Family Plot/Frenzy

I'm backing up to get two Hitchcock films, both of which are contained in the Masterpiece Collection. I've never seen either film, so I'm just reacting as I go.

Family Plot is Hitchcock's final film, a sort of thriller/black comedy. Though far from Hitchcock's best work, he was in his mid seventies at the time of the film's release, and still puts together a film that trumps most stuff made in the last 35 years.

Unfortunately, such faint praise is the only praise I can give Family Plot. What's more, despite a 95% fresh rating, many of the critics resort to faint praise, too, using phrases such as "not exactly top-tier Hitchcock," "minor but worthwhile," "pretty good," and my favorite, "enough good stuff to make it at least worth one viewing." Uh...okay. Perhaps more telling is the 57% fresh rating among audiences, or the 2.5 star rating on Netflix. The film has many fans, but most of them are hardcore Hitch fans who like everything, and/or critics who are afraid to call this film dopey.

For a start, the medium/psychic scenes with Barbara Harris are kind of painful to watch, Bruce Dern plays pretty much the same character in every film, and the melodrama is hard to swallow. Still, I'm sticking with this one.

A tall, mysterious woman who goes by "The Trader" and who looks like a young Tom Petty walks around this film, dressed head to toe in black. What's her deal? Oh, wait, that's Karen Black. I liked her better in Five Easy Pieces.

And...oh, wait, there's William Devane, formerly of "Knots Landing," and a dude I once saw roam into the Borders bookstore where I worked in Chicago. Hard to believe that guy worked with Hitchcock. What's he done since? Uh...a lot of television, mostly typecast as the creepy or unscrupulous type. Still working, though. Hey! I was once within 10 feet of an actor who worked with Hitchcock. That's kinda cool, I guess. Devane is super slimy in this film, all mustache and teeth and licking his lips a lot.

The plot is twisty, features egregious and unnecessary blue screen use, and doesn't make a lick of sense. I can do without this one.

Frenzy, on the other hand, is a fantastic film. I wish this had been Hitch's last film, because Family Plot is such a slog. Set in London, Hitchcock's penultimate film is a straight-ahead suspense film about a "Necktie Killer" on the loose. When a stack of circumstantial evidence puts the law on the trail of Richard Ian Blaney, a hard luck case, he has to find a way to clear his name. Jon Finch plays Blaney, a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, temper-prone Englishman who is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up the target of a police investigation into a series of grisly strangulations.

Frenzy is deftly written and paced, and seems the kind of film that is much more polished and lucid than Family Plot. Hitch has this incredible cast of great English character actors: Finch, Alec McCowen, Barry Foster, Billie Whitelaw, and on and on and on.

Hitch returns to England with a keen eye for the distinctly English. At one point, we're treated to a protracted conversation between a police inspector and one of his underlings, while the inspector eats the bigger part of a traditional English breakfast of eggs, sausages, rasher bacon, mushrooms, toast, and other fatty protein-y things that are awesome. When I visited England, I had a real breakfast at least twice. I was full for hours. The average LDL number in England must be in the thousands.

Food plays a significant role in this film, for some reason. Hitch features characters eating something in just about every scene. Brit food is often slagged off for being bland, boring, or just plain gross (blood pudding, anyone?), but I must say, after seeing what the police inspector's aspiring "gourmet" wife made him for dinner, I'd take this any day:

For Hitch, Frenzy seems like a love note to all things English — the plot is a nod to Jack the Ripper, the food is distinctly English, the black taxis are prominent, and familiar pieces of London are given plenty of screen time — Tower Bridge, Covent Garden, etc. Normally I'd say that this is why I liked the film so much, but really, the film is just damned good.

I'm not one to recommend many movies, but if you get anything out of this Hitchcock jag that I'm on, maybe you'll get a look at a lesser-known Hitch film like this one. In many ways this is a textbook thriller — the kind of film Hitchcock could make in his sleep, but in other ways this is Hitch coming full circle to make one last great film.