Frenzy
by Alfred Hitchcock
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Actor: Alec McCowen, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh-Hunt, Barry Foster, Jon FinchDirector: Alfred Hitchcock
Brand: FINCH,JON
Cinematographer: Gilbert Taylor
Cinematographer: Leonard J. South
Producer: Alfred Hitchcock
Editor: John Jympson
Producer: William Hill
Writer: Anthony Shaffer
Writer: Arthur La Bern
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Published), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Dolby, Dubbed, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 116 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-20
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Universal Studios
DVD Reviews of Frenzy
DVD Review: The True Art Of Dark Comedy.
Summary: 5 Stars
I love this film deeply and I believe it is worthy of five stars even though five stars is what I would also give to Hitchcock's most far-reaching and profound film, VERTIGO. How is this justified? By judging each film within the context of what it proposes to accomplish. VERTIGO is a tragic film that includes the purging of its own darkness which makes it genuinely and fully "tragic." It presents itself in the scope and depth of genuine tragedy and it must be judged accordingly. It succeeds beyond doubt. It gets five stars. FRENZY is in a different category of type and it must be judged by the standards specific to that category. What is that category and is it as worthy a category as Tragedy?
The genre of FRENZY is Dark Comedy. Is this a worthy genre, I mean worthy of the same respect as the genre of Tragedy? My personal view is that it is because there are works in this category that are indisputably great art. Examples would be Celine's JOURNEY TO THE END OF THE NIGHT or DEATH ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN. Those are works which prove, in my view, that this category is capable of containing greatness. Am I thereby implying that FRENZY is a great film? I am.
What does a work of Dark Comedy have to achieve to be great? It has to reach a paradoxical balance of deep humor and deep pathos, and no purging save that contained in the black laughter itself. The deep humor must collide with the deep pathos and create not nonsense or absurdity, but an undeniable dual reality that can only be absorbed through laughter which can only be black laughter.
The tone of FRENZY is set in the opening scene in which a politician is poetically promising to a gathered crowd (which includes Hitchcock in somber black and grim aspect) that all the pollution sources that have made a mess of the Thames river will be purged so that the pollution is eliminated. We not only know, by the time the scene is finished, that this promise will not be carried out by the government, but that the depth of the "pollution" goes far beyond what the politician is blithely referring to. What washes up on the shore of the river in this scene is not merely a glob of trash, it is a murdered woman who is evidence of a far deeper sort of "pollution" at the source of the city, at the source of human life. Humor, pathos, black laughter.
The alternating humor and pathos are constant in the film, they give the film its tension and movement. A scene can be funny in one moment and uncomfortably tense in the next. Let me suggest what are perhaps the high points of both of these intertwining elements.
Humor: The scene where the murderer Rusk is in the back of the truck trying to retrieve his pin from the clinging corpse of Babs. Who could keep from laughing here in spite of the horror?
Pathos: One of the greatest single shots in cinema, the shot sometimes referred to as "Goodbye to Babs." I am referring to the shot that comes right after Babs goes upstairs with Rusk into the room where she will be murdered. After the door is closed on us, the camera moves in terrible silence slowly back down the stairs, through the entry way, out the door, and back into the daily public swarm as Babs disappears into oblivious, violent death. What sensitive cinema viewer is not wrenched into painful silence by that exquisite shot? Perhaps the deepest moment of pathos in the film and not a single figure involved!
And finally the last spoken line in the film. So funny and so horrible that the only possible response is dark laughter.
After watching the film several times, one begins to grasp that the elder Hitchcock has made a very serious, very sad, very "funny" and absolutely masterful film here, giving us a concrete definition of Dark Comedy and why it is indeed a worthy category.
DVD Review: 1972 Hitchcock film.
Summary: 4 Stars
Hitchcock returns to London, to film Frenzy, where England is the back drop, of the film. Also features an all British cast, in the film. In any case, the film is a black comedy, and even though the subject matter is quite gruesome, the film plays well, due to the fact that it doesn't take the subject matter all too seriously.DVD Review: The Wrong Bloke
Summary: 4 Stars
When it was released in 1972 after a couple of slower moving espionage flicks, many reviewers saw Hitchcock's FRENZY as something of a return to form--to say nothing of it being a welcome return to the director's native England. Even after he was firmly ensconced in Hollywood, Hitch had never really ceased making films with an English setting. But aside from the requisite location footage, those films were obviously shot on studio lots--DIAL M FOR MURDER and STAGE FRIGHT being prime examples. And those classics, good as they were, featured American actors in key roles. FRENZY, on the other hand, was veddy British and proudly so. Anglophiles the world over can take delight in the rather spectacular opening shots of the Thames and the Tower Bridge. And many of the exterior shots were filmed in Covent Garden, where decades before Hitchcock's own father had been a greengrocer.
Aside from the neighborhood and overall milieu, I wouldn't go overboard on stressing the autobiographical elements. The return to his homeland does seem to energize the director and make for a ripping good yarn, with a goodly amount of real suspense and gobs of dark Hitchcockian humor. But this is not an intensely personal film, in the manner of VERTIGO, say. Despite its grim premise--serial murder being something of delicate matter in the post-Manson early 70s--FRENZY has a lightness of touch that was largely absent in his classic 60s period. The movie is as much remembered for the wryly humorous domestic scenes between Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec MacGowan) and his ecctric but perceptive wife (Vivien Merchant)as it is for its graphic violence.
I remember any number of critics at the time commenting on the almost complete lack of glamour about the film. The shots of London were often breathtaking, but the cast seemed average in the extreme (if such a thing is possible). Even the potentially dashing Jon Finch (who had just wrapped Polanski's MACBETH) wasn't exactly radiating star power here. Whatever charisma he might have otherwise possessed, is hidden behind a rumpled suit and a bad haircut. The average man caught up in an intrigue he cannot quite fathom isn't a Hollywood luminary like Jimmy Stewart this time out. Finch looks every bit the down-on-his-luck former RAF pilot reduced to tending bar and scuffling his way through life in a Swinging London that seems to be leaving him behind.
And he's really not all that likeable, which may be Hitchcock's cleverest touch. He's anything but a sweetly bumbling Stewart type, or an elegant, cheeky Cary Grant. This character has baggage, much of it under his eyes. This is another "wrong man" tale, but the difference is, you have to work a bit harder to care about this particular wrong man.
Ultimately, the relative obscurity of the cast makes for a much more character driven film, and I'd say, one that's all the stronger for it. There are lot of familiar faces in this movie, but there's a world of difference between looking at a character actor and wondering, "Now where have I seen him before?" and saying, in effect, "Ah, Jimmy Stewart, well, we all know what he brings to the table."
Aside from being a compelling suspense film, FRENZY was also the first Hitchcock film to receive an "R" rating. Much had changed in the ten years since PSYCHO, for instance, and a romantic liaison in a hotel, for instance, would now feature actual nudity. It was the 70s, after all, and such was required in almost every film aimed at an adult audience. Interesting that the master handled this newfound freedom as well as he did. There is nothing that is gratuitous about the nudity in the trysting scenes, and while the equally graphic rape and murder scene (and there's only one, although others are implied)is quite disturbing, it also is anything but gratuitous. (Thank the good Lord and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer for convincing Hitchcock to only portray only ONE of the film's several murders up close and all too personal.)
FRENZY wasn't quite the hit it should have been, but it did serve to demonstrate that the later Hitchcock had lost none of his powers. Good show!
DVD Review: Solid Hitchcock suspense, but his powers were waning
Summary: 3 Stars
This has all the hallmarks of classic Hitchcock: a good man is turned victim of the system by bad luck, and must fight to exonerate himself while threatening his soul by seeking vengeance. The baddie is a serial killer who is revealed early on, so there is no guessing about who's who. There is also plenty of humor, both extremely grizzly (legs hanging out of potato sack) and mundane (British food anxieties).
Unfortunately, something about the chemistry of this film just doesn't work very well. At least for me, I couldn't quite believe it and did not get wrapped in a separate world, away from my own concerns. This is a very late film from the master, whose collaborator wife had recently passed away, and his imaginative energy simply cannot match the extraordinary qualities we expect from his film of the 50s and 60s.
REcommended only for the most serious of Hitchcock fans.
DVD Review: Good'n creepy
Summary: 5 Stars
I first watched Frenzy when I was much younger and I remember being pretty darn scared. I've always loved Alfred Hitchcock's movies and this one is just so creepy because the wrong guy is the suspect through most of the movie until the very end, meanwhile the real culprit just keeps killing women. I think the actors couldn't have been picked more perfect for the roles and I simply just love this old movie.
Description of Frenzy
No Description Available.Genre: Feature Film-Drama
Rating: R
Release Date: 20-JUN-2006
Media Type: DVD
Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film, written by Anthony Shaffer (who also wrote Sleuth), this delightfully grisly little tale features an all-British cast minus star wattage, which may have accounted for its relatively slim showing in the States. Jon Finch plays a down-on-his-luck Londoner who is offered some help by an old pal (Barry Foster). In fact, Foster is a serial killer the police have been chasing--and he's framing Finch. Which leads to a classic Hitchcock situation: a guiltless man is forced to prove his innocence while eluding Scotland Yard at the same time. Spiked with Hitchcock's trademark dark humor, Frenzy also features a very funny subplot about the Scotland Yard investigator (Alec McCowen) in charge of the case, who must endure meals by a wife (Vivien Merchant) who is taking a gourmet-cooking class. --Marshall Fine
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