Alfred Hitchcock (1972)

Frenzy begins with aerial shots of the Thames and the London skyline, and music by Ron Goodwin which has the quality of a fanfare.  (Once the story is underway, Goodwin’s score becomes generic thriller music.)  The camera’s movement is steady, almost stately.  The tone is ceremonial but somehow amused.  Is Alfred Hitchcock remarking, tongue in cheek, his own homecoming to the city in which the early films that made his name were typically set?  (After his move to Hollywood in 1939, Hitchcock made only two films in Britain before Frenzy:  Under Capricorn (1949) and Stage Fright (1950).)   The camera settles on the Embankment, where a cartoon pompous politician is making a speech about cleaning up the Thames.  He’s interrupted when members of his audience (they include Hitchcock but I managed to miss him) spot something more interesting – a dead body floating in from the river.  The corpse is that of a woman, naked except for a tie round her neck.  This identifies her as the latest victim of a serial killer, the ‘Necktie Strangler’.  There follows a bit of conversation among two or three of the gawping crowd.  Although it’s clear from the look of London and the clothes being worn that the action is set in the present day, these voices – who mention Jack the Ripper almost nostalgically – suggest Cockneys of a bygone (screen) era:  this too hints at a connection with Hitchcock’s earlier work.  As Sally said, none of these bit players, in spite of the onlookers’ supposed excitement at the sight of the corpse, utters a line until the previous speaker has completed theirs.   Perhaps the non-overlapping dialogue is a brilliantly funny illustration of English politeness, of the national propensity for forming an orderly queue.  Perhaps, later in the film, the revolting food served by his wife to the police detective investigating the murders is meant to be a witty jab by Hitchcock at the alleged hopelessness of English cuisine, especially when the cook is attempting cordon bleu French dishes.  Or perhaps both the antique opening conversation on the Embankment and the strenuous unfunniness of the scenes chez Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen) and his wife (Vivien Merchant) are simply two illustrations of what a crap film Frenzy is.  I wasn’t surprised, though, to discover from Wikipedia that ‘it is often considered by critics and scholars to be [Hitchcock’s] last great film’.  A book called Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy: The Last Masterpiece, written by Raymond Foery, was published as recently as 2012.

In the early stages of Frenzy, it appears that the serial killer may be a man called Richard Blaney – an RAF veteran who’s lost his way on civvy street and whose quick temper and lack of self-control are repeatedly in evidence.  At the start of the film, Blaney’s behaviour promptly loses him the job as a barman in a London pub to which he’s been reduced.  One naturally thinks it can’t be as simple as that (and not only because Jon Finch as Blaney is utterly lacking in dangerous volatility), and it isn’t.   But when, not much later, the true identity of the killer is revealed – he’s Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), a Covent Garden fruiterer and an old friend of Blaney – this seems hardly less unbelievable, thanks to the lame, mechanical staging of the scene in which Rusk rapes and strangles Blaney’s ex-wife (Barbara Leigh Hunt).  The circumstantial evidence points to Blaney and dyed-in-the wool Hitchcock fans were no doubt delighted by the return of one of his favourite scenarios – that of a man wrongly suspected of a crime and/or a victim of mistaken identity, who’s on the run.  Maybe to the auteurist mind the trope is all that matters – and it’s irrelevant that, whereas Hitchcock and the star actor concerned ensure that the audience cares what happens to, say, Richard Hannay in The 39 Steps or Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest, the fate of Richard Blaney is of no interest.  But since in Frenzy the Master also abandons a major element of suspense by unmasking the killer less than halfway through, what’s left if you’re not engaged by the principal characters?   The film is absorbing only because it’s dire:  you feel that, since this is Hitchcock, there must be a good reason for what’s apparently bad and you keep watching – almost mesmerised by the mostly lousy acting, the tin-eared dialogue by Anthony Shaffer and the creaky plotting, and awaiting their justification.  None materialises – but I wonder if admirers of Frenzy take the view that its seeming faults are expressions of Hitchcock’s legendary sense of humour, that he is lampooning the crime thriller genre.

Here are just a few of the laughable moments.  (1) One of the film’s visual highlights occurs when, after Rusk has murdered Brenda Blaney, her secretary, Monica (Jean Marsh), returns from a lunch break and enters the office building.  The camera waits motionless outside; the secretary’s discovery of her boss’s body thus occurs in real time; the discovery is signalled by a loud scream from Monica; this is completely ignored by two passers-by outside, even though every member of the public is characterised elsewhere in Frenzy as insatiably ghoulish. (2) Blaney and his barmaid girlfriend Barbara (Anna Massey) spend the night in a hotel; a morning paper, announcing that Blaney is wanted for the murders, is put under the door of their room; presumably having read the headlines, they escape through a window.  The next we see of them, they’re sitting on a park bench, discussing what to do.  After several minutes of this conversation, Barbara says, ‘But, hang on, the police will think you did it’ – the realisation of which is what sent them to the park bench in the first place. (3) Rusk murders Barbara and hides her body in a sack of potatoes, to be dumped in a truck about to convey supplies of spuds from Covent Garden.  It’s a truck with a back that comes down but Rusk, although it initially appears that he can hardly carry his heavy load, doesn’t take advantage of that – he hurls the sack, now without any great effort, into the truck.  (4) After returning to the truck to retrieve potentially incriminating evidence from the corpse, Rusk gets driven away in it – not what he intended.  When the vehicle eventually stops at a roadside pull-in, he gets out and skulks around the cafe, looking the worse for wear.   Later on, when Blaney is in jail and he suspects that the wrong man was convicted for the murders, Detective Inspector Oxford sends his colleague, Sergeant Spearman (Michael Bates), to the pull-in.  Spearman returns with a clothes brush, which, he says, the cafe manageress remembers a man resembling Rusk asking to borrow one dark night.  The pull-in may have a grimy, broken window in the toilet – we saw Rusk peering furtively through it on his visit there – but it’s evidently the kind of place with a clothes brush available to needy customers.  The brush hasn’t, however, been cleaned when the police get hold of it months later:  Oxford sniffs the object – ‘Potato dust, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’, he suggests to Spearman.

Maybe this pedestrian film’s title is itself a piece of comic irony.  The source material is a novel by Arthur La Bern, entitled Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square.   Although it was published in 1966, La Bern’s story, according to Wikipedia, takes place shortly after the end of World War II.  Richard Blaney’s recent experience as a pilot in the Allied air raids on Dresden has deeply affected how he sees himself – as a man responsible for many deaths – and how he therefore reacts to being suspected of the necktie murders[1].  On the rare occasions when it is compelling, Frenzy grips by its voyeurism and sadism:  Hitchcock seems especially to relish photographing the fleshy throat of Brenda Blaney as the tie tightens round it and Rusk’s struggle in the truck with Barbara’s corpse – its fingers, clenched in rigor mortis, holding the tiepin she ripped desperately from Rusk’s shirt front as he attacked her.  Hitchcock is keen to show as many views of naked female flesh as he can, as if regretting that this wasn’t an option during most of his film-making career.  His and Anthony Shaffer’s updating of Arthur La Bern’s novel is remarkably lazy.  They set the action at the dog end of Swinging London without bothering to rethink the characters to take account of the quarter-century difference.   (The dialogue is also shamelessly geared to the American box office – as when the secretary Monica gives the police a description of Blaney, including that he weighs ‘about a hundred and fifty-five pounds’.)  Jon Finch, whose film stardom was unsurprisingly short-lived, is hopeless as Blaney – it’s a visible effort for him to work up any kind of emotion – but it wasn’t the fault of the actor, thirty at the time, that he was twenty-five years too young for the role.  The cast is full of people whom you know to be talented – it includes Billie Whitelaw, Clive Swift and Gerald Sim, as well as those already mentioned – but who, with two exceptions, manage to seem to be anything but.  Did working with Hitchcock blind them to what they were doing? (Bad acting isn’t of course unusual in his films:  does auteurism acknowledge this kind of pattern?)  The exceptions are Bernard Cribbins, as a pub landlord, and Jimmy Gardner, as a hotel porter who realises the wanted man is a guest there.  When the porter calls the police, Gardner has a fine blend of pride in behaving as a responsible citizen and morbid excitement at having given service to, and got a tip from, a presumed serial killer.

15 January 2012

[1] Arthur La Bern did not share the widespread critical enthusiasm for Frenzy.   His letter to the Times of 29 May 1972 can be read at http://preview.tinyurl.com/os3z7mx.