Family Plot is a dazzling achievement for Alfred Hitchcock masterfully controlling shifts
from comedy to drama thoughout a highly complex
plot. Witty screenplay, transplanting Victor Canning's British novel, The Rainbird Pattern , to a California setting, is a model of construction, and the cast is uniformly superb.
Bruce Dern and Barbara Harris are the
couple who receive primary attention, a cabbie and a phony psychic trying to find the
long-lost heir to the Rainbird fortune.
Dern is a more than slightly absurb figure, oddly appealing; Harris is sensational.
William Devane takes a high place in the roster of Hitchcockian rogues,^while Karen Black, gives a deep resonance to her relationship with the mercurial Devane.