Genre
Index

Home

After a string of disappointing films in Hollywood during the 1960s (films like Marnie, Torn Curtain, and Topaz), Alfred Hitchcock returned to England for his next to last movie. He was returning to his roots in more ways than one. Frenzy is, more or less, a remake of The Lodger , Hitchcock's 1928 Jack the Ripper thriller, in which our misunderstood hero is suspected of being a mass murderer. It is standard procedure anymore to declare that Hitchcock, the master filmmaker, was in decline during his last decade of filmmaking. I hold an opposing viewpoint. Hitch went through an even more troubling drought earlier in his career (around the time of Jamaica Inn and Under Capricorn) and his decade of "decline" is littered with interesting artifacts like Marnie, The Birds, and the murder sequence in Torn Curtain. And Frenzy, which is one of his best movies any way you slice it. But even Frenzy is something of an anomaly in his career.  I'll get to that later.

Frenzy is another of Hitchcock's "innocent man wrongly accused" films in which Our Hero is suspected of being the strangler who is terrorizing London. This is the only movie of this type he made after he made Psycho, and he imports some of the things he learned in Psycho into this movie. For instance, we get the point of view of the killer himself, and Hitchcock sets it ups so that we sympathize with him on a certain level. If we didn't sympathize with the killer, the sequence in which he attempts to hide a body on a potato truck (one of this film's bravura sequences), simply would not work. Hitch is very careful with this element, though. He goes to great pains to make the killer repellent, too. This film's infamous murder sequence, in which the killer rapes one of his victims then strangles her with a tie insures that the audience doesn't identify TOO closely with the killer. Frenzy has been severely critisized for this sequence, but it is an absolutely necessary scene. When provided the set-up for the next murder, we see the killer close the door on the audience and the camera glides languidly back into the street. Hitchcock doesn't need to show it to us twice, but this long retreat from the scene of the crime is actually somehow worse, I think, because we KNOW what is going on behind that door and we are impotent to stop it. Frenzy is filled with sequences like this. Hitchcock lost nothing as he aged. Frenzy is a tour de force, demonstrating at every turn Hitchcock's mastery of cinematic form.

And yet, as I said earlier, Frenzy is an anomaly in Hitchcock's career. I have seen arguments condemning violence in movies which use Hitchcock's films as an example of how to depict violence bloodlessly. "Hitchcock didn't need graphic violence," the argument goes, and to an extent, it's true. He didn't NEED graphic violence. But when given the opportunity to use it as a filmmaking tool in The Birds and then in Frenzy, he used it mercilessly. This surprises people, but it shouldn't. There are glimpses of it in Psycho, with its imfamous shower sequence and Mrs. Bates's slow dance in the flailing light in the basement; there are even more glimpses of it on Hitchcock's television show. The ferocity of the violence in Frenzy IS surprising, though. It is almost as if Hitchcock let every misanthropic tendency he had built up over the decades have free reign here. It has an interesting effect on the movie. Most of Hitchcock's movies are slick entertainments, all smooth lines and graceful curves--no rough edges as such. Frenzy has lots of rough edges. It depicts the swinging London of the early seventies with a kind of grottiness and squallor that is alien to Hitchcock's other films. The violence amplifies this.

Hitchcock made only one more film after Frenzy--the much maligned Family Plot (which isn't as bad as all that, actually)--but I prefer to think of Frenzy as his last movie. It nicely bookends his career and allows Hitchcock the dignity and grace of ending his career with a masterpiece.