Family Plot (1976)

Family Plot, released in 1976, was Alfred Hitchcock’s final movie. This is definitely Hitchcock Lite, but that does not mean it’s a lesser Hitchcock movie. Some of Hitch’s cleverest and most delightful movies can be thought of as Hitchcock Lite, obvious examples being Young and Innocent and The Trouble with Harry. And of course To Catch a Thief. When I say these movies are Hitchcock Lite I mean that they were intended as lighthearted feelgood entertainment. I like feelgood entertainment if it’s done well, and Hitch did it extremely well.

There are Hitchcock fans who wish that his final movie had been something more in the style of his previous movie Frenzy. But it was not to be, and I think Family Plot was Hitchcock going out on a fairly high note.

Family Plot is essentially a comedic caper movie but the movie it most resembles in tone is The Trouble with Harry. That movie had been a flop because it was at least a decade ahead of its time. It was pure comedy, but it was black comedy. Neither audiences nor critics were ready to embrace such a concept in 1955. By 1976 however audiences were accustomed to black comedy and Family Plot was quite well received by both audiences and critics. By that time they had caught up with Hitchcock.

There are two entirely separate plot strands involving two contrasting criminal couples. We can see early on how the two plot strands are going to intersect and knowing this adds to the fun.

Blanche Tyler (Barbara Harris) is a phoney psychic. Her boyfriend, cab driver, George Lumley (Bruce Dern) helps her out by digging up background details on her clients to help her to convince them that her psychic powers are real. Now they’re hoping for a big score. Mrs Julia Rainbird (Cathleen Nesbitt) is an old lady with a guilty conscience. Thank to her her nephew missed out on his inheritance. And the Rainbird Estate is worth many millions of dollars. If Blanche and George can produce that long-lost nephew Mrs Rainbird will give them a large cheque.

Fran (Karen Black) and Arthur (William Devane) operate on a whole different level. Thy have just pulled off a kidnapping and collected a million dollar ransom.

Blanche and George are not really particularly dishonest or immoral. They really do intend to find Mrs Rainbird’s nephew and it never crosses their minds to try to substitute a phoney nephew. They don’t do that because it would be out of character for them. It would be immoral and cruel. They are just not cruel people and in their own way they have a sense of fair play. They intend to produce the genuine article. They are very much small time. Their score, if it comes off, will amount to a $10,000 cheque from Mrs Rainbird. And they will make an old lady very happy. It’s also significant that they are amateurs and they’re working class.

Fran and Arthur are big time and they’re ice-cold professional criminals. They’re smooth and sophisticated middle crass crooks. They don’t have the ethical qualms that Blanche and George have. I don’t think Hitch had any intention of making a political statement about class - it just adds extra flavour to make the two couples so very different in every way.

What links these two couples was something that happened a long time ago. We, the audience, know all about it. The fact that the protagonists don’t know this crucial fact leads them to make absurd and mistaken decisions. They have no way of knowing that their decisions are absurd and mistaken. That not only adds to the fun, it creates the suspense.

William Devane as Arthur is great fun. He’s not so much a psycho as an old-fashioned scoundrel. A Victorian melodrama villain for the audience to boo and hiss. Karen Black looks like a classic Dangerous Dame.

Bruce Dern had been around for a long time mostly doing B-movies or playing heavies and misfits. This gives him a rare opportunity to strut his stuff as a comic actor and he makes the most of it. He gets so much mileage out of that pipe. George is no genius but he really is a nice guy.

But the movie belongs to Barbara Harris. She does the phoney medium bit to perfection She’s funny and adorable.

We can’t help really liking George and Blanche. They’re only mildly dishonest but really they’re pretty nice and they love each other.

Technically Hitch is in complete command. The film is full of neat little Hitchcock moments. And the highway scene with the car is the sort of thing he’s done before but he manages to make it feel totally fresh, and it delightfully combines whimsy and terror (which is of course very Hitchcockian).

It’s a movie with real charm and wit and a lightness of touch and I manages to be very 1970s as well. This is not a movie made by a tired old man who had lost his touch. It’s a movie made by a man who still had enormous enthusiasm and style.

Family Plot is based on Victor Canning’s novel, The Rainbird Pattern. Canning was one of my favourite thriller writers and a lot of his novels were filmed. He’s not as well known today as he should be. I’ve reviewed his novels The Golden Salamander, Panther’s Moon and Castle Minerva all of which I recommend.

Ernest Lehman wrote the screenplay, having previously written North by Northwest for Hitchcock.

Family Plot is just splendid entertainment. Highly recommended.

It looks great on Blu-Ray.

La Vérité (1960)

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s La Vérité (The Truth) was released in 1960. For many people this is the movie that established Brigitte Bardot as a serious actress but it’s interesting for a number of reasons.

This is a courtroom drama with most of the story told in a series of flashbacks but the French criminal justice system (and their entire legal system) is radically different from British or American systems. If you don’t know that then you will be extremely perplexed. A young woman, Dominique Marceau (Brigitte Bardot) is on trial for murder. She has a defence counsel but the victim’s mother is also represented in court by counsel. In this movie he is in practice acting as a second prosecutor.

And the fact that Dominique shot and killed her lover, Gilbert Tellier (Sami Frey) is not in dispute. Her defence is based on the claim that this was a crime of passion and in France until the 1970s that was a legitimate defence. It could make the difference between the guillotine or a very short prison term, or could even mean acquittal. What that means in this story is that it is the strength of her love that is on trial.

La Vérité is also interesting because of the social milieu in which Dominique moves. She is part of a group of what are essentially beatniks. 1960 was a time when juvenile delinquents and youth subcultures were causing much excitement and hysteria. And the Sexual Revolution was just starting to gather steam. The prosecution in this story is in practice putting Dominique on trial for flouting traditional morality. In her social circle sexual promiscuity is taken for granted.

Dominique is actually a bit wild but to the middle-aged members of the jury and the officers of the court she is a monster of depravity. They are shocked to learn that after leaving her parents’ home in the provinces and moving to Paris she has frequented coffee shops and cinemas.

In Paris she meets Gilbert Tellier, a student of music. He was her sister Annie’s boyfriend. Gilbert soon decides that the free-spirited Dominique is much more exciting than the staid resectable Annie.

Gilbert and Dominique but from the start there’s trouble. And there are dramas and breakups and reconciliations and betrayals. It was always likely to end badly. And it does.

The title makes it clear that this movie is a search for the truth. But what exactly does that mean? This is not a conventional mystery. We know precisely what happened. We know that Dominique shot and killed Gilbert and then tried to kill herself. We need to know how exactly that came about. We need to know if Gilbert ever truly loved her, and if she ever truly loved him. And given that her defence relies on the claim that it was a crime of passion both the court and the audience have to find out exactly what was in Dominique’s mind when she pulled that trigger.

And when the court and the audience know what was in her mind they have to decide if her passions were so inflamed that she can be forgiven.

And of course this is a trial, with both the defence counsel and the rival counsel having their own versions of the truth which they hope they can persuade the court to accept. Lawyers know that the secret is to present and package the truth in just the right way.

And Clouzot feeds the truth to us slowly. One obvious truth quickly emerges. Gilbert and Dominique were terribly young, terribly in love and terribly and spectacularly mismatched. They were always going to hurt each other. They both realised it, and could do nothing about it. Dominique knows Gilbert is the wrong man for her but she cannot get him out of her mind and her heart.

They both behave badly. Dominique cheats on Gilbert repeatedly but that’s the inevitable result of their being so mismatched. He’s a very serious minded ambitious musician with no time for fun. Dominique is a high-spirited passionate 20-year-old girl who needs fun and excitement as much as she needs oxygen. That does not excuse her betrayals, but the betrayals were inevitable. Dominique cannot change who she is.

There is a girl who is perfect for Gilbert - Dominique’s sister Annie. Annie is serious minded and respectable and equally career-oriented. They are an ideal match. But Gilbert dumps her because Dominique is much hotter and is dynamite in bed.

And Clouzot is not going to make it easy for us. Do we ever learn the real truth? Will it satisfy us if we do? You’ll have to watch the movie and decide for yourself.

Bardot is absolutely superb. We like Dominique but sometimes we want to shake her and tell her, “Girl, you just can’t do that.” But we know that she will anyway. Bardot captures her elusive and contradictory personality perfectly, and her youthfulness. There’s no point in expecting Dominique to think anything through. She cannot. She is not evil, but she’s like a driverless runaway car. And she can be manipulative. Could she be lying about the shooting? Perhaps. But she could be telling the absolute truth. And she could be telling the truth as she sees it.

It’s a complex movie and it necessarily takes its time unravelling the story of this disastrous love. But it is enthralling and Bardot is mesmerising.

La Vérité is highly recommended.

The Stone Killer (1973)

The Stone Killer, released in 1973, was third of the six films directed by Michael Winner that starred Charles Bronson.

Bronson had been around for a very long time and had been a minor presence in 1950s TV (including the lead role in the interesting Man with a Camera series). He seemed destined never to be a major star. He just didn’t have movie star good looks. He had a fact that looked like it had been kicked around a football field. He lacked obvious movie star charm. It was Michael Winner who realised that Bronson really did have star quality, albeit unconventional star quality. And he had a very masculine brand of charisma. There were other movie tough guys but Bronson was just a whole lot tougher.

The Stone Killer can be considered to be part of a wave of movies set against a background of seemingly out-of-control urban violent crime but it is important to point out that unlike the next Winner-Bronson movie, Death Wish, this is not a vigilante movie. The character played by Bronson, Lieutenant Lou Torrey, is a cop. Having become somewhat controversial he accepts an offer to move over to the the west coast but in L.A. he is still cop. He is now a Detective-Lieutenant in the LAPD.

While his methods are ruthless and sometimes unconventional and while he has major disagreements with senior officers over his current case he does at all times act with the knowledge of, and the approval of, his immediate superior Captain of Detectives Les Daniels (Norman Fell). He is not a rogue cop.

And the shooting which upset his superiors at the beginning of the story was justified. The punk, who had already shot a cop, pulled a gun and pointed it directly at him. Lou Torrey blew the punk away, which is what a cop is going to do in such a situation.

Over-sensitive critics at the time (and today) were very upset by movies like this one and Dirty Harry and Death Wish which did not conform to the politically acceptable line that it’s the violent criminals who are the real victims. And some over-sensitive viewers will be clutching their pearls at many points during the film.

The case gets moving when Armitage, a burnt-out hitman facing a drugs charge, offers Lou information that a major hit is going to go down soon. That’s all that Lou finds out. It’s an essential ingredient of the plot that although the audience knows what’s going on the cops initially do not have a clue. But it is obvious that it’s not just some businessman hiring a hitman to kill an inconvenient business partner. Armitage had been a senior Mob trigger man. And whoever is behind this hit soon demonstrates a willingness to kill anyone who might conceivably spill the beans to the cops. And they’re sufficiently well organised to kill people in police custody. It has to be something big.

Now this was the 70s, when left-wing urban terrorism was a big thing in the U.S. (and in Europe as well). So when the police top brass jump to the conclusion that whatever is going to go down is likely to be political that’s not an implausible conclusion. But Lou Torrey doesn’t buy it, and he’s right.

The audience knows what is going on. It’s wild and crazy but Winner was trying to make a movie that would be a manic adrenalin-charged exercise in frenetic action and large-scale mayhem and that wild premise is perfect for such purposes.

And this movie really delivers on the mayhem front. It’s like a full-scale war. And the action scenes are terrific. And the momentum just keeps building as Torrey slowly starts to realise the sheer scale and insanity of the crime, and as the momentum builds it gets more manic and deranged.

There’s also Lou’s amusing encounter with the hippies at the ashram. It’s a swipe at the counter-culture but I enjoyed it.

Bronson is excellent. Lou Torrey isn’t a vigilante or a maverick cop as such but he is a force of nature. He’s an effective cop because he’s unstoppable.

Norman Fell was always good in these kinds of roles. I can’t tell you anything about the character played by Martin Balsam but he’s very good.

Michael Winner really pushes the buttons of many critics and film scholars. Their disapproval of the subject matter of films like Death Wish makes them unable to admit that maybe the guy actually knew how to direct movies and that maybe his films were successful because they were actually entertaining.

The highlight of the Blu-Ray extras is an audio recording of a lecture given by Michael Winner in 1970. He really was a very funny man and he wasn’t afraid of being provocative and he’s a joy to listen to.

The Stone Killer promises action and mayhem and it delivers the good. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed Winner’s extremely interesting 1964 film The System (one of six he did with Oliver Reed). And I’ve reviewed his much misunderstood Death Wish (1974), his superb The Mechanic (1972) and his very underrated spy thriller Scorpio (1973).

Physical Evidence (1989)

Physical Evidence is a 1989 mystery crime thriller, it’s a courtroom drama and it also has serious neo-noir vibes.

It was directed (but not written) by Michael Crichton. It might seem like an outlier in Crichton’s filmography but in his early career as a novelist he wrote relatively straightforward thrillers so it’s reasonable to assume that he had some affinity for the thriller genre.

It starts with a very impressive visual set-piece on a bridge. Which leads to the discovery of the body of Jake Farley, a sleazy nightclub owner with a spectacularly shady past.

Cop Joe Paris (Burt Reynolds) is arrested for Farley’s murder. Joe is already on suspension. He’s a good cop with a very short temper which has landed him in trouble many times.

Hotshot lady lawyer Jenny Hudson (Theresa Russell) works for the Public Defender’s Office and she begs for the case. It will be a very high-profile case, the kind of case that can make or break an ambitious lawyer’s career.

The audience has no idea whether or not Joe is guilty. The evidence against him is very strong but if he is being framed by someone powerful you would expect that, and Joe has plenty of powerful enemies.

Jenny Hudson also has no idea whether or not Joe is guilty. She’s a lawyer. Her job is to defend him either way.

And the uncertainty about Joe’s guilt is maintained quite skilfully, for a while at least. The evidence against him steadily accumulates but the possibility that someone might be framing him also increases. We still do not know. Nor does Jenny. It’s a good basis for a neo-noir suspense thriller and it works.

The main problem is that this is the most potentially interesting aspect of the plot and it gradually gets lost and the story thereafter becomes rather routine.

There’s also the problem that courtroom dramas are always dull because courtroom scenes are always dull. They’re stagey, rather than cinematic. They’re all about dialogue and dialogue scenes are inherently uncinematic. They’re at best a necessary evil. And it’s very difficult to get away from that staginess in courtroom scenes.

I have seen very few Burt Reynolds movies but he’s pretty good here, not making Joe too sympathetic but just sympathetic enough.

Theresa Russell’s specialty was playing offbeat roles in offbeat roles in offbeat movies for directors like Ken Russell and her husband Nicolas Roeg. This is a much more straightforward role but she handles it well. I like the way she does the full-on power-dressing girl boss thing on the job but throws off that persona as soon as she’s off-duty. She’s a pro. The girl boss routine is part of the job.

The sexual tension between Joe and Jenny works quite well because they’re so radically mismatched. Yes, that’s an established formula, but Reynolds and Russell carry it off well enough.

It bombed at the box office but there’s nothing really wrong with this movie. It’s a bit like an old-fashioned B-movie or a well-crafted TV-movie. It’s decent entertainment but it isn’t going to knock your socks off. And if, like me, you’re a bit of a Theresa Russell completist you’ll enjoy her performance.

This movie is paired with The Anderson Tapes on a double-header Blu-Ray from Mill Creek. There are no extras but it looks terrific. Physical Evidence isn’t particularly special but if you buy the set for The Anderson Tapes (and you should) it’s worth giving Physical Evidence a spin as well.

Five and Ten (1931)

Five and Ten (later retitled Daughter of Luxury) is a 1931 MGM pre-code romantic melodrama. It was a star vehicle for Marion Davies, with her co-star being Leslie Howard who was not yet a major name in the United States.

The Depression is an important factor in many pre-code movies but it’s ignored completely in this movie which may reflect the fact that it’s based on a novel (by Fannie Hurst) written prior to the Wall Street Crash.

Five and Ten is a story of love but this is also very much a movie about the class struggle. No, not that class struggle. This is is not the capitalists vs the workers, the upper class vs the working class. This is class struggle within the upper classes. This is the old money blue blood American aristocracy vs the rising power of the nouveau riche new upper class. This was a very real class struggle, not just a device invented for the movie.

John Rarick (Richard Bennett) and his family represent the upstart nouveau riche. Rarick owned a chain of five and dime stories in Kansas. Now he owns an immense nationwide chain and he’s fabulously rich. That made him decide to relocate, with his family, to New York City.

His wife Jenny (Irene Rich) and daughter Jennifer (Marion Davies) are at first very excited. They assume that they will be welcomed into high society in New York. But New York is not Kansas City. They are snubbed by New York high society. And for a woman there is no humiliation to compare with being snubbed by society women.

Jenny has consoled herself by taking a lover. He gives the impression of being a gigolo but Jenny doesn’t care.

John Rarick has no idea what is going on and he had no idea how lonely and socially isolated Jenny had started to feel. The truth is that John Rarick has ceased to understand anything other than money.

He is also unaware that daughter Jennifer has been snubbed as well.

Now Jennifer has met Berry Rhodes (Leslie Howard). He’s an architect, or claims to be although he’s really just a dilettante. He spends his time playing polo and going to parties. Berry is perpetually broke but that doesn’t matter. He is a blue blood. His family is Old Money. As far as society in New York is concerned he is very much an insider. He is engaged, in a desultory fashion, to Muriel Preston (Mary Duncan), also very much of Old Money stock.

Jennifer has decided that she’s going to marry Berry. It’s impossible of course. There is that yawning class gap between them. But Jennifer is a very determined girl.

Perhaps she is motivated partly by a desire to storm the walls of the fortress of society but she is genuinely besotted by Berry’s aristocratic sophistication and self-confidence and stylish elegance.

And Berry has fallen for Jennifer, although that doesn’t mean he will choose a nouveau riche girl in preference to blue blood Muriel. It’s going to be an epic battle between these two women.

Meanwhile Jennifer’s brother Avery has turned to the bottle.

I adore Marion Davies. She’s funny, she’s lively, she’s charming and she’s sexy. She’s gorgeous and she has those incredible eyes. It’s unfortunate that she is often dismissed due to the vicious hatchet job Orson Welles did on her in Citizen Kane.

Leslie Howard is pretty good here and you can see why he would soon start making an impact in Hollywood.

Is it pre-code? The answer is very definitely yes but to tell you why would involve spoilers.

Five and Ten is an excellent pre-code melodrama and Marion Davies is sensational. And directed by Robert Z. Leonard, maybe not an auteur or a visionary but just a guy who directed a lot of excellent movies. Very highly recommended.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very nice.