“With a kick on a cemetery headstone that has no body below (‘Fake! Fake!' shouts the kicker), and a gentle, lethal plopping of brake fluid, the sound track of Alfred Hitchcock's Family Plot firmly plants us in a world in which the hallowed is a hoax and the mechanically sophisticated is dangerous to treat as a plaything. Hitchcock has never made a strategically wittier film, or a fonder” Penelope Gilliatt, The New Yorker.
A teasingly complex plot juggles two separate story lines involving two couples: for-the-money spiritualist Barbara Harris and her cabbie boyfriend Bruce Dern, and jewel salesman and thief William Devane and his enigmatic lady friend, Karen Black. The couples collide in search for the long-lost heir to a family fortune, and Hitchcock makes use of narrative coincidence to further the collision on a psychological level. Barbara Harris is as bright a comic as Karen Black is a macabre one, and Hitchcock, in inspired collaboration with his cast, creates some deceptively rich characters in this, his 53rd film.