Authors: Patrick McGilligan
Nesbitt was cast as the elderly Julia Rainbird, who in Canning’s novel is seeking her deceased sister’s lost child, now a grown adult. Hitchcock told writer Joseph McBride that he had managed to sneak a little of his beloved
Mary Rose
—with a quintessential James Barrie actress—into his fifty-third film. In the first scene of
Family Plot
, Blanche would hold a séance with Mrs. Rainbird, who is guilt-ridden for having forced her sister to abandon an illegitimate baby forty years earlier. “Julia tells her sister’s ghost,” wrote McBride, “in words that could have been addressed to Mary Rose, ‘If he’s still alive, I’ll find your son, and I’ll take him in my arms and love him as if I were you.’ ”
There had been many grand dames in Hitchcock films over the years; Nesbitt was destined to be the last and most sympathetic, and her acting gave Hitchcock inestimable pleasure.
By the end of their collaboration, Hitchcock was no longer meeting—or even speaking—with Ernest Lehman. Instead the two wrote messages back and forth “almost on a daily basis,” in Lehman’s words. Why? The writer had been banished from the lot and the director’s bungalow. “It’s too difficult to get Ernie to agree with me,” Hitchcock told a studio executive.
Hitchcock had insisted on purging almost everything from Victor Canning’s book that seemed—at least to Lehman—Hitchcockian. Evil never had triumphed in a Hitchcock film, as it did in the second half of Canning’s novel; so the second half of the book was simply jettisoned. The clairvoyant and her offbeat boyfriend became increasingly comic characters. Blanche’s spiritual detection became a con game. The police detection, a crucial component of the novel, was completely marginalized; Hitchcock, at the end of his career, just didn’t care about police, or even about punishing villains. Blanche, Lumley, Mrs. Rainbird, the Trader, and his wife are all slain violently in the novel; at the end of the film they’re all alive and well. (Only one minor character dies.) Even the
Mary Rose
conceit grew so faint as to become, finally, almost irrelevant. “Hitchcock largely was content to treat the subject of occultism as an oddball jeu d’sprit,” wrote Joseph McBride, “rather than the artistic testament
Mary Rose
might have been.”
Reality, long an elaborate contrivance with Hitchcock anyway, was thrown out along with the book. British accents and quaint phrases like “village parson” would coexist in the film alongside hippie-era actors. In the end the director even shrank from San Francisco, saying he was tired of
Bullitt-type
car chases in the hilly city, so the Americanized settings of
Family Plot
became generic California scenes—part San Francisco, part Los Angeles.
The film was still called “Alfred Hitchcock’s Deceit” when it began shooting on May 12, 1975.
Not much filming got done that first day, however, for the studio threw a luncheon to introduce the cast and director, attended by dozens of journalists and critics. The luncheon was staged in a cemetery erected on the back lot, where each guest could read his (or her) name on a tombstone. “The reporters asked Hitchcock all the old questions,” reported the
Los Angeles Times
, “so that he might respond with all the old answers.”
“Hitchcock’s 53rd” felt like the most publicized film since
Gone With the Wind.
Correspondents visited the set from all over the United States and around the globe, representing everything from major media outlets to small, elite film journals. On the schedule the first week—and once a week—was an 11:15
A.M.
pacemaker phone call to UCLA. The journalists not only got interviews; they usually got Hitchcock lifting his shirt and displaying the scar of what François Truffaut called his miraculous “medical gadget.”
The interviewers gaped at the scar—and deferred to the legend, who handled the press with the usual aplomb. “He had all [his] answers worked out,” unit publicist Charles Lippincott recalled, “and made it seem like fresh material. He was a terrific actor.”
Now and then Mrs. Hitchcock materialized on the set, and even she cooperated with a few interviews. “I suppose it’s my own background in silent cinema, where a big crew was eight or nine, but I don’t find it so enjoyable with sixty people around,” Alma told one journalist. “I always find myself visualizing the finished films from Hitch’s scripts before he starts shooting, and then I like to stay away until the rough cut to see how far my visualization corresponds with the film itself.”
With his every move monitored by doctors, studio officials, and the press, Hitchcock was on his best behavior, drinking only moderately and then only at the end of the day. Most of the production took place on Universal soundstages; except between shots, when he hid out in his trailer—sometimes giving interviews, sometimes napping—Hitchcock seemed on constant display.
Right from the outset, he was openly irritated by Roy Thinnes, whom he mistakenly introduced as Roy Scheider (wishful thinking!) at the first-day press gala. Thinnes had sent him a letter with little ideas for his character (one was that the Trader ought to have perpetual shaving nicks on his face). Subsequently, Hitchcock found fault with Thinnes’s performance. After filming the kidnapping of the bishop on location in San Francisco
in early June, he decided the actor lacked strength in the part. He fired Thinnes and rushed another actor into the role, reshooting most of Thinnes’s completed scenes. (Hedging from day one, though, Hitchcock had staged some of the action from behind Thinnes’s back.)
*
He chose William Devane as his new Trader. Devane might be considered Hitchcock’s last stroke of countercasting, having risen to prominence playing President John F. Kennedy in the television miniseries
The Missiles of October;
Devane would play the Trader with a constant duplicitous smirk—like Kennedy with Nixon’s smile. (Ironically, though, Devane proved no less annoying than Thinnes, for the new Trader was another Method actor with endless questions about his motivation.)
Although people had cautioned Hitchcock against Barbara Harris, he had more trouble with Karen Black, fighting the actress’s temptation to tinker with her disguise, look her attractive self, and be more likable in her role. “Hitch chewed her out,” recalled publicist Lippincott. “‘Miss Black,’ he said, ‘You are
bad
in this movie and you are to remember that from now on. I don’t want you trying to change your character.’ That was it, short and to the point.”
John Russell Taylor, covering the production for the
London Times
, reported that Black seemed a different actress after the encounter from the one he had watched a year earlier during the making of
The Day of the Locust.
“There, in tune with the atmosphere of the production as a whole, she was playful, extrovert, kooky, and from time to time temperamental,” Taylor observed. “Here, she is staid, deferential, eagerly concentrating on the purely technical problems of fitting into a staged action, referring to Hitchcock, rather like a good little girl who hopes for an approving pat on the head from her teacher.”
At times Black got more than a pat. The actress insisted in subsequent interviews that Hitchcock ended up liking her so much that one day he impulsively gave her a kiss, thrusting his tongue into her mouth. “He was an exuberant spirit,” she said. “I think he probably was born an exuberant spirit, and that’s why he French-kissed me. He felt like it.”
The two performers Hitchcock clearly liked best, however, were playing the characters he liked best. After shaking hands with all the principals on the first day of filming, he also gave Barbara Harris—who appeared scared—a buss on the cheek. As he did so, he whispered, “Barbara,
I’m
scared. Now go and act. Many are called but few are frozen.” When Hitchcock noticed the actress still trembling, he ordered some brandy for her teacup.
Whenever Harris had trouble with a scene, she asked his advice. “All his suggestions would be very good and to the point and unconfusing,” she recalled in one interview. “I call it Brechtian-type directing. Because he sees a scene, not so much for the subjective emotional intent that he’s interested in, but what the scene is about. In the cab scene, I didn’t know if I was supposed to be a sex-starved girl with my boyfriend, or what. He said it was a business scene. So then I became a businesswoman. Which is a Brechtian idea. Brecht would say, ‘Well, what would Hamlet be like in the kitchen with the servants?’ ”
Hitchcock’s other favorite was Bruce Dern. “Hours the two spent together,” according to
Rolling Stone
, “Hitchcock telling him stories.” Dern could be counted on to laugh at the director’s jokes and jolly him along with his own banter. “I got to jack him up a little,” Dern reported. “Get him ready for the day. He’s bored with the whole fucking thing.”
When Hitchcock was “feeling better,” said Dern, “there was no one better on the set. He noticed everything—a shadow on a performer’s face, a bad angle for a prop, a few seconds too long on a take. Just when we thought he had no idea what was going on, he’d snap us all to attention with the most incredible awareness of some small but disastrous detail that nobody would have noticed until it got on screen. And then he’d be bored again.”
But when Hitchcock was feeling uncommunicative, or when he’d made up his mind about something, even the favorites could find him inflexible. “It’s frustrating sometimes,” Dern complained in an interview, “because you say, ‘Let me do another take on that, I didn’t go deep enough.’ And he says, ‘Bruuuuuce, they’ll never know in Peoria.’ ”
Throughout the filming, Hitchcock’s fifty-third continued to favor light over darkness. One planned highlight was the sequence that starts with Blanche (Harris) and Lumley (Dern) arriving to meet the Trader’s henchman at a mountain roadside diner. They order beer and hamburgers. The diner is deserted except for a priest and his small catechism class. The henchman doesn’t show up; Blanche and Lumley don’t notice him outside, sabotaging their car.
Afterward, driving down the high, winding mountain road, they discover that their brakes have been disabled. Lumley, who is driving, frantically tries to keep his grip on the wheel as a hysterical Blanche grabs and climbs all over him. The screeching around curves and lurching back and forth are made worse by the fact that both have had too much beer, and Blanche, for one, feels like throwing up. The actors were encouraged to wildly embroider the humor. It was the silliest comedy of Hitchcock’s career—a slapstick replay of the Corniche chase in
To Catch a Thief
—and in the film he allows it to go on … and on.
Gregg Kilday was on location—a dirt turnoff on a bend of the Angeles Crest Highway—for the filming that day, and watched Hitchcock shoot
parts of the scene. Hitchcock told Harris to go ahead and step on Dern’s face. “It’s a twisted mouth that we are playing for,” he said. As Kilday noted in his account for the
Los Angeles Times
, although the scene had been storyboarded, Hitchcock egged the actors on, and incorporated their ideas.
After their car finally crashes, “I want them to climb out of the top of the car and slither down,” Hitchcock told Leonard South, indicating where the camera should be positioned.
“I can crawl out like a worm” from under the car, Dern volunteered, and Hitchcock liked that image. “That’s good, Bruce, very good,” he responded, telling the cameraman to change the shot.
“As the sequence progresses,” wrote Kilday, “Hitchcock even allows Dern to invent a piece of business. Free of the car, the actor and actress walk back toward the deserted road. Approaching a bit of rough ground, Dern picks Harris up and carries her the rest of the way.
“Watching the scene,” Kilday mused in his article, “one can easily imagine the analysis that even such a tiny gesture will eventually receive. For when Hitchcock is working at top form, his films contain few, if any extraneous movements. Every camera angle, every action takes on a special significance. ‘Each shot is like a line in a novel. It says something,’ Hitchcock insists. Clearly, the director has his reasons for instructing Barbara Harris to step on Bruce Dern’s face. Does Dern’s carrying Harris then also contribute to that meaning?
“The master does little to encourage such speculation.”
By the end, it was Harris’s and Dern’s film all the way. Hitchcock didn’t even give the Trader and his wife a reaction shot after Blanche and Lumley slam the door on them in the basement—one last Hitchcock film to end with a cell door clanging. “The weakness of the villain was responsible for the weakness of the picture,” Truffaut noted after Hitchcock’s death—but it was also the director’s weakness for the pair who made him chuckle.
In the film’s coda, Lumley wonders where the missing diamonds are. Blanche consults her muse; then, to his surprise, she wafts into the atelier and halfway up the stairs, slowly whirling to stab her finger at gems glittering in the chandelier. Turning to face the camera, Blanche then does something as remarkable as proving her psychic prowess: she winks.
This final shot of the final Hitchcock film was the “main difference of opinion” between the director and Ernest Lehman, according to John Russell Taylor. After arguing about it at every stage, Hitchcock wrote the ultimate variation himself, and “submitted it to Lehman, listened to his objections (mainly that the medium is shown throughout as a complete fake, so to suggest at the last that maybe she has a touch of psychic power is disturbingly inconsistent), discussed his alternative solutions, and then went right ahead and used his own version.” Hitchcock couldn’t
be stopped from winking at the audience, just as he had been doing for fifty years.
Postproduction, wrote John Russell Taylor, was characterized by Hitchcock “still modifying, still worrying,” especially about that “on-the-nose” final shot of Blanche winking.
Once, music had been paramount for Hitchcock; now it was almost an afterthought. “Evidently nothing in
Family Plot
or
Frenzy
had been planned in relation to the musical score,” according to Taylor, “which was slotted into a relatively small, circumscribed place in Hitch’s considerations, to be supplied when the rest of the film was nearing completion.” John Williams, riding high at Universal on the tsunami of
Jaws
, was hired to write the score.