"Frenzy" Review

 

by Daniel White

Who says you can't go home again? In Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), the famed director returns to the London of his childhood. With portions of his penultimate film set in Covent Garden where his father worked as a green grocer, it's a fond tribute to the city. Above all, it's a rippingly good comic thriller. Released by Universal Pictures, the flick opens high above London. As the credits roll and the urgent music plays, we are propelled forward, under the Tower Bridge, to the banks of the Thames. There, the body of a naked woman floats. She has been strangled, with a tell tale neck tie wrapped around her throat.

Hitchcock was in his early seventies when he helmed Frenzy, an age when many of the great masters of cinema begin to lose their grip. But not Hitch, this is a skillfully executed piece of filmmaking, as taut and tightly-crafted as anything he ever directed. Hitchcock was never interested in mystery, we know who the killer is thirty minutes into the flick. No, in Frenzy, he plays upon a common theme of his: the wrong man.

Jon Finch is Richard Blaney, an angry young bloke who is prone to physical outbursts. Fired from his job as a barman, and down on his luck, Blaney becomes Scotland Yard's main suspect in the "Necktie Murders" when his ex-wife becomes the latest victim. Hunted by the police then framed by the real killer (Barry Foster), Blaney's fate is uncertain, right up until the final suspenseful moments of the movie.

Playwright Anthony Shaffer penned the screenplay and despite a couple of contrivances that stretch credulity, it is a sturdy framework from which the director can work his magic. All of the players are excellent, in particular the quirky Vivien Merchant, as a policeman's wife. She may serve up some hideous gourmet dishes that her husband (a wonderful Alec McCowen) can't stomach, but her intuition is spot on. But it is the Hitchcock touches that are most striking. Despite one ghastly on-screen killing, much of the film is played for gallows humor, including an extended grisly comic mishap set inside a lorry transporting potatoes.

Some may protest that drawn-out, explicit, and very disturbing murder. It is difficult to watch and had me squirming. But it is how Hitchcock treats the second murder that is superlative. The killer and the victim enter a flat together, we know what's about to happen. But instead of going in, Hitchcock pulls back, down the stairs and out into the street. He spares us another visual assault. It's a subtle, masterful piece of film work that brilliantly complements the previous display of violence.

I have often balked at the way cinema pundits have placed Alfred Hitchcock high atop a motion picture pedestal. But in watching Frenzy, even I have to admit: this guy was good!

Finally, I want to pay tribute to Billie Whitelaw, Jean Marsh, with a special shout out to Anna Massey and Barbara Leigh-Hunt. With an eerily appropriate musical score by Ron Goodwin, Frenzy is available on YouTube.