The Great Runaway Car Scene
"Family Plot" has its flaws...almost entirely born of Hitchcock's advanced age and ill health, plus Universal's budget restrictions...but it certainly has some classic scenes, too.
I think the runaway car scene is really a great Hitchcock set piece. And in his last movie, too!
I know, I know. In the years preceding "Family Plot," two great car chases had been filmed ("Bullitt," "The French Connection") involving REAL cars on REAL streets being driven by stunt men all over creation, with cameras on board the cars a lot of the time, plus lots of medium shots and long shots of the cars in action.
Meanwhile: the "car chase" in "Family Plot":
1. Isn't really a car chase at all. (The car has been sabotaged, and Dern must drive it down a curving mountain road with no brakes and a jammed accelerator.)
2. There are no shots (save one) from OUTSIDE the car, looking at it swerve past us (or below us from a helicopter, as in the "set-up" scene). Almost the whole thing is simply a POV shot of the curving mountain road ahead.
3. "Worst of all": Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris do all their work in a "fake car" with a process screen behind them at all times.
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Yes, well. But wait:
1. Hitchcock was here bound and determined to BE Hitchcock: he had no interest in long shots and medium shots of stunt drivers driving cars around. He never had such interest. He wanted the audience to experience the excitement WITH the driver, from inside the car, no escape.
2. A last primer in the famous Hitchcock motif: A person looks (Dern and Harris in the car.) POV: what they see: (the curving road ahead.) How they react (they yell, they cringe, they argue, they duck. Hilarious.)
3. Hitchcock "fixed" the similar car scene in "North by Northwest," in which drunk Cary Grant's POV of the road ahead was always framed by car hood the bullseye Mercedes front-piece of the car. In "Family Plot," we see ONLY the road rushing to meet us, nothing to slow down the imagery and cause us to refocus on the car hood.
4. No music this time, as in "North by Northwest". Just the super-intense screech of brakes ...and screeching of Barbara Harris yelling at Bruce Dern. Plus squealing tires.
5. Barbara Harris' screeching is in Hitchcockian character: Dern and Harris bicker all through the movie. So now -- their lives in imminent danger -- what do they do? They BICKER. ("It's not me, Blanche -- its the BRAKES DON'T WORK!!!") The process photography that may be old-fashioned and grating here at least allows Dern and Harris to comedy-act their little hearts out with dialogue. Face it: you couldn't FILM this kind of car sequence for real anyway, not at these speeds and with that dialogue.
6. Hitchcock's last movie prior to Family Plot, "Frenzy" had as its centerpiece a grueling and ugly rape-strangulation. This time out -- his last time out, and maybe Hitchcock sensed that -- all thrills would be PG. We're going on a roller-coaster ride, and there will be thrills (as cars suddenly appear in OUR lane, head-on) and there will be laughs (Dern and Harris, bickering away.)
7. The best thrill AND laugh comes near the end: POV: a flock of motorcyclists to slalom through, followed quickly by a cut to a sheepish Dern: "We've gotta get off this road..." Big laughs (this line was stolen by Bill Paxton in "Twister," right after he drove through a house!)
8. The POV shots are great, with the footage sped up slightly to suggest top speed, and all manner of obstacles -- other cars, cliffs, motorcycles -- hurtling at us.
9. Once, and only once, the camera leaves the car to show it ALMOST go off the cliff, as the tires fling dirt and gravel into the air. By saving this as a "surprise," Hitchcock stops our hearts for a moment.
10. And when "we've gotta get off this road"...Hitchcock DOESN'T leave the car until the very last moment of its slowing down and tipping over. Where he has another joke waiting (Harris' foot on Dern's contorted face.) The shift from all that noise (brakes, tires, Harris and Dern, motorcycles) to complete and utter silence is a great Hitchcock "aural touch."
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It may not be as shocking as the shower scene, or as gigantic as Mount Rushmore, but the runaway car scene in "Family Plot" IS thrilling and it is all Hitchcock. Sure, he may be borrowing here (from the car drives in "Suspicion," "Notorious," "To Catch a Thief" and "North by Northwest"), but this is the PERFECTED version of those previous POV car chases, and I think it is delightful, a fine mix of the exciting, the scary, and above all, the funny.
P.S. Themes are important here, too: Cary Grant's drunk drive in "North by Northwest" fit HIM because he was a drinker. Dern and Harris are here the victims of a murder planned by one Joe Maloney -- a car mechanic -- and exactly how WOULD a car mechanic kill two people?
By rigging their brakes and their accelerator, natch. Pure Hitchcock.
Also pure Hitchcock: the set-up shot of the white car making its way UP the curving mountain highway, which is like the static high overhead shot of Cary Grant waiting for the crop-duster in "NXNW." In both scenes, Hitchcock sets the stage, and lets our imaginations run wild thereafter.
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