BY CHRIS MILTON
Sandwiched
between the unfortunate Topaz (1969), which Hitchcock described as an
‘ordeal,’ and his final film, the trifling Family Plot (197), about
which many have been altogether too kind, Frenzy (1972) was the final efflorescence
of Hitchcock’s diabolic, virtuoso talent. He hadn’t had a box office hit since The
Birds, and hadn’t deserved one. Frenzy was both a critical and
commercial success. In the intervening fifty years since its release its
critical stock hasn’t declined, yet is still the least known and least written
about of Hitchcock’s handful of masterworks. This is perhaps because it wasn’t
a star vehicle, though it did feature the leading British theatrical talent of
the time, perhaps because it is the most misanthropic, if not nihilistic of his
films, with an overarching air of grubbiness.
The
failure of Hitchcock’s post-Birds films has generally been discussed in
terms of age and artistic decline, but these films were farragoes due to
factors beyond the director’s control, and in any case Hitchcock’s career was from
the start one of peaks and troughs, of films such as Stage Fright (1950),
Lifeboat (1944) and Rope (1948), that didn’t come near the delirious
aesthetic heights of Vertigo (1958), Frenzy, Psycho (1960)
or The Birds (1963). Frenzy was just another artistic crest and
was the last simply because he didn’t have enough time on earth left for
another.
If
Frenzy hasn’t aged one whit it is because although ostensibly set in 70s
London, with a significant part of it shot on location in Covent Garden, it is
actually set in a purely cinematic, Hitchcockian, time-transcending London.
Hitchcock and his writer, Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth, The Wicker Man)
had the film’s characters speak a slightly archaic diction, to evoke the London
of Jack the Ripper, Crippen, Christie and that of Hitchcock’s first film, The
Lodger (1927), like Frenzy, the story of a woman-murderer at large,
and a man on the run falsely accused of his crimes.
Frenzy
is hardly the ‘love letter’ to the London Hitchcock was born and grew up in
some have lazily taken it to be purely because he returned there towards the
end of his life. Rarely has the city looked so unlovely on screen, squalid
even, with an excremental brown dominating the film’s palette. The city, which
he left for good in 1939, is the setting for themes of the failure of love and
friendship, of humans bestially devouring each other, a seamy setting for
debased and degenerate crime. Much is made of the Covent Garden setting (Covent
Garden was set for demolition in 1974, and it is fascinating to see the area as
a working market), but this is more to do with the motifs of food, eating and
waste running through the film, rather than fond memories – after all the
killer is given the same trade as Hitchcock’s father – a Covent Garden
Greengrocer.
The
film opens with a piece of mordant irony: the camera swoops over and down the
Thames, through Tower Bridge to soaring, majestic, even pompous orchestral
music that might soundtrack a tourist information film. It alights riverside on
the steps of City Hall where an MP is giving a flatulent speech, promising to
clean up the polluted river. Amongst the clapping, animated crowd stands a
motionless, expressionless, black-clad Hitchcock, glaring balefully head. No
whimsy here, in this cameo he is Death. Someone in the crowd spots a woman’s
naked corpse, face-down, bum-up, floating in the Thames, with the necktie that
strangled her still around her neck. From soaring celebratory grandeur to the
utmost sordor of an abused human body become mere waste, part of the estuarial
muck, shat out by death.
And
cut to Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) doing up is tie at the mirror. There’s a
killer on the loose again, an old London story. But it isn’t Blaney. He’s on
his uppers, working as live-in barman, and about to be sacked for helping
himself to the brandy. He’s suspected of being the killer when his estranged
wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) becomes one of the victims after he’s seen
leaving the matrimonial agency she runs just before her dead body is discovered,
the real killer having locked her office door behind him. He goes on the run
and his girlfriend, Babs (Anna Massey) becomes the next victim. Blaney is
caught, sentenced, imprisoned and escapes, intent on the revenge murder of the
real killer. Not as improbable, plot-wise, as it sounds, because the real
killer is Blaney’s friend Rusk (Barry Foster, who would soon hit pay dirt as TV
cop Van der Valk), a becoiffed and dandified Jack-the-Lad and Mummy’s Boy,
and a regular at the pub where both Blaney and Babs work. We know he’s the
killer less than fifteen minutes into the film, creating unease in every scene
in which he appears. He’s, likeable, helpful, everyone’s obliging friend,
though he lets slip his nihilistic cynicism and misogyny several times in his
banter.
It
is hard to sympathise with Blaney, a sullen, sponging, fractious, bitter and
rude malcontent: Hitchcock wanted to portray him as a perennial loser. In
Hitchcock’s other innocent-man-accused films we root for the characters not
just because of their innocence but because of their charm. Even in Hitchcock’s
most dour film, The Wrong Man (1956), a film of almost Bressonian
austerity, the protagonist, played by Henry Fonda, is decent, and a loving
husband.
Hitchcock
had recently seen Jon Finch as the intense lead in Polanski’s Macbeth (1971),
still the best Shakespeare on film. But he didn’t like him. Or at least he
pretended not to: his constant cold-shouldering of the actor on set seriously
affected Finch’s mood during filming, and made his performance edgier, moodier,
more frustrated.
Blaney
is unaware that Rusk is one of his wife’s would-be-clients: Rusk wants her to
find him a woman with ‘certain peculiarities,’ by which we’re meant to
understand a taste for masochism. She refuses to help him. He rapes and murders
her in his office after pleading is case. The scene lasts for a gruelling
twelve minutes. Stylistically it was departure for Hitchcock in his depiction
of murder, lacking all legerdemain, filmed in real time, without music,
without ostentatious cuts. It is in no way, thrilling, is entirely anerotic. It
is disgusting. Increasingly menacing dialogue presages the violence; a queasy
apprehension of fear, predatoriness and impending savagery is achieved with
dolly zooms. The increased freedoms from censorship allowed Hitchcock to depict
violence towards women in its repellent, pathetic squalor, to become not a
pseudo-pornographer but a severe, despairing moralist. Rusk picks up Brenda ‘s
half-eaten apple after he has killed her and casually takes a bite, his dessert.
(Rusk eats after both murders in the film and is constantly seen snacking and
handling food.) The scene is Ackermanesque – if it had been shot by a woman it
would have been hailed as proto-feminist.
The
final shot of this sobering scene, Branda Blaney’s goggle-eyed death stare, and
swollen, grossly protruding tongue, has been described as ‘cartoonish’, but in
fact is a highly realistic depiction of the face of a strangled-to-death human.
Hitchcock was a connoisseur of corpses and the grotesque attitudes of death. In
1945 he was recruited to oversee the editing and appointed Supervising Director
of a documentary made from footage of the Nazi concentration camps shot by
Allied and Soviet troops called German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey
(it was not shown until 1984, released under the title Memory of the Camps,
with a later version that included an omitted sixth reel released in 2014). Hitchcock
sat through four hours of some of the most distressing images ever filmed and
was traumatised by it, staying away from the studio for a week and refusing to
watch any of it a second time.