Though less pretentious and preposterous than Torn Curtain and Topaz, less ludicrous than Marnie, and less offensive than Frenzy, [Family Plot] is still late Hitchcock, and not very good. (p. 84)
There are moments of inventiveness, here and there. When a woman tries to escape from a man in a cemetery whose paths are laid out like lines in a Mondrian painting (Hitchcock's own simile), there is something amusingly nutty about the pair's puny convergences and divergences, when mere cutting across a lawn could put an end to it all…. Let no one tell me that Hitchcock is not expressing once again his deep-rooted dislike of women, which first struck me in his treatment of the Madeleine Carroll character in The 39 Steps, and which reached its unappetizing apogee in a couple of scenes in Frenzy. Yet I could forgive the antifeminism, but not the contrivance and overextension.
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