As Shadow of a Doubt opens, Joseph Cotton’s uncle Charlie is running away from the police. He has been lying down in his cheap hotel room, dollar bills on the floor, the blinds closed; not asleep, though, but just lying in the dark; brooding; ready to get up and leave in an instant. Then, the hotel owner, a jolly, oblivious old lady, barges in, babbling like a fool, saying two gentlemen have just passed by to ask for him. He knows who they are: it’s the police. Uncle Charlie gets up, takes a peek out of the window, and, of course, runs away at once.
His niece Charlie, meanwhile, is lying on her bed on the other side of the country, filmed at the opposite angle from how her uncle has just been filmed, comfortable inside her family’s big house in a small town where everyone knows her name. And she too is thinking of running away. She has got a perfectly normal family, including a loving mother and father, but still, she says, things just can’t go on as they are. Still feels oppressed. Her father gets up to see her, she who hasn’t left her room, and after a bit of dialogue, Hitchcock sums up their situation with a single shot: the door of her bedroom in center frame, separating father and daughter, who, each in their own corner, are slightly out of focus. The family, the house, is ganging up on its own members. Charlie feels imprisoned, desperate for a change; yet, unlike her uncle, she won’t get up and leave. No men have come to ask for her; maybe if they had, she’d then have the energy to move, but her persecution is much more diffuse, abstract, and since no predators are running after her, she simply doesn’t know in which direction to go.
Within these two poles is the entirety of Hitchcock’s cinema: there are those who are paralyzed (Rebecca, Suspicion, Under Capricorn, Psycho) and there are those who are actively looking for a way out. But everyone is equally trapped. What separates them? Charlie the niece will soon find out: it’s crime. It turns out her uncle had been, in his youth, in the same situation she finds herself in now, he too having felt trapped by his family, alienated by routine. The only difference is, he took matters into his own hands and plotted an escape. That is, he became a criminal. That’s because in Hitchcock the only possibility of subversion lies in crime, be it the crime we commit or the crime committed against us; the only path out of the banality of daily life is the illicit, the perverse. Beneath the shiny, clean surface of humanity there’s only the monstruous to be found. No, Hitchcock wasn’t a revolutionary. In Ernst Lubitsch, for instance, characters are just as oppressed by bourgeois life, yet they don’t need to dirty their hands in order to find an alternative; they don’t need to plot a murder in order to stand out from the crowd. Quite the opposite, when an alternative does come, it’s not a lessening, an abasement, but rather something that launches them upwards, into new, open regions, like a breath of fresh air, like a sudden clarity (Cluny Brown, Design for Living). In Lubitsch, even crime (Trouble in Paradise) is gay and joyful.
But in Hitchcock, even passion is oppressive (Rebecca, Vertigo). So what will happen to young Charlie? Her uncle will teach her the harsh reality of life: if you want to escape, be prepared to shove your hands into the mud. She’s horrified, of course, she takes it all back, all she wants now is to return to her old, normal, eventless life. And that’s what she’ll do in the end: when we leave her, she’s ready to marry the perfectly bland police officer who had been courting her. Yes, in the end she is afraid, and prefers to stay in the illuminated surface of bourgeois society rather than diving deep into herself as her uncle had done, and risking to become herself a monster. Can we blame her? Those are the rules in Hitchcock’s world: all those who are unsatisfied with their lives must choose: between immobility, conformity, and abiding to every single social rule, however unreasonable they may be; or monstrosity. There is no middle ground. We are all trapped, and those who break from their prisons break, at the same time, from humanity.
In Lubitsch, as in Mozart, there’s a lightness even to the tragic; in Hitchcock, there isn’t a single ray of light that doesn’t bring with it an image of pitch-black darkness. And if his attempt at a screwball comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, was such a failure, it’s not because he wasn’t a comedy director: he had already shown us (The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes), as he would continue to show throughout the rest of his career, that he was as comfortable in comedy as he was in suspense. But in order to function, he needed the aid of sharp contrasts. Two pretty, young actors inside a pretty house would never do; he needed the ugly in order to arrive at the funny. He was a man of contrasts — a romantic — and maybe that’s what explains this inclination of his for suspense: it’s the play between tension and release, the constant rise followed by fall, essential to the creation of both suspense and comedy, that best characterizes his art. Maybe if we were to give less weight to his own words — Master of suspense? — we’d more easily understand his body of work, without having to make concessions for supposedly disparate movies. In Under Capricorn, for instance, he had wanted to make a melodrama, and it was that movie’s box office and critical failure that pushed him further into his master of suspense persona. In Hitchcock, it’s above all the polarity that matters, that explains at once his taste for suspense and comedy, romance and horror, the ideal and debased. He can only advance by way of pronounced diametrics.
This is why uncle Charlie has to be not only a murderer, but a vicious, cruel one. It’s a sick pleasure of the director’s, the best example of which would no doubt be Psycho: Hitchcock was always carefully building scenarios, getting the audience deeply involved in them, only so he could suddenly break them apart with the perversity of a child breaking their own toys. But there are those of us who prefer the beginning of The Man Who Knew Too Much, or of Shadow of a Doubt for that matter, to the thriller that eventually overcomes it, and who regret that these small instants of humble, daily life, of actors playfully interacting, backed by some great dialogue and, most of all, by great direction, should have to be interrupted by a narrative weighted with turns and twists. There are those of us who prefer watching Marion Crane meeting up with her lover inside a cheap, unadorned hotel room rather than seeing Norman Bates surrounded by his stuffed birds and gothic mansion.
All of this is what makes Family Plot so particularly beautiful. It’s through and through a Hitchcock picture, possessing all of the famous themes and obsessions, yet for once, free from his baser need to shock at all costs, to impress everyone by always going a step further, free from naïve notions of perversity and darkness, free from that pervasive heaviness designed to keep us at all times on the edge of our seats, we’re finally allowed to breathe during one of his movies, and no twist will catch us off guard. What if uncle Charlie and his niece’s relationship had been allowed to develop? What if instead of taking a sensationalist approach and making a monster out of this uncle, Hitchcock had given him more nuance and portrayed him as a human being? What if Hitchcock had relied on the the subtler instincts he exhibited from time to time and not on external expectations, and had put his chips not simply on the next big effect?
Viewers had to wait for Family Plot in order to answer such questions, and the results are quite impressive. This time, instead of the usual one couple, we follow two of them. As the movie opens, they’ve both been together for so long that there isn’t a single line of romantic dialogue left in their mouths, and we certainly won’t see any of them kissing in close-up while the music builds up and abolishes the outside world for an instant. Instead, their conversation is already immersed in habit, full of inside jokes and petty fights about mundane matters. And despite a series of criminal activities, and even murder attempts, it’s this simple, ordinary life they live that will set the tone for the entire picture. Thus, when the protagonist couple’s car — for they will quickly be divided between protagonists and antagonists — is tampered with, and the brakes don’t work, the woman shouts at her partner to slow down as might have done on any other day. And in the final act, the man will, quite practically, have to finish his shift at work before he can take part in the film’s denouement.
This time out, Hitchcock is neither trying to shock nor horrify us. In the first scene he already highlights all the artifice of the film: the female protagonist, a fake psychic, shamelessly displays her hammy acting skills that fool no one but the old lady sitting in front of her. And though both couples do partake in illicit activities — one, small time swindlers, deceiving old ladies; the other, more seriously committed, deeply involved in a kidnapping scheme — the story never takes a dark turn, not even after we find out the male antagonist had, many decades ago, arranged for the murder of his family. This is no Norman Bates, and no cheap psychology will explain his motivations at the end; and though he is no doubt very unscrupulous, he is neither particularly scary nor revolting: he is, more complicatedly, just an ordinary man. This too is part of Hitch’s game. We soon are introduced to the mysterious blonde woman of the movie’s poster: tall, dressed all in black, wearing sunglasses at night, she seems to come straight out of a James Bond picture. But then, once her job is done, she enters her partner’s car, removes her sunglasses, her big hat, her high heels, and when she finally looks up and lets us see her face, we find out she’s cross-eyed. Then she takes off her wig: she’s not even blonde. “Who needs a blonde woman?” she jokingly asks. “I do,” her partner answers. Since Hitchcock is constantly laying his cards on the table, no big drama is ever able to unfold.
But because this is all played in a lighter key, because there are no extravagant sequences and no stunning effects — though Hitchcock’s mise en scène is as sharp as ever — audiences and film history are inclined to dismiss this movie as secondary. But this is a mistake. As beautiful as any of the movies of his ’50s run, Family Plot also occupies a unique place in the director’s filmography. All of his famous themes, tropes, and obsessions are on display right in front of our eyes, not by some theorist or some biographer, but by the artist himself. Here is a man auto-critiquing his oeuvre with the acuity of the brightest critic, and we for some reason didn’t care to see it. The truth is, viewers and critics alike were in expectation of cheap thrills and cheap horrors. Hitchcock found out early on: all the audience asks for is to be locked into a narrative, as Scottie in Vertigo, and escape for a couple hours the lack of sensationalism in their own lives. Yes, we want to be tied up; like Charlie the niece, we are never brave enough to face our own shackles, to look at the ground on which we are stepping. We want someone to guide us completely: so Hitchcock guided us. And the one time he didn’t, the one time when he distinctly set out the rules of the game in front of us, we dismissed his final product as a minor work.
We do know the director didn’t intend this to be his final movie. But what an opportunity it was for a career to end this way. Family Plot‘s final scene, among the most evocative in all of Hitchcock’s filmography, not only serves as a perfect closing point to one of the most important careers in cinema — easily comparable to the last scenes of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Gertrud or John Ford’s Seven Women — it also serves, from this man who would avowedly treat everyone — actors, characters, audience — as cattle, as a supreme mark of respect.
One last time our female protagonist — for she now is rich and won’t need to keep up with her scamming — puts on her psychic show. As before, it’s not us, the audience, whom she’s trying to deceive, but another character: this time, her own partner. So, after locking up their persecutors through a game of hide-and-seek — the man going as far as taking off his shoes and walking around the house in socks so as not to be heard — she decides to continue playing and fool, for no particular reason, her own partner. She goes up the stairs in a fake trance, peeking through her half-closed eyes, and, sure enough, points straight at the diamond which had been hidden, since the beginning of the movie (following no doubt the lesson of Edgar Allan Poe) in the most obvious place there could be, in plain sight: “To conceal this letter, the Minister had resorted to the comprehensive and sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all,” Poe, by way of detective Dupin, explains. She points at it, and her partner — who clearly didn’t go to the trouble of reading “The Purloined Letter” at school — bursts out: “Blanche, you are psychic!” She then sits down on the stairs and, in a close-up now, with a big smile on her face, and breaks the fourth wall to knowingly wink at the audience. Another close-up captures the diamond in its ingenious hiding spot, placed amidst the other rocks of a fancy chandelier by a humble strap of duct tape. The movie ends. And so ends the career of the one man who was ever able to “control the universe”: it had always been nothing but a game; revelations come and go, miracles don’t make for a life. The important thing is to keep playing till the very end.
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