‘Men like this leave no stone unturned in their search for their disgusting gratifications...’
With Brian De Palma’s Sisters and William Freidkin’s The Exorcist less than a year away, the world of cinema had changed dramatically in 1972 in comparison to Alfred Hitchcock’s heyday a decade or so earlier. While Frenzy doesn’t feel old-fashioned in the same way that 1966’s Torn Curtain does, this is still the work of a director who can feel his power slipping and is following the herd rather than doing something really innovative. It’s also a lot of fun…
In a classic Hitchcockian case of mistaken identity, caddish rogue Richard Blaney (Jon Finch) is wrongly accused of being the notorious ‘Necktie Murderer’. We know that Blaney’s casual acquaintance Bob Rusk (Barry Foster) is the real killer but it takes Chief Inspector Timothy Oxford (Alec McCowan) rather longer to figure out what’s happening, mainly because his wife keeps cooking him loads of exotic meals that he has to pretend that he likes and this takes up most of his mental capabilities. It’s a lovely little touch and the kind of thing that ensures that Hitchcock’s films always have something in them that is worth the price of the ticket.
It’s odd watching a Hitchcock film that features murder, bad language and even a graphic rape scene, and one gets the feeling that Hitch revels in his newfound freedom perhaps a little more than he should. That being said, many of the murder scenes are creepily effective and Foster is suitably imposing in a role that was initially meant to go to Michael Caine.
While it’s lovely seeing London at the tail end of the swinging sixties (every scene that takes place inside The Globe pub at Covent Garden is a joy to behold), it’s difficult to get past the fact that we have nobody to root for here. Unlike, Norman Bates in Psycho say, we never sympathise with Rusk, and Blaney is a dickhead to everyone he encounters. This abrasiveness makes the character difficult to love.
Frenzy was Hitchcock’s final thriller and while it is brutally effective in moments, it is a mile away from the auteur’s best work. Having said that, it’s still a worthy addition to the Hitchcock oeuvre and one of his better late-period works.
