Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot (1976)

An exhilarating experiment in mise en scene from beginning to end.  His characters, played by a new breed of actors, are freed from the often suffocating restraints of his highly composed frames, enabling them to move around in front of the camera and invent their lives in a visual universe of medium shots and medium close-ups.  Hitchcock overturns the principles of his cinema and makes a film that belongs to the cinema of the eternally young, along with Seven Women (John Ford, 1966), A King in New York (Chaplin, 1957) and La Petit Theatre de Jean Renoir (1971).
--Bill Krohn, Hitchcock at Work, (Phaidon,2000).

When I originally saw Family Plot in 1976 a friend said, when Hitchcock appeared in silhouette at the Registrar of Births and Deaths, "Hitchcock is a shadow of his former self" and I reluctantly agreed.  I should have been used to Hitchcock confounding one's expectations.  In my current course on Hitchcock (Ball State and Turner Classic Movies have joined together to offer the course on-line)  there is an understandable attempt to emphasize what Hitchcock's movies have in common.  Family Plot is summed up for me in an overhead shot of a cemetery where George Lumley (Bruce Dern) and Mrs. Maloney (Katerine Helmond) follow geometric paths to a confrontation:  the shot is slow and deliberate, from a high angle, emphasizing the important information that Lumley is seeking and how two stories are coming together.  Hitchcock has abandoned the importance that stars once had for him (he felt that audiences would be more concerned for them in suspense situations), especially after his failures with Julie Andrews and Paul Newman in Torn Curtain, 1966); Hitchcock's last three films did not have well-established stars, allowing Hitchcock a new freedom.

In Family Plot Hitchcock has less interest in music (by John Williams), cinematography (by Leonard South) and more interest in production design (by Henry Bumstead), plot, in its double meaning (script by Ernest Lehman) and staring death in the face while establishing a new abstract universe (there are no overt symbols of place, as there are in most of his films) using younger actors.