Ex-RAF officer down on his luck falls victim to a series of increasingly incriminating coincidences and circumstantial ghosts from his past as a friend of his continues his career as the Necktie Murderer. Jon Finch provides a believably flawed hero in Blaney whose post military life has been a series of missteps that have all but obscured his natural goodness. As his foil Barry Foster's Bob Rusk is all Cockney charm that ends as soon as his urges turn to frenzy. Between these points are the gang of hinderers and helpers that you'd expect from a Hitchcock movie plus one of his best police characters (Chief Inspector Oxford played by Alec McCowen). The cast also includes Samuel Beckett's favourite Billie Whitelaw, dependably severe and intimidating, and Anna Massey of whom more later.
And the setting is the updated London of his earliest features but now updated if a little weary after its days of swinging. Scotland Yard has become the gleaming rotating sign and glass skyscrapers of New Scotland Yard. If Hitch's Londoners were always on the grown-up side they now are more worldly and grumpy. It feels, if anything, like the London of 10 Rillington Place but there is another spectre hanging over it that needs a mention.
Psycho was released in 1960 so was, back in the U.K. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a violent and confronting serial killer film that drew on the building blocks of cinema itself. Psycho further consolidated Hitchcock's name and reputation. Peeping Tom damn near destroyed Powell (who sentenced himself to transportation and made a few features in Australia). As a fan of Peeping Tom and the extra mile it goes toward the gravity of its central monster and the disturbing origins of his condition I find watching Frenzy impossible not to compare the two. I don't mean in how far they go in depicting violence or sex crimes (both films feature sexually motivated murder) but in that icy worldliness. The masturbation joke by the shop keeper in the earlier film has a direct descendant in the sleazy rape joke in Frenzy. In both we get the other side. Peeping Tom's Mark takes the kind of photos that the newsagent sells to knowing customers as "views". That smirking rape joke is wiped off its teller's face when he beholds a victim in the morgue (it's subtle but it's clear). And I can't help but wonder if the casting of Anna Massey was intentional. She went to the edge as Mark's would be girlfriend and then has an extended acquaintance with sexual violence in Frenzy. There's even a very impressive long take in that moment that takes us from the scene to the murmuring everyday world which invokes the walking camera of the opening of Peeping Tom. What do I make of this? Mostly coincidence but I do like to fancy that it is Hitchcock's acknowledgement of his fellow cinemaster who took one for the team all those years ago.
As well, there is a great deal of Hitchcockian humour on show from the Inspector's wife's faddish and hideous culinary experiments (Vivien Merchant who gives us more than the screenplay would allow) and the near unbearable suspense of a ride in the back of a lorry to retrieve evidence among a mass of potatoes. Most unsettling is the continued rapport between the accused killer and the real one throughout; jolly friends but for that one divergent flaw.
Frenzy finds Hitchcock in the familiar territory of an innocent fugitive and a rounded villain as well as the physical territory of his own youth. His adaptability makes me think of other filmmakers who have not been so agile in the face of changing times. Scorsese's more recent efforts feel older fashioned than the '70s films that broke his name and I don't mean the period settings. Dario Argento has struggled with shifts in the culture since the '80s. There are more but these will do. Hitch could make it like today whenever today was. He even went out on a 'convincing '70s style black comedy with Family Plot. Frenzy feels less dated than the work of those he influenced. Says lot.
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