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Fran is Gone: The Passing of Karen Black

posted 11 years ago by ecarle
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Karen Black has died, at the age of 74, from cancer she fought valiantly with the aid of internet fundraising.

In 1999 around this very time(Hitchcock's birthday, today as I post this in 2013), I attended a one-evening tribute to Alfred Hitchcock on his 100th birthday at the Academy Theater in Beverly Hills.

In another part of the building, some Hitchcock "materials" were on display(the storyboards for The Birds, the key from Notorious, music notes for Psycho -- "no music during the murders" said Hitchcock then, Paul Newman's memo about "Torn Curtain"(he didn't like the title, for one thing.)

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The "show" was mainly short clips (the shower murder, the birds attack Bodega Bay, Brenda Blaney gets strangled) and the Psycho trailer, etc.

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Few Hitchcock performers were there. I recall only two:

Janet Leigh, who was introduced to discuss "Psycho" from a chair on stage(she did so very quickly, as if embarrassed and pressed for time.)

Karen Black, who was NOT introduced, but was at least warmly swarmed by folks in the audience when the show was over.

I figure Black was snubbed not personally, but because "Family Plot" simply doesn't have a "classic" reputation.

Well, it isn't a classic, but it is historic: Hitchcock's final film. And I think it teaches his lessons well yet again -- about storytelling, about coincidence, about irony, about cinematics -- and the cast is a damn good one.

The record shows that Hitchocck offered roles in Family Plot to some big stars at the time -- Nicholson, Redford and Pacino for Lumley(Nicholson pal Bruce Dern got it); Burt Reynolds and Roy Scheider for Adamson(William Devane got it after Roy Thinnes -- a good but bland non-star actor -- was fired a week or so into filming.) And Faye Dunaway for Fran(Dunaway later said she thought the movie was about kidnapping children; she took Network instead.)

Barbara Harris got the plum role of Madame Blanche after Hitchcock considered but did not hire Beverly Sills, Goldie Hawn, and Liza Minnelli.

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When the cast for "Family Plot" was announced, I for one was a bit disappointed. Black, Dern, Harris and Devane were simply not stars -- with the possible exception(and that's why she got top billing) of Karen Black.

It was an odd career, but certainly a very big one for a few years. Karen Black may end up being known today the "main lady" of the Counterculture Crew. She worked with Nicholson and Hopper and Peter Fonda and Bruce Dern(several times with Dern.) She was in Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces, big classics of their limited type. She got an Oscar nom for Pieces.

In a truly weird roundelay in 1974 and 1975, we found Karen Black as the lead player in a big Paramount film("Day of the Locust") even as she did a "mere" TV movie -- and got huge fame off it("Trilogy of Terror" -- folks only remember the devil doll part, but that's enough.) Yet in the same year, there she is in "Nashville"(along with Barbara Harris.) And before that, Black took a truly junky role in a truly junky disaster movie -- "Airport '75" -- which nonetheless got Black notice for being "The Stewardess Who is Flying the Plane!" (Black's co-star way down the cast list was Roy Thinnes, evidently on a Universal contract -- making his casting in "Family Plot" truly odd at the time -- and Hitchcock fixed THAT.)

As the critical homages are noting, Karen Black was the perfect actress FOR the counterculture seventies. Her beauty was flawed, a bit cross-eyed, a bit on the floozy side. And alas, her looks didn't hold too long.

From interviews with her(and there are many on the subject of Hitchcock and Family Plot) I know that Black was offered "WC Fields and Me" or "Family Plot" by Universal and took "Plot" to work with Hitchocck --- even though she wanted to play Blanche. I know that Hitchcock got angry with Black for playing Fran "too nice" and told her "You are playing a bad person in this film" and made sure she knew it. Black made the changes to the character to Hitchcock's satisfaction.

Black's Fran is rather a "straight arrow"(for a villainess), and that was Hitchcock's point, he said: the villain couple are smooth and well-tailored and somewhat loving; the hero couple are bickering eccentrics. Moreover, Black does "Plot" in some classy and VERY seventies clothes by Edith Head, I think, and is about as stylish as she ever looked.

Each of the characters in Family Plot (save Devane's Adamson) gets a "big scene" to themselves, or two or three: Harris gets the seances; Dern gets the early investigation scenes.

But Black gets the fun scene in which she picks up the diamond ransom as if playing a children's game: she never speaks, despite all the men trying to GET her to speak. Its perfect and its fun. And Fran is quite brave.

I noticed that only some of the Black tributes even MENTIONED Family Plot. Her other movies are more "important"(and there's even Portnoy's Complaint, directed by "Family Plot"/NBNW scribe Ernest Lehman.)

But I really like Karen Black IN Family Plot. It took a few years. I always found her the weak acting link in the picture, but I've come to change my mind with repeated viewings. Lehman gave her some poor lines, frankly, but overall "Fran" proves interesting with little for Black to work with: I think Fran is a "lost child"(possibly an orphan or foster child and later, maybe a call girl) who found Arthur Adamson and became his criminal accomplice more out of love than greed -- their kinky relationship probably just kept going to the point where Fran couldn't stop.

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Black's career kind of collapsed came the 80's but Altman's "Jimmy Dean" filmed play evidently stands as a real acheivement for her, and we all remember her now.

The first of the "Family Plot Four"(Black, Dern, Harris, Devane) has passed. A sad thought: these were the YOUNGEST players my generation had seen in a new Hitchcock film. And now they are old. And one has passed.

Time marches on -- but Hitchcock movies are immortal.

And so is Easy Rider. And Five Easy Pieces. Goodbye, Karen Black. You will be remembered. That's part of what the movies are about.

[–] 11 years ago

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[–] ecarle 11 years ago

That's an interesting observation. Have you read the production notes, or the book? I wonder if they give any background for her character, because we don't hear anything of it in the film.

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I did not read any production notes, but I did read the novel. However, the novel(entitled "The Rainbird Pattern" from 1970) is of no help on Fran -- because there IS no Fran in the book.

Nor an Arthur Adamson.

The book, as I recall(read it decades ago when the movie came out) DID have a Rainbird heir originally named Edward Shoebridge, but his new personality was not as jeweler Arthur Adamson. As I recall, this version of the heir was a man living with a WIFE(not a girlfriend) in the British countryside, and the couple had a young son. These were dour, fanatical people. I recall the male kidnapper as fitting Robert Shaw in described looks.

At the end of "The Rainbird Pattern"(which was set entirely in England), the British Secret Police kill the kidnapping couple and their little boy is given to Julia Rainbird as the new Rainbird heir. But the book ends with the little boy pushing Julia down her long staircase to her death -- and plotting the death of the Bruce Dern character(Madame Blanche had been killed by the kidnapping couple upon her discovering them, as in the movie without Blanche's death.)

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Hitchcock elected to take a downbeat story in which almost everybody dies into a comedy thriller in which almost nobody dies.

And the kidnappers were entirely reinvented as a sexy, unmarried couple with no kid.

My guesses as to Fran's "roots" are from a few clues:

1. No one at Adamson's jewelry business knows about Fran. She comes there acting out the role of a wife looking to buy something from Adamson as suggested by "her husband". So Adamson has been hiding his relationship with Fran from the world.

2. Adamson has NOT told Fran that he is Eddie Shoebridge. (His line to her in their car: "Don't ask me why, but they're looking for some spook named Eddie Shoebridge.") So Fran isn't much of Adamson's close confidante.

It speaks to me of Fran(who doesn't even get a last name) as being some sort of "pick up" that Adamson met somewhere(a bar?)or hired, a lost soul and hence(in my estimation), maybe a hooker or call girl Adamson found and decided to enlist as a lover and henchperson.

Though some critics dumped on how "broad" the hints were, we also learn that Adamson and Fran have a kinky sex life("You'll have to torture me" "That's what I intend to do.") . Though hey, that doesn't spell "hooker." Still, ADAMSON is a lost soul, so many he connected with Fran.

There is, finally, the fact that Fran becomes more and more freaked out by just how lethal Adamson is willing to be -- "she didn't sign up for murder" -- and that again suggests to me that Fran is more Adamson's toy than his soulmate.

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Karen Black 1976 interview for Family Plot: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-x5D1q8h8U

Thank you, very helpful information!