Frenzy

Movie Review: Frenzy

Year of Release: 1972
Country of Origin: UK
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Jon Finch, Barry Foster, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Anna Massey, Alec McCowen

Plot outline: A serial killer is murdering London women with a necktie. The police have a suspect, but he's the wrong man (IMDb).

Based on the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Bern, Frenzy is Hitchcock's penultimate movie. After many years working in the United States, Hitchcock returned to his native Britain to make this movie. After a pair of less successful movies about political intrigue and espionage, Hitchcock returned to his specialty, murder, with this movie. Frenzy opens with a wide shot along the Thames and then a zoom in to a ceremony on the banks of the river in which Londoners inaugurate legislation to rid the river of pollutants ... only to have the corpse of a naked woman wash ashore in the midst of it. Except for the scene of the rape and strangulation of Brenda that leaves the audience simply stunned, Frenzy has many of Hitchcock's trademarks: 1) The scene when the secretary comes back from lunch to discover what has happened since she left; the audience is made to wait what seems an eternity. 2) The scene when Babs goes into the killer's apartment; the camera then glides away from the apartment door, down the stairs, through the hall, out of the building, into the crowded and noisy streets, where the scene of the crime becomes just one room among many ... and we shudder with our own imagination that she is now having the same fate as Brenda. In suspense, as imagination is a very powerful thing, what you don't see can be a lot more frightening than what you do see. 3) The scene in the potato truck when the killer tries to retrieve the pin from Babs' dead fingers. To counter-balance the gruesome aspects of the movie, Hitchcock introduces a subplot story of chief inspector Oxford whose wife constantly feeds him nothing but gourmet meals that sound so foreign and look so horrible (!) In several scenes the detective and his wife discuss the case and the wife gently points the husband in the right direction with a series of simple but appropriate questions and comments. These scenes are so funny and charming (!) As in several other Hitchcock's movies, the audience is fully aware of the identity of the killer very early in the proceedings. Frenzy has a lot of suspense and humour - more sarcastic and sharper than ever. Hitchcock doesn't use big names, instead he chooses less famous names - they are all very good and effective. The setting, Covent Garden, becomes a "character" that constantly presses in upon the people that inhabit it. The last line of the movie should go down in history when chief inspector Oxford says to the killer: "Mr. Rusk, you're not wearing your tie." What a great finale (!) Though it's not a great classic like Rear Window or Vertigo, it's still a very good movie.

My judgment: *** out of 4 stars