Frenzy (1972)

 

Frenzy

(1972)

 

The film opens with a credit sequence that features a long helicopter shot following the Thames River, going under London’s Tower Bridge, and then closes in on a public speech by some nameless Politian. The score (by Ron Goodwin) is triumphant sounding, and given that the audience must know what kind of movie this is, it more than a little incongruous.

 

The music is a bit of a in-joke, actually a double-joke: first it is a symphonic fanfare welcoming the greatest film Director in English history, Alfred Hitchcock, back home (this would be his first film made in England in about twenty years, only his third since he moved to Hollywood about fifty years prior), and secondly, it is very much the kind of music you’d find in a film produced by a tourist board, but the politician’s speech is about pollution in the Thames, and the bulk of the rest of the film unfolds in over-crowded, dingy and smelly, low-to-middle-class neighborhood of Covent Garden (this film features a lot of location shooting that had become rare in Hitchcock’s movies decades prior).

 

And then the Politian’s speech is interrupted because a naked corpse has just washed ashore, and that is much more interesting to the spectators than anything he has to say.

 

No single Director is more important to Horror film than Alfred Hitchcock, yet across his long career, only four of his almost 60 films would fit comfortably within the Horror genre -- “The Lodger” (1927), “Psycho” (1960), “The Birds” (1963) and this one. It must be significant that three of those four films concern Serial Killers. Hitchcock had a profitable relationship with the very unseemly, but also very normal, human fascination with those who commit acts of unforgivable violence. He also was clearly more drawn to the compulsive violence of the individual deviant than that of the oppressive state.

 

In this movie he examines that perverse fascination, and in doing so, he also cruelly indicts the audience for their compulsive voyeurism (two guys at a bar discuss the “Necktie Murders” that are dominating the media, "It's been too long since the Christie murders; a good colorful crime spree is good for tourism," which refers to Real World Serial Killer, John Christie). Basically, Hitchcock is choosing to bite the hand that feeds him, and that hand seems to enjoy it because the movie proved a hit.

 

The roots of this story are in a real, and still unsolved, crime; a string of eight stranglings that happened between 1959 and 1964 wherein the victims were stripped naked and dumped in or near the river Thames in England. In one of the most callus and exploitive turns of the notoriously callus and exploitive British press, the Killer was nicknamed, “Jack the Stripper.” This case inspired multiple works of fiction, both prose and film, but important here is Arthur La Bern’s novel, “Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square” (1966), which was the basis Anthony Shaffer screenplay for this film. Shaffer was a significant Author whose novels and screenplays, whether they be Crime, Drama or Horror, generally share a less-that-positive view of human nature. The original novel was set in the 1950s and the Horrors of WWII haunt the proceedings and play a role in how the Police identify the wrong man as the Killer. The film is set almost two decades later and leaves that out, focusing instead a Peace-time version of moral decay. One could also see a connection to the Real-Life Christie murders, and an innocent man, Timothy Evans appears to have been hung for one of Christie’s killings.

 

This is considered Alfred Hitchcock’s last truly great film (it was also his second-to-last film). In some ways it broke new ground for him (more explicit in the sex and violence than ever before) but in most ways it was a return to old forms, similar to his films of the 1940s wherein an innocent accused of a terrible crime and full of gallows humor. But Hitchcock updated the 40s material in ways more significant than mere explicitness, this film is more misanthropic than any Hitchcock that came before for it, as if he was progressively losing faith in the human race, but it also analyzed of the misogynistic undercurrents of many of his previous films.

 

Hitchcock’s movies often thrived on eroticized domination of, threat to, and violence against, women. Here Hitchcock and did something truly shocking, he turned it upside-down, making a film about a Serial Rapist, told mostly from the POV of the male Characters, and in doing so casting a cold eye on the men’s image of their own masculinity whether they have committed a crime or not. Most of the female characters are likable, some are strong individuals, while most of the men are moral weaklings. One man earns our disgust after learning from another that a victim was raped before she was murdered states, “At least there was a silver lining.”

 

Here Hitchcock is exploring the difference between a conventional man and a Deviant. It’s not a rare objective, but there’re traps that most of Crime fiction falls into, one is elevating conventional morality in a pandering manner in the comparison, let’s face it, making a Serial Killer the comparison is setting the bar a bit low. Another trap is getting too enraptured in the excitement of being transgressive in a way that elevates the Serial Killer power above the conventional universe. Hitchcock avoids both by making his innocent accused somewhat less-than-appealing but his killer utterly repulsive. Our nominal hero is a screw-up, shares a few attributes with the Killer, and the film is pretty hard on him until he’s wrongfully accused. Even then, given how badly he’s mucked up his entire life, it seems as if it is an inconvenience that he’s not actually guilty – the moral obligations that his innocence creates is a real headache to several other people in the film.

 

Throughout his career, Hitchcock cast his films with beautiful people, his icey blondes like Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly and Kim Novak are the most famous, but his leading men were the likes of Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart and Paul Newman. Here he didn’t go for either big stars or even the exceptionally attractive, the gifted cast who were unknown in the USA, and a goodly number of them have been far better looking in other films. He was pursuing an image of averageness that hinted on an embrace of realism, something he had steadfastly avoided except for the under-rated “The Wrong Man” (1956), obviously also about the wrongfully accused.

 

But in “The Wrong Man,” the protagonist was the tremendously appealing Henry Fonda, while here we’re offered Jon Finch playing Richard Blaney, a former RAF Officer who can’t fit in outside the service, divorced and economically marginal who, after being fired from his job as a bartender, doesn’t even have a place to sleep. He’s short tempered, blames others for his troubles, and on a certain exceptionally wrong day to do it, goes to his far more successful ex-wife for sympathy. He behaves badly, but unremarkably so. Fate is against him, and that behavior creates a strong circumstantial case that he was the one who murdered his ex- the very next day.

 

Barbara Leigh-Hunt plays Brenda Margaret Blaney, the ex-wife, who runs a matchmaking service. She is the victim that film spends the most time with, first a well-developed character then her death scene is a full ten minutes long, most likely influenced by the similar scene in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring” (1960)). One of the film’s themes is men’s discomfort with the new assertiveness and independence of women and Brenda’s personal success is contrasted sharply with Richard’s perennial failures; that it is a blow to his masculinity is explicit. But Richard doesn’t hate women, in fact, even given his short temper, he doesn’t seem to hate anyone (at least until very late in the film), and therein seems to be the line between him and the Killer.

 

The film doesn’t disguise the Killer’s identity for very long, he proves to be Richard’s friend Robert Rusk, played by Barry Foster, who is a modestly more successful and polished version of Richard (note they share the same first initial). Even before his true nature is revealed, Robert’s little bit of more polish is off-putting. When his true Monstrous is revealed, toying with Brenda, smashing her confidence with implied menace (telling “You’re my type of woman” after he’s been told to leave) and exploding with violence only when she realizes she hopelessly trapped. It is one of cinema’s best explorations of how sex crimes most often more often about a lust to assert power than a lust for sex. Other than when in the midst of a criminal act, Robert is all façade, almost always smiling and friendly and going out of his way to appear helpful, he even insists on calling himself “Uncle Bob.” Circumstance and coincidence first Richard in the cross-hairs of the Police, but it that wasn’t enough for Uncle Bob, he takes active steps to frame Richard, and that will ultimately prove his undoing (Real-Life Serial Killer Christie assisted in the prosecution of almost certainly innocent Evans).

 

The next significant killing is that of Richard’s nominal girlfriend Barbara Milligan, played by Anna Massey, her death scene is the film’s most famous sequence. Barbara was a good-hearted, sympathetic character, but naive. Her faith in Richard is a failing, and Richard being, in fact, innocent, doesn’t change that, because Barbara’s heart invites hurt into her life. Fatefully, she turns to Uncle Bob, hoping he will help Richard. Uncle Bob agrees and invites her upstairs to his apartment. The camera precedes them up the stairs, watches them go through the door (Uncle Bob says to Barbara, “You’re my type of woman,” just before they both disappear), and then backs down the stairs in silence, as it exits the building’s door the sounds of the city begin to intrude, a teeming community unaware of how close they are to a Horror.

 

The film’s second most famous sequence immediately follows: After disposing of poor Barbara’s body in the back of a potato truck, he realizes that on Barbara’s corpse is a piece of incriminating evidence. He runs back to the market and climbs into the truck to retrieve it, but moments later the truck pulls out with Uncle Bob trapped in the back. Uncle Bob struggling with one potato-sack-after-another to find the one with the corpse. The bumps it the road tossing him around and even causing the corpse to kick him in the face. The corpses rigor-frozen fingers refuse to let go of the damning evidence. We are so close to Uncle Bob’s POV that, for this one scene, we are almost sympathetic to the Monster.

 

And then the unkindest cut to Richard of them all. Already being sought by Police, and a married couple, the Porters played by Clive Swift and Billie Whitelaw, put him up over-night. They could serve as alibi witnesses and clear him of Barbara’s death, which then could lead him to being cleared of all the killings. But they don’t want to get involved, admitting to the Police that they harbored him would complicate their lives and ruin their vacation plans.

 

This film’s venomous view of humanity is best demonstrated by the Porters, even more so than through Uncle Bob who obviously deviant. But there’s also a scolding view of many social classes’ contemptuous view of authority figures, and there the film hints at having a certain degree of political content.

 

Despite Hitchcock making a number of fine Espionage films including ones with explicit anti-Fascist and anti-Communist messaging, a serious examination of Political violence was almost never a subject of Hitchcock’s movies. During WWII he did work on a documentary of the Nazi abominations but it was never completed and the horrors of the Holocaust are never addressed in his post-war films. In Hitchcock’s films often had a tension between a distrust of, and a desperate need for, authority figures; I doubt there’s another Director in history who made more films about wrongfully accused and his most appealing Detectives were rarely Cops, he preferred amateurs. Even in his espionage films, his heroes were rarely Professionals, but common folk pressured into service by circumstance, so victims of the system like the wrongfully accused in other films. Yet in all those films I can’t think of any films concerning a corrupt Cop or American or British Intelligence engaging in nefarious subversion of their own Nations’ Democracies.

 

"Frenzy" features Hitchcock’s most appealing Policeman, Chief Inspector Oxford, played by Alec McCowan, and it becomes increasingly obvious that if the residents of Covent Gardens, especially Richard, were not so reflexively hostile to Cops like Oxford, innocent Richard would’ve never been arrested, indicted, convicted, and imprisoned (a process that takes less than three minutes, a notable contrast to the amount of running-time devoted to the crimes themselves).

 

In most Hitchcock films, the main Characters were of was, at the time this film was released, starting to be called, the “jet-set,” or some other form of economic elite. This film is mostly about the lower- and laboring-classes, and I don’t think the film’s suddenly kinder view of Authority figures was entirely coincidental.

 

The plot is heavily dependent on coincidences that pile up and entrap poor Richard, often a difficult thing to sell in a film, which is probably why Hitchcock assumed the mannerisms of realism for the bulk of the film’s length. After the last scene with the Porter’s, the driver of the plot shifts to the deliberate machinations of the characters, and Hitchcock switches back to the exquisite artificiality that distinguished most of his best films in the past. This was unfortunate, for me at least, because I loved his unusual interpretations of the realist forms and missed them as the evaporated in the film’s later passages. But as this happened, Oxford takes center stage, and he’s wonderful character, saving the film for me.

 

Oxford is, amusingly, a victim of a sort of oppression as well. His wife, played by Vivian Merchant, is obsessed with experimenting in the kitchen and the meals she inflicts on him are comically horrific. Hitchcock was mocking the home-chef craze launched by Julie Robert’s phenomenally successful and much imitated cooking TV show, “The French Chef” (first aired 1962, probably in syndication in England by the time this film was made, and even if not, much imitated in the Island Nation). Oxford proves entirely hen-peck by her, but it was also her badgering at the dinner-table ("Women's intuition is worth more than laboratories. I don't know why you don't teach it in police colleges.") that leads him to re-examine the “Necktie Murders” even after he obtained Richard’s conviction.

 

Richard’s being cleared feels weird in this film. It’s obviously the point if the conclusion, but it doesn’t come across as cathartic or triumphant, just a mechanical process of tying up loose ends. The film switches from an intelligent study of the intersection of the lives of many characters to a mechanical Agatha Christie mystery with a revenge sub-plot. But this faltering constitutes less than the films last half hour, and the very last scene is a sardonic triumph.

 

Trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gWjZpkkkIs