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.
Original Japanese poster.
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.
Another
influence on Hitchcock overlooked in discussions of the Lustomord – sex
murder – theme in Hitchcock is his time spent living and working in Berlin. He
was there from 1925 to 1927 working as Assistant Director on an Anglo-American
production called The Blackguard (1925) and later as Director of The
Mountain Eagle (1926) at Berlin’s Ufa Studio.
At
the time Berlin was rocked and transfixed by a series of serial sex killers,
most recently Carl Grossman, which I believe was formative for Hitchcock. Lustmord
featured prominently in the works of several male Berlin artists during this
period and is unlikely that Hitchcock was unaware of this. He was passionately
interested in modern painting, later becoming a significant collector. He
studied the history of art, started his career as Art Director and his office
contained many art books, to which he had constant reference when working on a
film.(Hitchcock archly highlight’s
Rusk’s evil by having his flat decorated with Vladimir Tretthickoff
reproductions). I believe paintings such as George Groz’s The Little Woman
Murderer (1918) and John the Woman Murderer (1918) to be formative
for Hitchcock and at least as big an influence in Frenzy as the London’s Jack the Stripper murders of 1964-65.
Counterpoint
to the innocent-man-on-the-run motif is a quirky police procedural. This mostly
takes the form of exchanges between Inspector Oxford (Alec McGowan and his wife
(Vivienne Merchant). The humour is based around her being a would-be gourmet
cook, taking a course at the absurdly named Continental School of Gourmet
Cooking, and her husband’s desire for plain fayre and revulsion over her
dishes. These scenes are hilarious and Merchant proves herself a superlative,
subtle comedienne. Although the scenes’ humour leaven the horror and carry the
plot along, there is a darker edge to these exchanges that make them
symbolically consistent with the rest of the film, for it is made clear that
the bizarre dishes are a punishment for neglect and that the marriage is a
sexless one.
This
could be seen as a mischievous, slightly distorted portrait of Hitchcock’s own
marriage. Just as it is Oxford’s wife who solves the case, so Hitchcock ran scripts
by Alma for approval. Both Hitchcock and his wife were keen gourmands, planners
of extravagant and costly dinners and keepers of the best cellar in Hollywood,
with over sixteen hundred bottles.From
the late sixties Alma devoted herself to food and entertaining, though presumably
Hitchcock was more appreciative than bacon and eggs fixated policeman.
Running
alongside these two plot strands is the demented rampage of Bob Rusk. The
murder of Babs is as much as a tour de force as that of Brenda Blaney.
Rusk takes her back to his Covent Garden flat after following her out of the
pub after she chucks in her live-in job. As she stands on the steps of the pub
Rusk approaches her from behind and the soundtrack goes preternaturally silent,
presaging death, and Anna Massey’s face takes on the look of a
predator-startled mammal. Rusk offers to let her stay at his flat while he is
away for a few days. Walking alongside Babs, Rusk sadistically comments that
she has the “whole of her life” ahead of her. As they enter the flat, he uses
the phrase that immediately foretold the murder of Brenda “you know Babs,
you’re my kind of woman”. The door closes. But instead of following them into the
flat the camera pulls slowly away from it, down the stairs, back along the
hallway and out of the door into the peopled street, in silence. The soundtrack
is silent until the camera enters the busy street when sound returns as street
hubbub. This is paradoxically when we know that Babs has been prematurely
ripped from the world. The horror is perhaps greater than in the first murder
scene, for we are compelled to create the scene in our own minds, with what we
remember of the first murder as material. The scene is painfully elegiac and
traumatic, nihilistic in its insistence on the commonality of death amidst
life, of the profound insignificance of both.
Even
more malevolently manipulative is the perhaps the film’s most famous scene in
which Hitchcock masters our suspense and morality with montage, managing to
make us root for Rusk despite ourselves. Rusk has dumped Babs’ body in a potato
sack in the back of a potato truck going up to Lincolnshire. But he’s left his
tie pin in her hand and gets in the back of the truck to retrieve it. Meanwhile,
the truck sets off with him still in the back. There’s a grotesque slapstick
element to Rusk being knocked about the truck, kicked in the face by Babs’s
stiffening corpse, potatoes falling everywhere, while he tries to get the
tiepin out of Babs’s hand. Rigor Mortis has set in and he has to break her
fingers to prise the tie pin from her cold dead hands.
Oxford
is onto Rusk when Blaney escapes from prison, already arranging his pardon,
though his wife had solved the case long before. Blaney steals into Rusk’s flat
and begins to beat what he thinks is Rusk’s sleeping body underneath the
bedclothes, leaving us no longer in doubt about Blaney’s own capacity for
savage killing. But it’s not Rusk in the bed, but another of his victims, naked
but for one of Rusk’s ties. Oxford enters on Blaney’s heels and they hear a
heavy clumping up the stairs – Rusk puling a massive black trunk behind him. After
Oxford delivers the film’s most famous line, “Mr Rusk, you’re not wearing your
tie”, Rusk drops the trunk, and the credits roll over it. It looks for all the
world like a coffin, with a crucifix formed by its clasps in its centre, this memento
mori promising perhaps either promise of redemption or nothingness.
Hitchcock was an intensely death-haunted man in his final years, and his
Catholicism became even stronger (he was a practising Catholic all his life,
and it’s in plain view in many of his films); Mass was said regularly in his
Bel Air home, and he is said to have wept intensely when receiving Holy
Communion.
But
if Frenzy is a nihilistic satire upon
an unregenerately bestial and loveless mankind, a more serious accusation about
it at the time from some quarters was its supposed misogyny. The fact is that
all of the female characters in this are sympathetic (he has them in bright
clothing as against all the brown-clad men, literally a bunch of shits), and
all of the male characters are to different degrees unappealing, from the
frenzied sex-killer, and the aggressively bitter ex-husband, to the leering
boss and the neglectful husband. Hitchcock surrounded himself with women
professionally and in private, adored and was adored by them, was an uxorious
husband, and doting father to his daughter. Hitchcock, pace the auteur
theory, was a highly collaborative director, and throughout his career some of
his closest collaborators were women: his wife Alma, screenwriter; Joan
Harrison, screenwriter, Peggy Robertson, producer and screen supervisor. (For a dark, monstrous view of
Hitchcock and his attitude to women Robin Wood and Donald Spoto, with his
unaccountably malicious, misleading and inaccurate biography of 1983, have much
to answer for.) Many female critics and academics have written admiringly of
Hitchcock and although it would be too much to call him a feminist, his films
are always sympathetic to women and he gives them as much independent
mindedness and complexity as his male protagonists, but it is only his men who
act like beasts. Frenzy is not a misogynistic film, it is about
misogyny; if one had to label it in terms of sexual politics, it would be
fairer to describe it as misandrist. A hotel porter’s remark on the murders, “Sometimes
the lusts of men make we want to heave”, I take to be Hitchcock’s anguished
moral outrage being voiced.