While she participates in more staged seances to make ends meet, he pretends he's a lawyer to locate the missing relative. Director Alfred Hitchcock's unfortunately premature swan song from filmmaking isn't as bad as most critcs and film historians make it out to be. Family Plot features an interesting script that moves well and even though you might figure out how these two seemingly seperate stories will intersect, it's enjoyable getting there.
Drawbacks here are limited, but damaging nonetheless.
For a Hitchcock film, there just doesn't seem to be much style in the film. And while the film's concept is intriguing, somehow the finale doesn't pay it off like it should. Once these two storylines merge, things should kick into high gear. Instead, characters literally do nothing more than wander around for the last ten minutes of the film, sucking out any energy that the story's climax delivered moments earlier. Family Plot is available on DVD from Universal Home Video .