List Price:   $19.98 Price:   $17.99 find out more information

Buy posters from this movie

A tale of the seamy underbelly of modern-day (in 1970) London, Hitchcock ironically starts off his final ‘innocent man/mistaken identity’ thriller by helicoptering down the river Thames to an bombastically upbeat musical orchestration. Skillfully following the latest “necktie murder” with a shot of our hero Richard Blaney (fresh from Medieval Macbeth, Jon Finch) hurriedly doing up his necktie, Hitchcock slyly introduces us to his most unpleasant lead character.

Fired in his first scene for “pinching” gin from his pub owner’s bottles before work, Dick Blaney is immediately shown to us as disagreeable, highly irrational, and short-fused. After being given the push, Blaney heads off through Convent Garden market place (accompanied again, with a romantic interlude of beautiful music) to meet his only good friend, Bob Rusk. A charming (though somehow off-putting) blonde fruit vendor, Rusk (Barry Foster) turns out to be the worst friend Blaney could have. Things stack up against Dick after his ex-wife becomes the latest murder victim, and he appears at the scene of the crime only minutes after it happened - talk about bad timing. We - and not Blaney - learn the identity of the real killer, which Hitchcock uses against us to ratchet up the suspense level, as Blaney unconsciously makes gaffe after gaffe trying to clear his name.

In plotting the legal side of Frenzy, Alec McCowan somehow manages to steal the show from all other performers as the hysterically sarcastic Chief Inspector. McCowan and his onscreen wife Vivien Merchant chew over the grisly details of the various murders while Merchant, who is taking a gourmet cooking class, serves her disgusted husband the most stomach-turning gastronomical ‘delights’ imaginable. The two of them are the only likeable folks we encounter the entire movie, thus adding the important injection of Hitchcockian comic relief between episodes of horror and suspense.

As in Hitchcock’s Psycho, the true hero of Frenzy exists in two halves. On one side we have the arrogant, pugnacious Richard Blaney; a crude drunk whose only virtue is his innocence. On the other we have Bob Rusk, a respectable gentleman of business, with a kindly old mother whose picture rests prominently on his dressing table; a charming, good-looking man who happens to violently rape and murder half of the film’s female contingent.

All sympathy aside, it is hard to like either man on paper, but we somehow find ourselves rooting for both of them, and are shocked at how relieved we feel when Rusk extricates himself from some rather sticky situations involving potato sacks and broken fingers. If only the hero were a good-looking man of business, who didn’t drink, swear, or turn out to be a serial murderer... but then that wouldn’t be Hitchcock, would it?

At age 71, with 51 feature films under his triple-XL belt, Alfred Hitchcock’s creative engine was, pacemaker and all, still working at full tilt. Frenzy is by far one of his riskiest, most technically stimulating films. It appeased his life-long goal to make movies with pictures instead of words. Even though the script is brilliantly written by Sleuth’s Anthony Shaffer, Hitchcock’s camera is, as usual, the main attraction.

‘Pure Cinema’ was a phrase he quoted often, describing ‘shower-scene’-ideals in which the juxtaposition of images create the main emotional effects, and many moments in Frenzy have his camera telling us things far more poetically than any amount of words could. He knew the power of an image; when to cut and why, when to let a scene play itself without interruption, and always (always) where to put the camera in the best possible place to tell the story.

Watch how Hitch’s camera is invisible as it leads Rusk and a victim up the stairs to his apartment; we don’t notice its presence at all. Then, after the door closes and we know what the woman’s fate will be, the camera suddenly becomes a living being, an organism. It is us; as though Hitchcock were right there himself, leading us by the hand back down the stairs, seeing only what he wants us to see. We creep slowly down those stairs – methodically – cautious not to make a sound, and then out the lobby door we go, into the deafening roar of the street. I cannot think of a more remarkable, effective use of a ‘one-shot’ in Hitchcock’s work.

You’re along for the ride, and Hitchcock controls all the stops in between. Sometimes he will take your ears away from you, as in the pivotal moment where Babs (Anna Massey, perfectly Cockney and just Jon Finch’s type) stands in an extreme close-up and all the traffic noise drains away just in time to hear Rusk’s voice whisper in her ear. Other times he’ll crank the volume way up, to let you know your screams will go unheard: that no one is there to save you. Next he’ll jab you in the stomach with rapid cuts, splicing together tiny bits of horror into a canvas of evil.

But, thankfully, he’ll also make you laugh. He turns boring exposition scenes into witty banter, and lets dinner table conversation play out as belly-laugh black humor. He lets you see a hundred shots in five minutes, and then says, ‘nope, you’re only getting a sense of this one - fill in the gaps on your own’.

Best of all, Hitch gives us our money’s worth. He lets us laugh at ugliness one minute, and gasp at it the next. He reaffirms himself. 1972 was nine years after The Birds - the last time he truly shocked us - and Frenzy proved he hadn’t lost his touch. Not a bit.

Master of Suspense?? This is why.

 del.icio.us    
link directly to this review at http://efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=2166&reviewer=364
originally posted: 02/14/05 22:41:36
 printer-friendly format