The penultimate film from the master of suspense is a nasty piece of work.
Editor's note: The following contains references to sexual assault. In a career that spanned six decades, Alfred Hitchcock justifiably became known as the master of suspense for films such as North by Northwest and Psycho. However, by the early seventies he was coming off a pair of disappointing spy thrillers, Torn Curtain and Topaz, when he returned to London for what would be his penultimate movie, Frenzy. Hitchcock was over 70 at the time and the film was shot around Covent Garden, the area where he grew up and set his first pictures. However, Frenzy is far from a mild victory lap by a director in the twilight of his career. Rather, it’s Hitchcock’s most graphic and disturbing film, and one that is still a troubling watch today – perhaps more so than at the time of release.
Frenzy begins with the discovery of a woman’s corpse in the Thames, the latest victim of the “Necktie Strangler.” Shortly afterwards, Dick Blaney (Jon Finch) is fired from his job as a bartender and commiserates with his greengrocer friend, Bob Rusk (Barry Foster). Secretly the serial killer, Rusk rapes and kills both Blaney’s ex-wife, Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), and girlfriend, Babs (Anna Massey). Blamed for the murders, Blaney seeks revenge on Rusk.
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Opening with a tracking shot along the Thames towards Tower Bridge, Frenzy’s musical fanfare and the superimposed "City of London" crest suggest the start of a tourist information film as much as a thriller. It’s a typical Hitchcock misdirection, as moments later a naked corpse is shown face down in the river. This graphic image lingers as bystanders crowd to see, immediately signaling that Frenzy is a different beast to the director’s earlier films. Psycho’s shower scene had shocked audiences in 1960 with its nudity and violence, but this was mainly achieved by a series of fast cuts and suggestion. In Frenzy's opening, the exposed body is shown in a single long take, before cutting away to the crowd, and then back again as police collect it from the river. Hitchcock had always been a master of implying more than he showed, but here the body is displayed in a matter-of-fact manner that lacks the stylization of earlier films and prefigures what is to come.
The scene in which Rusk sexually assaults and then strangles Brenda is analogous to Psycho’s shower scene, although its graphic content and flat execution are starkly different. As in Psycho, the violence comes without warning and from an unexpected source. In its first half hour Frenzy does a good job of suggesting that the Necktie Strangler is Blaney, who has a fraught relationship with women and anger management issues. Rusk is first introduced as Blaney’s “cheeky chappie” mate, seemingly a supporting character. When he appears at Brenda’s marriage agency it comes as a surprise – the viewer is unaware they knew one another at that point. We learn that Brenda considers Rusk an inappropriate client after disclosing his sadistic urges during the matching process.
Earlier in the film two doctors in a pub are overheard discussing the motivations of the Necktie Strangler in a classic piece of Hitchcock pseudo-psychiatry, recalling the doctor’s explanation of Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) at the end of Psycho. That scene was necessary for audience members who, in 1960, might have been completely perplexed as to why a character would dress up as his mother and kill people. In Frenzy, the experts do the explaining before the violence, with one doctor labeling the strangler a “criminal sexual psychopath” who progressively gets more and more pleasure from the act of killing.
This plays out in the scene where Brenda is raped, which is portrayed as a chillingly mechanical act by Rusk. It’s only when the ordeal ends that he shows any emotion, verbally abusing and then strangling her with his tie. While the sexual assault is confronting, focusing on Brenda’s frozen terror, the resulting murder is equally graphic. Here the camera dwells on a close-up of the victim’s throat being constricted and her eyes in the moment of death. Editing is minimal, with the camera showing the action of murder in a manner unthinkable in earlier Hitchcock films. The scene’s final affront comes as Rusk casually leaves the office, cutting back to Brenda, staring dead-eyed with the tie wrapped around her neck. In a macabre detail, her bloated tongue sticks out of her mouth. It’s a shocking image, perhaps Hitchcock’s most extreme, and calculated to challenge what the viewer can handle.
Hitchcock had depicted many killers with complex sexual motivations, such as Norman Bates and Joseph Cotton’s “Merry Widow Murderer” in Shadow of a Doubt. But previously the focus was on the act of murder rather than sexual assault, no doubt because of censorship at the time. Frenzy was released in the year after Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs had challenged what was acceptable to show on screen. Straw Dogs was controversial, and highly questionable in excusing misogyny through the idea all humans are irredeemably cruel and violent. Frenzy has the same low opinion, although Hitchcock had long employed a general misanthropy to justify attacks on his female characters. Perhaps he felt the need to keep up with the inevitable trend towards ever more graphic content in the seventies, which progressed with mainstream films such as Death Wish. Hitchcock had always been known for suspense, but the posters for Frenzy reframe him as “The Master of Shock.” The film certainly favors shock over suspense, leading to a flatter experience than his earlier films. The censor had necessitated the innovation of Psycho's shower scene, with Hitchcock using sleight of hand in the editing to suggest more than was being shown. If there’s an argument that restriction can push artists to creative heights, then its supported by the unfavorable comparison between Psycho and Frenzy.
The part of Frenzy where Hitchcock most clearly reverts to his trademark suspense is one that challenges audience identification. After killing Blaney's girlfriend, Babs, Rusk places her body on the back of a truck. This long sequence centers on Rusk as he struggles to maneuver the potato sack in which Babs is hidden and then realizes she grabbed his tie pin when he killed her. Going to retrieve the pin, he gets trapped in the truck as it drives away, desperately trying to find the evidence and finally breaking Babs' fingers to retrieve it. It seems a particularly cruel exercise, one which culminates with Rusk escaping and Babs’ naked corpse falling from the truck onto the road.
Hitchcock had pulled a similar trick in Psycho, where the central character in the first part of the film, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh), is killed. There’s a vertiginous moment as the viewer loses the point of focus (Marion) and has to settle on the next available character (Norman) as he disposes of the body. The novice assumes that Norman is covering for his mother’s murder, but even on repeat viewing the audience can transfer identification because Norman is sympathetic, seemingly other to the character who kills. It was part of Hitchcock’s stock-in-trade, a flexing of the director’s power to bend audience identification to his will. However, Rusk is an abhorrent character, demonstrated in terrible detail through the scene with Brenda, and here the technique is likely to leave the viewer feeling queasy rather than thrilled.
To a contemporary audience, Frenzy is a film containing many such oddities and contradictions. The scenes set in the pubs, apartments, and markets of Covent Garden look like they’re from an even earlier time than the seventies. The soundtrack, by Ron Goodwin, feels parochially British and has none of the sweeping intensity Bernard Herrmann gave Hitchcock’s great works. Even the lettering of the opening titles recalls British films of the forties and fifties, in stark contrast to the modernism Saul Bass brought to the incredible title sequences of Vertigo and Psycho. The main characters are surrounded by a cast of comedic pub landlords, hotel porters, and mustachioed coppers who display either a prudish view of sex or a nudge-nudge wink-wink attitude that could be straight from a Monty Python sketch. This depiction of London probably looked dated even to audiences of the time, with Hitchcock invoking his early British films Blackmail and Young and Innocent in Frenzy’s setting and plot. There’s none of the fading glamour of “swinging London” here, although Rusk is initially presented as a cockney “ladies man” in the style of a young Michael Caine (Hitchcock’s first choice to play Rusk, who turned down the role because he was repulsed by the character). At times the film resembles a low rent sex comedy as much as a thriller.
These antiquated elements sit very uneasily with the scenes of rape and murder. By way of mitigation, there’s a suggestion the violence represents a dark undercurrent essential to the character of London. After Brenda’s body is discovered we hear her secretary’s scream from the street – two women look up, shrug, and walk on. When Babs is murdered, the camera pulls down the staircase of Rusk’s apartment building and into the market, where normal business continues undisturbed. Most significantly, when the first body is found in the Thames, the excited onlookers discuss the killer in reference to Jack the Ripper, suggesting a continuum of abuse and murder accepted as a working class fact of life in the city.
The screenwriter of Frenzy was Anthony Schaffer, whose Sleuth and The Wicker Man also frame murder around issues of class and sexual attitudes. His script clearly has comedic intent, especially poking fun at middle class pretensions. However, fifty years on from the film’s release, it’s hard to interpret what audiences of the time would have found satirical and what simply depicts ingrained attitudes. In discussing the murders, Rusk tells Blaney that the victims were “asking for it,” reflective of his twisted viewpoint. Yet the same sentiment is expressed by other characters throughout the film, significantly the doctors and the police investigator, suggesting a generally held belief. Contemporary films, such as Edgar Wright’s Last Night in Soho, have interrogated the period and its abuses through a revisionist lens, but Frenzy is of the time and suffused with these assumptions. Hitchcock’s depiction of women had always been problematic, but Frenzy reaches new levels of misogyny as the female characters either attempt to imprison men through the stultifying bonds of marriage or are available victims, soon to be assaulted and strangled. For a director who had previously shunned nudity in his films, Frenzy maintains an obsessive focus on the naked and dead bodies of women to the bitter end.
“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” is a sentiment that comes to mind when watching Frenzy as it reaches fifty years old. It lacks the grace of Hitchcock’s best work, perhaps deliberately so on the part of an aging director seeking to maintain his position. It’s a film full of coded messages and attitudes that no longer have currency, many of which might escape a modern audience completely – such as the suggestion in his clothes and walk that Rusk is homosexual – but would have played only too clearly to the stereotypes of the time. It certainly points to Hitchcock venturing into increasingly more brutal work were he not coming to the end of his movie career, which culminated with the lightweight Family Plot. Given the suspense, style, and beauty of his earlier work compared to the crude extremes of Frenzy, perhaps that’s something for which we can be grateful.
Andrew Taylor is a Melbourne-based writer who loves Hitchcock, giallo movies and 'Dog with a Blog.'
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