Frenzy (1972) Film Review

Frenzy (1972) Director: Alfred Hitchcock

“Now, do I look like that sort of a bloke?”
“All blokes are that sort of bloke.”

Alfred Hitchcock’s penultimate film, and the final British film he made after already having relocated to Hollywood (the other two were Under Capricorn in 1949 and Stage Fright in 1950), 1972’s Frenzy carries many familiar themes that are replete throughout Hitchcock’s filmography –an innocent ordinary everyman character who becomes swept up in a plot he knows nothing about– and in some ways Frenzy is a return to Hitchcock’s early British works, such as the The Lodger, in that it is about a sadistic murderer roaming the streets of London. However, Frenzy is also a shocking black comedy that uses rape and murder as playful tools for toying with the audience’s capacity to remain unsettled. I recently went to see this film at a local independent theater with my Dad (who is a prolific reader of this blog!) and in the theater, several members of the audience decided to walk out on Frenzy early into the film. Suffice it to say, this is a challenging film to stomach at certain points, especially for modern audiences.

With a script based on Arthur La Bern’s novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square (1966), and adapted by Anthony Shaffer (the screenwriter for such murder mystery films as 1972’s Sleuth, 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express, 1978’s Death on the Nile, 1982’s Evil Under the Sun, and 1988’s Appointment with Death), Frenzy follows Richard “Dick” Blaney (Jon Finch), a divorced, working-class barman who always seems to be light on cash. He is a former RAF fighter and a heavy drinker and womanizer. At the start of the film, we are unsure if we can trust our protagonist. We see him pinching a drink at the pub where he is employed only to be caught and fired on the spot by his boss, Felix Forsythe (Bernard Cribbins). At the same time, he has been enjoying a dalliance with his co-worker, Babs Milligan (Anna Massey), and now his wallet is nearly empty. His life appears to be spiraling as he continues drinking and growing ever more embittered.

Now free of his job, Blaney walks the streets of London (in Covent Garden where Hitchcock was raised), and he happens upon a friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), a blond-haired, overly chatty comrade who runs a food stand on the street. Rusk is eager to help his friend, offering to give him money and encouraging him to bet 20 to 1 on a horse at the races called “Coming Up.” But all the chatter among ordinary people on the street is about a terrifying string of murders –dead women keep turning up who have been strangled to death with a necktie tied round their necks. Indeed, the film opens with a nude woman washing ashore in the Thames bearing only a necktie around her neck. The local press has started calling the mystery killer the “Necktie Murderer.” Here, Hitchcock weaves numerous bleak jokes into the film comparing supposedly posh British gentlemanly figures with the most vile forms of rape and murder. In one scene, a British politician calmly wonders if the nude woman floating in the river is actually wearing his own necktie (“I say, that’s not my club tie is it?”). In another scene, a pair of British men at a pub casually gab about the murders for an extended period, however they chuckle, taking apparent delight at the thought of raping someone. “He rapes them first, doesn’t he?” “Yes, I believe he does.” “Well, I suppose it’s nice to know that every cloud has a silver lining.” This whole sequence was reminiscent of the aloof, Victorian pair of cricket fans, Charters and Caldicott, as featured in Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes.

At any rate, Blaney visits his ex-wife Brenda Blaney (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) at her matchmaking company in London. Despite being drunk and angry, Brenda seems to be accepting and unthreatened by Blaney. In a clever bit of camerawork, Brenda’s secretary watches from the window in the background as she comes to believes Blaney has become angry and violent against Brenda. That evening, Blaney and Brenda have dinner together and Blaney causes a scene by smashing a glass, and despite all these concerning episodes, Brenda still allows him to come up to her flat afterward. At this point, we are unsure if Dick Blaney is actually the necktie murderer (taking out his lower-class anger on women in society). But in the subsequent scene –by far the most harrowing in the film—Bob Rusk stops by Brenda’s matchmaking company under an assumed name, “Mr. Robinson,” and we learn that he has been seeking women who match his peculiar tastes. Unlike when Blaney visited yesterday, Brenda seems visibly uncomfortable as Rusk looms over her and begins creepily complimenting her, calling her ‘his type.’ He grabs her and forcibly kisses her, and as she tries to escape, Rusk says that he locked her outer door, leaving them completely alone together. He tears Brenda’s clothes off and brutally rapes her while harrowingly repeating “lovely… lovely…” over and over (in this scene, Hitchcock deliberately makes the audience reach its maximum level of discomfort). And if that wasn’t enough, Rusk then strangles Brenda to death with his necktie, leaving her corpse seated in a ghastly position with her tongue bulging out of her mouth –here, Hitchcock allows the audience to learn the identity of the necktie murderer before the rest of the characters in the film are permitted to do so. This bit of dramatic irony plays an important role throughout the film.     

Moments later, after Rusk departs from Brenda’s business, Blaney strolls up but upon finding the door locked, he casually walks away, however he is spotted by Brenda’s secretary from afar as she returns from lunch. And when she finds her boss horribly murdered, Blaney becomes the top suspect in the murder case. Thus, he flees from the police out of fear that he will be framed. In the course of the mayhem, his girlfriend Babs is also raped and murdered by Rusk, and Blaney is briefly given safe harbor by friends who decide they must leave on holiday in Paris instead of helping him. Eventually, Blaney turns to Rusk for assistance, but Rusk has secretly framed Blaney and he turns his old friend over to the police, headed by Chief Investigator Timothy Oxford (Alec McCowen). As an aside, there is a hilarious gag running throughout the latter half of the film wherein Chief Investigator Oxford’s wife has been taking an “exotic cooking” course and preparing grotesque meals of pig’s feet and other unappetizing culinary experiments. It serves to highlight the passive aggressive tendencies (as opposed to the violence) lurking beneath a marriage as Hitchcock shows us the range of interactions between men and women in the film (married couples, ex-spouses, flings, relationships and so on). After his trial, Blaney is found guilty and imprisoned for the necktie murders. However, the chief inspector remains haunted by the case and he soon pieces together the clues that point to the true murderer –it was Rusk all along. At the same time, Blaney stages a faux suicide attempt and he escapes from jail in a fairly silly sleeping pill-hospital sequence. In the end, he is vindicated and Rusk is taken by Chief Inspector Oxford.

In addition to playing with tension, dramatic irony, and black comedy, in Frenzy Hitchcock also experiments with sounds and visuals, as violence often takes place offscreen (except in one notable sequence). There are several sequences of sexual violence wherein the camera frame stops just before entering the room, and in one memorable scene in particular, it slowly starts to backtrack out of a quiet hallway onto a crowded street (as if to remind us that screams will not be heard on the busy streets of London). The cinematography gives the audience an eerie, chilling sensation. Additionally, in one of the more macabre comedy sequences, Barry Foster as Bob Rusk can be seen hopping into the back of a potato truck where has just loaded the corpse of Babs, and while he is looking for his incriminating lapel pin on her corpse, the truck driver drives off unknowingly with Rusk and the corpse in the truckbed as potatoes go tumbling all over the road. It is the kind of absurd gag that only Hitchcock can get away with –and we in the audience cannot help but feel guilty chuckling at a murderer-rapist tumbling around in the back of a truck with piles of potatoes. At any rate, one of the major subversive themes in Frenzy is a psychological examination of gender dynamics in society. In Frenzy, men are continually claiming “Oh, I’m not that kind of bloke” only for Hitchcock to expose them again and again for being at least somewhat villainous. For example, consider when Blaney says: “Do I look like a sex murderer to you? Can you imagine me creeping around London, strangling all those women with ties? That’s ridiculous… For a start, I only own two.” Many of the most civilized, proper characters in the film are merely one step away from descending into bestial criminality like Rusk. While we can barely stomach the brutal rape scene between Rusk and Brenda, we can likewise hardly stand the extended scene wherein Hitchcock leaves the camera just out of sight as we wait anxiously to hear a scream from afar, or, in another case, to hear the judicial ruling against Blaney from outside the courtroom. In Frenzy, Hitchcock manages to once again drive the audience mad, perhaps leaving us in a state of “frenzy” throughout the movie, as we are often given either too much exposure to villainy, or an anxiety-inducing lack therein. We are aware that we are being toyed with by a master. In many respects Frenzy is appropriately regarded as Hitchcock’s last great film.

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Credits:

• Director: Alfred Hitchcock
• Writer: Anthony Shaffer
• Based on: Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern
• Produced by: Alfred Hitchcock
• Starring:
  • Jon Finch…..Richard “Dick” Blaney
  • Alec McCowen…..Chief Inspector Timothy Oxford
  • Vivien Merchant…..Mrs. Oxford
  • Barry Foster…..Bob Rusk
  • Anna Massey…..Babs Milligan
  • Barbara leigh-Hunt…..Brenda Blaney
  • Bernard Cribbins…..Felix Forsythe
  • Clive Swift…..Johnny Porter, the friend who briefly takes in Blaney
  • Billie, Whitelaw…..Hetty Porter
• Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor and Leonard J. South
• Editor: John Jympson
• Music by: Ron Goodwin
• Distributed by: Universal Pictures

Other Notes:

• Hitchcock Cameo: three minutes into the film, Hitchcock can be seen standing amidst a gaggle of photographers and journalists covering a politician speaking on the street when they suddenly spot the naked corpse of a woman wash ashore with a necktie around her neck.  
• For this film, Hitchcock hired all relative newcomers, claiming he preferred a “fresh face.”
• Hitchcock apparently rejected Henry Mancini’s initial score and chose Ron Goodwin instead to compose a score. The behind-the-scenes conflict was still painful for Mancini to talk about in later years.  
• Hitchcock offered the role of Rusk to Michael Caine who rejected the opportunity to play a sadist murderer on moral grounds and as result Hitchcock never spoke to him again (at least according to Michael Caine). Apparently, Vanessa Redgrave turned down the role of Brenda and Helen Mirren spoke with Hitchcock about playing Babs Milligan, but neither Mirren nor Hitchcock seemed to like each other so it didn’t work out.
• The location of the flat occupied by Bob Rusk (a.k.a. the “Necktie Murderer”) is at 3 Henrietta Street in Covent Garden, London. No. 31, Ennismore Gardens Mews, was used as the home of Brenda.
• Hitchcock filmed Frenzy as an homage to his upbringing in Covent Garden. He knew that it’s days as an open market were numbered and so he wanted to recreate the market scenes exactly as he remembered them from childhood (his father was a Covent Garden merchant). There is an anecdote told in a “Making-Of” documentary about Frenzy in which an elderly man visited the set one day and claimed to remember Hitchcock’s father as a vegetable dealer. Hitchcock then reportedly treated the man to lunch.