Why Hitchock's "Family Plot" 1976 is so kosher?

  Blender Dumbass
October 06, 2025

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#FamilyPlot #AlfredHitchcock #movies #film #review #cinemastodon

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Alfred Hitchcock is known to be a hell of a filmmaker at the time of the code. When everybody were required to be kosher, Hitch found every loophole in the rule book to get us exciting stuff. He was able to make sexy and violent psycho-sexual thrillers when sex and violence were not allowed. His final film, 1976 Family Plot was already shot during the MPAA rating system. Other filmmakers like Brian De Palma took the thrown the master of the macabre. So what does Hitch do? He does the safest, most PG movie of his career.

The film starts with some rather surreal John Williams score, and a 41 year old Barbara Harris who looks 20 that pretends ( rather obviously ) to be in touch with spirits of the other world. We as the audience understand that she is making shit up. Yet this old lady is totally and utterly buying her bullshit. The film has a rather fun comedic irony scene which leads us to the plot of the film. This woman wants her help ( or the help of the dead people she "can" communicate with ) to find a son of her long dead sister. For which she is willing to pay quite a sum of money.

Our duo of heroes that embark on a rather real-life investigation are the aforementioned Barbara Harris as Blanche Tyler and an actor you may know from some recent Quentin Tarantino work Bruce Dern as George Lumley. She is a professional spiritualist pretender and he is a cab driver, but he also helps her ( who appears to be his wife or something, maybe just a girlfriend ) to research the cases that she pretends later to read from the ether. And therefor he goes on to try to find that mysterious man of theirs.

Bruce and Barbara in this movie are a comedic genius of a duo. Bruce Dern plays this absolutely amateur motherfucker. He gets into the silliest of troubles. And yet somehow he always gets away unharmed. Which is not a skill. He is just lucky or something. Barbara Harris plays this... I don't know how to describe it...

The same fucking year as this movie was made, De Palma made Carrie. And yet this does not feel like the same year. Carrie is this ultra sexy violent tale. While Family Plot is so Kosher, I can't believe it. He's got probably the best looking 41 year old in the entire world and what he does with her? He puts her into more cloths than what Carrie's mother wears in Carrie.

Despite that extreme Kosherness though Barbara Harris steals every second of the film. She isn't per se acting good. She isn't trying to win an Oscar or anything. But she is really fucking fun to watch. She's got that charisma to her that makes her look very eye-catching. Like, first of all, she is like very fucking cute, and then she is also this very fun character. From the very first scene of the movie I started liking this woman a lot. And she didn't stop being very enjoyable till the very end of the film.

The writing of the movie is very plot heavy. A lot of it is people solving a mystery. But then you learn that the guy they are looking for doesn't want to be found. Which creates a lot of dramatic ( and comedic ) irony. The film is full of absurd coincidences ( which I find very fun actually ). Like for example, the main characters almost, by mistake, run over the girlfriend of the guy they are looking for in the very beginning of the film. The film uses it to do a scene transition. But in a way it is a stupid coincidence that is there only for irony's sake.

Hitchcock directs the movie a bit old-fashionably, even for the 70s standards. The film feels like a movie from the 50s. Maybe the 60s. Compared to the exciting cinema people like De Palma, Scorsese and even Steven Spielberg were doing at the time, this film is very basic. Basic, but not terrible. It is still an Alfred Hitchcock movie, so it is directed very to the point and very confidently. The film has a sense that you are in good hands when watching it. But some stuff may look strangely out of time.

For example, the driving scenes are obviously fake. They don't look like it is rear projection. They look like they are composited. Which is interesting. But this kind of look indicates old-timyness. In the 70s, the shots inside the cars already started to become real. Or at the very least they tried to hide the fact that they were fake. A good example would be Steven Spielberg's little 1973 TV movie Savage, where Steve is using a very dynamic camera on rear projection car shots, to hide the fact that those are rear projection shots, and to induce the scene with Spielbergesque momentum. Yet in 1976 Alfred Hitchcock just doesn't give a damn.

There is one very funny car scene. It's not a chase scene. The bad guys broke the brakes on the car of the protagonists. It could have been an exciting little action scene. No... Hitchcock doesn't give a damn. He has way too many giggles up his ass. He shoots the whole ordeal in 2 setups. We have generically fake cockpit shots of the two actors going insane inside of the car ( all of them shot from the same angle, because I doubt Hitchcock cared for any more than one angle of this nonsense ). And then this stuff is inter-cut with over-cranked footage of the road. Not even the car on the road. Just the road itself. The scene is sort of tense, in a way. But it's way more hilarious than tense. And yeah, the characters were drinking before driving this car, which makes the whole thing very fucking stupid ( in a good way ).

The John Williams score is good. Like what did you expect. It's John fucking Williams. Though he is trying to please Hitchcock who doesn't give a damn. And that results in some rather strange music. Like the music itself is funny to listen to. There are of course moments of absolute magic, which John Williams really knows how to do, but on the whole even the music is silly in this movie.

The rumor goes that Hitchcock was recommended to hire John Williams after what Williams did on Jaws ( by Steven Spielberg ). Now that is an interesting thing.

It is known that Steven Spielberg was a huge fanboy of Alfred Hitchcock. And yet he never properly met Hitch. Even with John Williams working on a Hitchcock movie, Spielberg still didn't get a chance to meet Hitchcock. The only possible story of a "meeting" between the two ( which I read in Spielberg's biography by Joseph McBride ) is that Steven, when he wasn't yet working as a director, one day was able to snick around the Universal studio lots. And got to see, from a far, how Hitchcock sets up a shot. Hitchcock noticed Spielberg. Noticed that he doesn't know him. And asked his managers to kick Steven the fuck out his set.

Then in the 70s Steven makes the hardest movie in his career ( Jaws ) for which, not he, but his composer is gonna, not just meet Hitchcock, but work with him. That gotta suck. I mean he probably was excited about it anyway. And probably smuggled some stories out of Williams about Hitchcock. But damn it is a shame.

And Brian De Palma is like "my turn to use John Williams, thank you... Also your girlfriend comes with me too... see ya later Steve..." and he makes The Fury. Is there anything I was trying to say about it? I lost my thought half way into writing it...

I think I've got giggles up my ass from this movie. Alfred Hitchcock didn't make his usual film. But he made a hell of an experience of a movie. If anything, it is a cool little movie. It's just I suppose Alfred didn't want to make a movie, per se, but a piece of art that puts giggles up other people's asses.

Happy Hacking!!!


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  Troler c:0


There are two men, one is a Hitchcock, he is the cinema legend and there is Hitchock, he made Family Plot in 1976 and no one has ever heard of him since.

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