I told you about danger, didn't I? First it makes you sick, then when you get through it, it makes you very, very loving.

Every review (contemporary or otherwise) of Family Plot refers to it as a "lesser work" of Hitchcock's, and my reaction both immediately after watching it and now, a few weeks later, is largely the same: it is no North by Northwest or Rear Window, both of which felt so obviously like they had not only invented a genre but mastered it in the making.

Family Plot, if it can be said to have invented anything, feels like a spiritual predecessor to the Coen brothers' early ouevre: tragicomic, centered around a crime and a misunderstanding, pitting the foolish and naive yet goodhearted against the evil yet fallible. Karen Black and Bruce Dern could have been the protagonists of Fargo; their performance, both individuals and as a team, is lovely (as is William Devane, who I'd never seen in this phase of his career.)

It's a fun film, but once the puzzle box of "how are all of these people going to run into each other?" is solved, it feels a little bit like the back third of a Sudoku puzzle: satisfying in its own right, sure, but not something you'll look back on with amity and awe.

If you want to get schmaltzy ^[1], though, I think there's a certain symbolic richness in Hitchcock's final directorial scene being as cute as this film's ending, a literal wink to the audience. You know, he says, that I hid this diamond myself: but I kept you guessing, and I kept your faith alive for as long as I saw fit.

★★★