What was Alfred Hitchcock’s final movie?
The release of The Birds in 1963 marked the end of an era for fans of Alfred Hitchcock, during which the director had stood at the summit of Hollywood, transforming film noir and effectively inventing the suspense thriller. Hitchcock’s innovations in cinematography, storyboarding and editing, as well as his novel use of film scores, would change the movie business forever, and lay the groundwork for auteur filmmaking in the era of New Holywood.
Between Shadow of a Doubt in 1943 and his final masterpiece 20 years later, no one could match Hitchcock for visual ingenuity or sheer entertainment value. Then came the slow decline as his career peaks faded into the past.
Starting with the troubling sex-obsessed melodrama Marnie in 1964, which marked the final time the director would work with his main lieutenants behind the camera, cinematographer Robert Burks and editor George Tomasini. It was also the last full Hitchcock picture to be scored by the legendary Bernard Herrman, who’d work on movies like Psycho and Vertigo was essential to their realisation. Marnie’s set was fraught with tension due to Hitchcock’s abusive behaviour towards the last “blonde” he’d ever use as a female lead in one of his films, Tippi Hedron.
The rest of the 1960s was a forgettable decade for the director before he managed to return to form for one final suspense thriller worthy of the name, the British-made Frenzy in 1972. This was his penultimate outing at the helm of a cinematic production.
So what happened next?
Hitchcock returned to Hollywood for one final picture in 1975, adapting Victor Canning’s novel The Rainbird Pattern for the big screen alongside screenwriter Ernest Lehman, who’d previously written the script of North by Northwest for him. Hitchcock had Lehman change the name of the screenplay to the catchier title Family Plot.
As final directorial features go, it’s far from the worst fare the veteran filmmaker could have served up. A tete-a-tete involving a faked death, a false identity and a fake psychic, as well as one of Hitchcock’s classic villains, Family Plot is a mild high to go out on. It’s gentle fun by the standards of Psycho, lightweight compared to Vertigo and hardly revolutionary alongside Rear Window, but it at least retains some of the character of a movie that’s unmistakably Hitchcock.
Bruce Dern and Karen Black led the big Hollywood names queuing up to appear in the film, while relative novice William Devane steals the show as killer conman Arthur Adamson. Al Pacino, Burt Reynolds, Faye Dunaway, Cybill Shepherd and Goldie Hawn were among the actors that the director turned down. On the other hand, Barbara Harris was the only actor he sought out personally, having tried to hire her for other roles in the past.
Alfred Hitchcock died four years after the completion of Family Plot at the age of 80. He never finished the development of his intended final work, a spy thriller called The Short Night. In any case, neither this unfinished project nor his final completed movie reckon with the full extent of his brilliance as a filmmaker. Still, although his prime years had already long gone, he achieved a more than respectable end to his career worthy of his legacy.
