The Hitchcock Players: Barbara Harris, Family Plot

Alfred Hitchcock famously loved his blondes, and they didn't come much more lovable than Barbara Harris. A Broadway star during the 1960s who later shifted her attentions towards film, Harris was at the peak of her talent in Family Plot, a delightful if minor Hitchcock entry distinguished by a fine quartet of American leads (Karen Black, William Devane and Bruce Dern are the others) among whom Harris stands apart.

Indeed, by the time of the conspiratorial wink from Harris that closes the film, audiences will surely find themselves already grinning right back.

As it happens, Family Plot was Hitch's 56th film and also his last, and he seems to have taken its casting unusually to heart: the trailer features the director intoning a roll call of his cast like a proud papa. And reteaming with Ernest Lehman, his screenwriter on North by Northwest, the director was working in the essentially genial mode of To Catch a Thief, except that this film features not one leading blonde (Grace Kelly) but two: Black (wearing a wig) and Harris, the two reteaming after sharing the screen the previous year in Robert Altman's seismic Nashville. (In that, Harris played the tentative ditz whose singing accompanies the final credits.)

Sunglasses adding to her cloak-and-dagger presence, Black is a low-voiced hoot as the mercenary Fran, girlfriend to the thieving jeweller played by Devane. But the film essentially belongs to Harris, playing a fraudulent psychic with the theatrical name of Madame Blanche. Her kewpie-doll appeal well-matched with the breezy dimness of the cab driver and actor played by Dern (pictured above right), Harris looks as if she is having the time of her life. And in a rare interview given a decade ago, the actress, now 77 and long retired to Arizona, admitted that she pretty much was. The performance brought her a Golden Globe nod.

A sort of West Coast Madame Arcati, Madame Blanche may be a scam artist but she's sweet with it, and it's Hitch's gift that he never patronises two characters (Dern's being the other) who aren't exactly the swiftest of intellects. Harris, for her part, went on to other films - Freaky Friday and The Seduction of Joe Tynan arguably the best-known - before calling time on her career. "I've grown very fond of that girl," Hitch lets on in the trailer (see below). And rightly so.  

Watch the trailer for Family Plot