Frenzy (Alfred Hitchcock, 1972)

Anna Massey and Barry Foster in Frenzy

Richard Blaney: Jon Finch
Robert Rusk: Barry Foster
Brenda Blaney: Barbara Leigh-Hunt
Babs Milligan: Anna Massey
Chief Inspector Oxford: Alec McCowen
Mrs. Oxford: Vivien Merchant
Hetty Porter: Billie Whitelaw
Johnny Porter: Clive Swift
Felix Forsythe: Bernard Cribbins
Monica Barling: Jean Marsh

Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer
Based on a novel by Arthur La Bern
Cinematography: Gilbert Taylor
Film editing: John Jympson

Frenzy is so often called a "return to form" by critics commenting on Alfred Hitchcock's films that it's worth parsing that phrase a bit. What's generally meant is that after the triumph of Psycho (1960), Hitchcock's films seemed to decline in quality: To the critics of the day, The Birds (1963) felt like a gimmicky monster movie, Marnie (1964) an overdone, miscast psychological drama, Torn Curtain (1966) and Topaz (1969) attempts to cash in on the James Bond-era vogue for spy movies. Later generations of critics have found intelligent things to say about some of these films (though there are few ardent defenders of Torn Curtain and Topaz), largely because of their ability to see the Hitchcock oeuvre as a whole and to work in the revelations of the Hitchcock biographers about the director's obsessions and predilections. But Frenzy was for many mainstream critics what Roger Ebert called it: "the kind of thriller Hitchcock was making in the 1940s, filled with macabre details, incongruous humor, and the desperation of a man convicted of a crime he didn't commit." I would qualify that observation with the remark that Frenzy is the kind of film Hitchcock couldn't have made in the 1940s because of the Production Code's restrictions on nudity, sex outside of marriage, and excessive violence. Liberated from the Code, Frenzy is rated R. And I think Hitchcock's delighted rush into the new era of frankness in film may have had a destructive effect on his ability to maintain consistency of tone. A scene like the rape-murder of Brenda Blaney belongs to a different kind of film than the domestic comedy of Inspector Oxford and his gourmet-cook wife, and there's something a little too sick about the snap of Mrs. Oxford's bread stick as her husband is recounting how Rusk had to break Babs Milligan's fingers to retrieve his stickpin. There is no heart in the film, the way there was in films of the 1940s like Shadow of a Doubt (1943) or Notorious (1946), in which we could feel anxiety over the plight of the characters. Hitchcock does seem to want us to feel some real-world horror at Brenda's reciting Psalm 91 and trying to cover her bared breast as she's being raped, but even that invocation of sympathy feels out of place later, especially when Babs's corpse is treated for comedy when her feet keep finding their way into Rusk's face. And a "joke" like that of the man in the pub who quips "every cloud has a silver lining" on learning that the killer rapes his victims before strangling them should never have found its way onto film. There is much to admire in Frenzy: Hitchcock never did a more skillful scene than the one in which the camera follows Babs and Rusk up to the flat where we know she's going to die, and then silently retreats back down the stairs and across the busy street. Alec McCowen and Vivien Merchant skillfully play the comedy of the husband and wife dinner table scenes -- the soupe aux poissons is particularly unappetizing. I especially like the bit in which Mrs. Oxford offers a drink to the sergeant who brings news of the case to the inspector: It's a new cocktail called a "margarita," she explains, made with what she pronounces "tekwila." The sergeant has to leave, however, so she swigs the drink he has abandoned and then, with a rather odd look on her face, hastily makes her exit. But too often in Frenzy what Hitchcock thinks is naughty is just nasty.