Hitchcock's 'Family Plot'- Analyzing the plot

Alfred Hitchcock’s, ‘Family Plot’ is an excellent thriller/ mystery movie which is created in color. Back in the day, most of Alfred’s movies were only black and white. It’s based on a novel named “The Rainbird Pattern”. It shows how a couple earns a bounty from the police by searching for someone with the help of the lady’s spirituality.

There’s no establishment of location in the beginning scene and directly starts with a young lady, who is supposed to be in touch with a spirit to help her client. The young lady, madam Blanche, pretends to be a spiritualist and is with a client who is an old rich lady. The rich lady’s sister had an illegitimate child who was given up for adoption and should now be around 40 years.

The rich lady then gave Blanche an offer of 10,000 dollars to find out the nephew to make him the heir to the Rainbird family throne of the rich lady. Blanche accepts the offer and now goes to her boyfriend who is a cab driver. He helps Blanch by providing her with information that he goes and finds out by his investigations by pretending to be a lawyer.

After Blanche’s meeting with the client, the boyfriend pretends to be Blanche’s chauffeur and, on the way back to Blanche’s place, they were supposed to run over a woman, but she escapes and behaves professionally and now the entire scene is about this unknown lady who was just crossing the road. She’s wearing blonde hair with shades on and leather clothes and gloves. She doesn’t say anything all this while but after reaching home, she removes the blonde colored wig she has on and gives a diamond to her husband. The husband hides the diamond behind her back and doesn’t reveal where he keeps the diamond all this while.

Later, the boyfriend is back on his investigations pretending to be a lawyer and tries to find out information about Rainbird’s nephew with Blanche’s car. He reaches a person at the petrol pump, who doesn’t give out any information about the nephew named “Shoebridge”. But this petrol pump attendant notices how the lawyer is phony and traces the car plates. He finds out information about the address and goes to the guy who was involved in the diamond theft and informs him about it. Here, Alfred opens up the story and shows how the robber is “Shoebridge” and that he also owns a jewelry shop and handles it.

Blanche and her boyfriend later are very close to cracking the deal but due to a tiff, Blanche tried to do the fieldwork and is then kidnapped by Shoebridge at his place. The boyfriend, on his cab duty, then sees Blanche’s car and tries to search for her. He breaks into Shoebridge’s house and tries to find her, but he couldn’t and hides in the house. Shoebridge and his girlfriend, the one who was crossing the street earlier, were on their way back home after they committed theft and stole another diamond. After reaching, the boyfriend spies on Shoebridge to see where he hid her since Shoebridge had an idea of killing Blanche and making it look like a suicide. He had a secret room where Blanche was kept and when the door opened. She pretended to be unconscious. Shoebridge goes back to his garage to prepare the things, while Blanche and her boyfriend prepare something up but Alfred doesn’t show it to the audience and has a cut right there.

Shoebridge and his girlfriend go right back to the room take Blanche to the car. But Blanche screams and escapes from the room with the couple remaining inside and Blanche’s boyfriend closes the door on time and captures them. In the meanwhile, Blanche acts sick, but starts walking towards the hall of the house and points out where the diamond is. The boyfriend then says that she’s finally become a psychic and the movie ends with the camera pointed towards the diamond, hung on the chandelier with the help of a cello tape.

-By Kevin D’souza