Devane and Karen Black

Harris, Black and Dern, exemplifying the “new breed” of 1970s actors, lend a contemporary edge to this basically old-fashioned film. (Harris and Black also appeared together in Altman’s masterpiece Nashville, and Dern acted opposite Black in The Great Gatsby.) In an attempt to be hip and current, a few four-letter words are thrown in, as well as humorous allusions to Harris’s and Dern’s spasmodic sex life. (They rock it on a waterbed, but alas, offscreen!) 

But of course, there are also moments of classic Hitchcock suspense...particularly the chilling sequence where Dern realizes his brakes have been tampered with as he and Harris careen down a mountaintop, and she claws at him for dear life. 

Hitch's last cast

Hitchcock was 75 when he directed Family Plot. He died just five years later, but lived to see Mel Brooks’s hilarious and affectionate spoof of his greatest films, High Anxiety (1977), which Brooks proudly showed to Hitchcock in a private screening. Hitchcock approved heartily, because, after all, in Hitch’s own words, “Every film I made was a comedy.” 

Hitchcockian Dopplegängers, De Palma-style

Brian de Palma’s obvious zeal for voyeurism reached its cinematic zenith in 1984’s Body Double, perhaps the director’s sexiest and most playful film. Written off as one of De Palma’s lesser efforts and mostly forgotten by today’s film audiences, Body Double combines comedy, romance and sex with suspense, thrills and gore.

It’s a titillating Hollywood story of success and failure, juxtaposing the fantastic wealth and luxury of Bel Air and Beverly Hills against the seamy and gritty reality of struggling actors and wannabes, prostitution and pornography. A glossy and seductive mystery punctuated by creative acts of kinky violence, Body Double takes the genre perfected by the original master of suspense and ups the ante under the aegis of an equally visionary auteur.

AA Lautner's futuristic treehouse provides the perfect vantage point for De Palma's voyeurism

Four years after Dressed to Kill, Brian de Palma was still deep in his “Hitchcock period,” and Body Double pays homage to two of Hitchcock’s best, Vertigo and Rear Window, both starring the redoubtable everyman James Stewart.

For Body Double, de Palma cast Craig Wasson, an unconventionally handsome and sensitive blond actor who was making a name for himself at the time, most notably in the 1980 thriller Ghost Story, where he starred opposite Hollywood legends including Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Fred Astaire and Melvyn Douglas. But in an era where pretty boy male ingenues like Tom Cruise and Michael J. Fox and overbuilt he-men like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone ruled the box office roost, Wasson never quite took off as a leading man. But here, he’s perfect...this is Wasson’s defining film.

Craig Wasson as Jake Scully

Like James Stewart’s Scotty in Vertigo, Wasson’s Jake suffers from a debilitating phobia, in this case a fear of confined spaces. An actor in a low-budget vampire movie, Jake is fired when he has a panic attack in his coffin during shooting. Dejectedly, he goes home, only to find his wife Carol in bed with another man. The camera lingers perversely on the lust-glutted expression on Carol’s face as she completes her orgasm even after being discovered by Jake.

Gregg Henry as Sam Bouchard

But things are looking up as Jake is befriended by Sam, a fellow student in his acting class, who offers him a place to stay....an incredible mid-century modern home in the hills with panoramic views of the city which Sam is housesitting for a rich friend. (Sam is played with smarmy charm by Gregg Henry, now a regular on the TV series Scandal.)  All Jake has to do is water the plants...and enjoy the view with the help of a powerful telescope. There are more fringe benefits to the arrangement: an eye-filling show through the window of a neighboring mansion, where the beautiful lady of the house does a slow striptease and sensual dance ending in self-gratification. Nightly.

In an extended sequence where Jake follows the woman on her errands, De Palma takes a familiarly suspenseful Hitchcockian mood and makes it his own. Not only does Jake spy on the woman while she shops for lingerie on Rodeo Drive; he even peeps into her dressing room as she tries on panties and is almost detained by security. Finally, the pair meet. Mystery, murder and mayhem follow in inimitable De Palma style.  

Deborah Shelton as Gloria Revelle

The flat-voiced Deborah Shelton, perhaps trying to imitate Kim Novak’s throaty whisper from Vertigo, is a perfect fantasy for Wasson’s character, with her curvy Playboy-ready physique and diaphanous designer clothes...until she opens her mouth to speak. Then she’s as wooden as a Rodeo Collection mannequin.

Melanie Griffith as Holly Body

Performance-wise, the film belongs to Melanie Griffith, who sparkles as porn star Holly Body. This underrated actress was truly the Judy Holliday of the 1980s, and her infectious laugh, baby-doll delivery and unerringly instinctive sense of timing inject this thriller with a dose of irreverent fun not found in most De Palma films. Griffith’s Holly is particularly amusing in her adult film pas de deux with Jake, with her deadpan delivery of bad porn movie dialogue:

HOLLY

You like to watch?

JAKE

Yeah.

HOLLY

Makes you hot, doesn’t it?

JAKE

Yeah.

HOLLY

Makes me hot, too.

Tightly plotted, with a satisfying climactic twist, so beloved to 1980s thrillers, Body Double is an absorbing film and includes all the sex and over-the-top bloody gore that De Palma fans demand. Lovers of 1980s nostalgia will also appreciate the MTV-like music video sequence featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s sexy megahit “Relax,”  which for me is enough to elevate this visually stimulating horror movie to high camp.