Frenzy (1972) | 31 Days of Horror: Oct 10

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The Master of Suspense returns!

Fifty years ago, Alfred Hitchcock presented a film that was more graphic and more shocking than Psycho. It may not be as well remembered but it still creates a tense story of a man misidentified as a serial strangler in 1972 London.

Before Viewing

As with other Alfred Hitchcock trailers, Hitch makes an appearance and narrates parts of the trailer, taking the viewer around to the locations of various murders from the film. His cheekiness and dry wit is on display when he mentions being able to get a leg of lamb at a farmers market while a human leg pops out of the sack he’s inspecting. This seems like more than the usual thriller from him, with dead bodies falling out of the back of trucks or floating in the Thames. Let’s see what the Master of Suspense has in store this time.

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

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After Viewing

On the banks of the Thames River, Sir George (John Boxer) is giving a speech about cleaning up the polluted riverway when a dead female body washes up, strangled by a gentleman’s necktie. At the Old Globe Pub, Richard “Dick” Blaney (Jon Finch) is fired (and evicted) for having a drink without paying for it by proprietor Felix Forsythe (Bernard Cribbins). Blaney is defended by his girlfriend/barmaid Babs Milligan (Anna Massey), but to no avail. At the Covent Gardens Market, Blaney meets his friend Robert “Bob” Rusk (Barry Foster) who offers him a job and some money, but Blaney doesn’t want the charity. Instead, Rusk provides him with a 20 to 1 long shot in a horse race, to which Blaney can’t afford to take.

Blaney gets a couple of drinks in a pub and hears a doctor and solicitor talk loudly about the ongoing necktie murders and the type of sexual psychopath that would do such a thing. He then visits his ex-wife, Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), who runs a successful matchmaking agency and meets her new secretary Monica Barling (Jean Marsh). The Blaney’s argue loudly, his temper getting the better of him, but she calms him and invites him to dinner at her club. He continues to be agitated, crushing a glass with his hand, so they return to her home. He comes into her apartment for a moment, but ends up spending the night in the Salvation Army hostel.

The next day Bob comes to visit Brenda, but she knows him as Mr. Robinson. She refuses to help find him women that will “submit to him.” He presses her, overpowering her, before ripping her dress and raping her. He then strangles her with his tie and leaves. Returning from her lunch, Ms Barling sees Blaney leaving the agency doorway just before she discovers her dead employer, and believes the ex-husband was responsible. She reports his suspicious behavior to Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen). Blaney continues on with his day, unaware that his ex-wife is dead and he is a wanted man. He collects his clothes from Babs and they head to a posh hotel for the afternoon.

A porter recognizes his description from the news and also alerts the police. Blaney and Babs leave the hotel and bump into an old friend, Johnny (Clive Swift), who offers his apartment as a safe house. His wife, Hetty (Billie Whitelaw), thinks him mad for bringing a suspected murderer into their place. Babs returns to the Old Globe to collect her things, but Forsythe is terse with her so she quits. She plans to meet Blaney the next day to hide out in France. Rusk offers her his place for the evening as the camera drifts slowly and menacingly out into the street.

Rusk places Babs’ body in the back of a potato truck that night, but has to go back when he discovers his monogrammed “R” stick pin, which could identify him, is missing. As he gets back into the truck, the driver takes off. He struggles to remove the pin from the corpses’ rigor mortised fingers. When the driver stops at a rest stop, Rusk gets out and disappears. The police pull the potato truck over when they notice the body hanging out the back. Back in town, Blaney, having heard about Babs’ death, does not know what to do and asks his friend Bob for help.

The police soon show up at Rusk’s place and arrest Blaney for at least three murders. Babs’ clothes are found in Blaney’s bag. He is quickly tried and incarcerated, but realizes that Rusk is the true murderer. He injures himself at the jail and manages to escape from the hospital where he is convalescing. Returning to Rusk’s apartment, he finds another dead body. CI Oxford, who had decided to follow-up on Rusk after hearing Blaney’s vehement cries during the trial also shows up. Blaney proclaims his innocence as Rusk walks in dragging a large steamer trunk. “Mr rusk, you’re not wearing your tie,” says the Chief Inspector.

“You are my type of woman.” – Bob Rusk

Welcome back to the anniversary theme week on 31 Days of Horror. If you missed it, yesterday celebrated the 100th anniversary of the most famous early vampire film, Nosferatu. For the next five days, articles celebrating similar anniversaries will appear. Today is a look at the fiftieth anniversary of Alfred Hitchcock’s Frenzy, which was a return to form for the director after two less than amazing films, Torn Curtain and Topaz. It was his second to last film and his last big success with audiences which recaptured horror elements of his biggest hit, Psycho. It was also surprisingly graphic for a Hitchcock film, showing much more violence, and nudity, than any of his previous films. Thematically it followed other famous films of his like North by Northwest, I Confess or The Man Who Knew Too Much about a character’s identity being mistaken with someone else. Here, the film allows the viewer to question Blaney’s guilt for the opening 25 minutes until they see Rusk commit the first strangulation. No other director is as good about turning the anxiety level up for the viewer as Hitch.

In 1972, the horror genre was changing. Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left (coming next week) marked a turning point in the genre, but the future of films with more graphic violence and nudity (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Black Christmas, The Hills Have Eyes) were still a ways off. All these aforementioned titles are lower budget movies which rely on shock, gore and nudity to help sell the horror aspects (and tickets). Surprisingly, the film that opened up some more taboo elements of horror was this big budget film from Universal Pictures. It was not even considered a horror film by many, but another of Hitchcock’s suspense films. To date, Hitchcock’s films suggested violence and nudity. Frenzy seemed like a much racier and graphic film than it was. Hitchcock only showed as much as he could get away with, but made it look like more, based on the blocking and editing methods he used. For example, in Psycho (1960) he suggested the nudity of Marion Crane in the shower, while the editing and soundtrack implied the violence of the knife attack. The Birds (1963) had somewhat more graphic scenes (and in color this time) but the violence was still heavily implied. Here, Hitch opens the film with a nude female body washing ashore on the banks of the Thames, setting the stage for what was to come. The film contains several topless females, along with overt rape sequences and intense closeups of multiple strangulations. The camera conveys the acts to the audience making them complicit with POV shots. Though once Hitch shows the excruciating details of the first assault, he lets the audience fill in more of the gaps by using any number of his camera and blocking tricks to purposefully hide the violence. Imagine what a shock this extra level of detail must have been to the audiences of the time. Watching Brenda’s rape and murder is still difficult to watch 50 years later, a testament to Hitchcock’s filmmaking.

While the graphicness of the violence holds up even these many years later, other aspects of the film don’t age as well, specifically some jokes about rape. Early on, before Brenda’s demise, when Dick is getting a drink in a pub, the foreground is focused on the discussion between a solicitor and a doctor discussing the recent killings. When the barmaid Maisie, a middle aged woman overhears, she asks “he rapes ‘em first doesn’t he?” The two older men smile. The solicitor, Mr Usher, smiles knowingly, “yes, I believe he does.“ And the doctor interjects, “Well, I suppose it’s nice to know that every cloud has a silver lining.” Maisie takes it all in a cheeky manner, and doesn’t seem incensed by the off-color joke. As insensitive as it seems, it shows the manner that rape was looked at 50 years ago. As if, even though the woman may have been strangled, at least she had some sex before she died. Today it is seen as a reprehensible and irresponsible discussion coming from these two “gentlemen.”

Frenzy certainly has the elements to be a traditional horror film, even if it has more moments of suspense and anxiety. It uses one of Hitchcock’s favorite themes, that of the wrongly convicted protagonist. While the first 25 minutes are set creating an amount of believability that Blaney is the strangler, the film changes gears showing that Rusk is the true killer. With that switch, the viewer sees the mounting circumstantial evidence growing toward the wrong man, which is anxiety producing. It culminates with the appearance of the murdered woman’s clothes in Dick’s bag, planted cleverly by Rusk when Blaney walks back into his life innocently enough. The film continues by sending him to prison, with his plan to escape and reveal the true culprit. These elements, by which the audience is aware of things that certain characters may not be, is a staple of Hitchcock’s suspense methodology, but also of modern horror. Hence the reason so many audience members shout at the characters on screen to stay out of the basement, or to turn around!

In addition to these plot and thematic moments, Hitchcock was also a master of the specialty shot. These are shots that often draw attention to themselves by their complexity or placement. The opening shot of the film, which seems like something that wouldn’t be attempted (or allowed) today, is an amazing helicopter shot through the opening halves of Tower Bridge, which turns into a helicopter shot flying up to the MP speaking at the banks of the Thames. Another shot, alluded to above, is when Rusk takes Babs’ up to his apartment. The camera follows them up to the door, where he utters his line that “you are my type of woman.” This signals to the audience that he is about to commit another murder. As they enter, the camera slowly backs down the stairs and out into the busy street. The wallah of the cars and pedestrians slowly growing on the soundtrack covering up any screams that might be heard. It’s an example of a clever shot that is often replicated by other filmmakers time and time again, but never as well as Hitchcock could have done it.

Another interesting difference in the film from other horror films is the use of Chief Inspector Oxford’s wife as an audience surrogate. She also serves as a focus for some moments of humor in an otherwise tense film. The two scenes at his house are both used as expositional moments, where the plot and facts are laid out again for the audience to follow along with. She asks a number of the questions that the viewer might also have, and suggests some reasons why Blaney might not be guilty, all from the female perspective. Some films try to have moments like this that let out huge amounts of exposition, but fail miserably. Somehow Hitchcock pulls it off and keeps the film moving along at the same time.

Frenzy is a tense and upsetting study of the sexual psychopath. There is a lot of pop psychology in the film to “explain” why Rusk does what he does. But no explanation really does his psychosis justice. He’s a nasty man that gets pleasure from the control and power he can hold over women. If this film were to be made today, it would probably have an ending where a woman turns the tables on him in revenge like Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, or a handful of popular 70’s revenge films. Frenzy would be the last great Hitchcock film. His follow-up, and final, film was Family Plot, a weaker entry in his overall oeuvre of suspense, death, and wry wit. This may not be the film he’s most remembered for, but it’s a solid entry that helped pave the way for even more graphic representations of cinematic psychopaths.

Assorted Musings

• As many know, Hitchcock has a cameo in the majority of his films. In Frenzy he is one of the onlookers at the beginning of the film gawking at the body in the Thames. He appears wearing a black bowler hat in the crowd, and can be seen at the bottom of the frame when a woman compares the strangler to Jack The Ripper.
• Just like Norman Bates and his Mother fixation, Bob Rusk also has a similar penchant. He shows off or talks about his mother at every chance he gets, proud to share his love for her with people. Perhaps Hitch was trying to get a bit more Freudian with his psychoanalysis.
• Billie Whitelaw is probably better known to horror audiences as the nanny, Mrs Baylock, in The Omen.