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So much average

Great Film overall

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

In FRENZY, Hitchcock returns to his beloved London, and throughout the film one gets the impression that he was really enjoying the sights, sounds, and smells of his city. The wonderful Cockney accents keep coming up, the typical wisecracks, all conjure up a wonderful plot, based on one of the Master's favorite themes: the wrongly accused man who has been framed, and fights outrageous (mis)fortune.Direction is inspired, acting is generally of the highest order, although a stronger actor than Finch might have elevated FRENZY to masterpiece status. In contrast, Foster is superb as the tie murderer, clearly intelligent enough to frame Finch and to lure his victims, and yet bearing some signs of split personality, both loving and despising women. The rape scene with Barbra Leigh-Hunt is disturbing even today, especially because of they way he changes from a crescendo of lust to one of hatred once he is done. Alec McCowen as the chief inspector, and Vivien Merchant, as his wife, steal the show with some truly delicious cullinary discussions, with McCowen wishing he could just eat fish and chips, while Merchant keeps coming up with pig's trotter and other supposed French delights. The drink she makes for a visiting police inspector is one of the film's comic highlights, in all its British understatement. In fact, the McCowen-Merchant relationship is the only durable one in the film - all the others break down tragically and otherwise, but always with darkly comic touches.Photography is very economical but extremely well done, and script is great, with an ending that is textbook stuff in its simplicity and objectivity: "You are not wearing your tie, Mr Rusk". FRENZY is reminiscent of other films in Hitch's early British period, notably THE 39 STEPS and YOUNG AND INNOCENT, but imbued with the cynicism of the 1970s. Hitch was on top form here.Strongly recommended. 8/10

A man finds himself on the run from police when his ex-wife is found dead and his ex-wife's employee spots her husband leaving the crime scene. Her husband isn't responsible for the crime and must fight to prove his innocence.For the most part, Frenzy is quite a darkly plotted crime film and is notably more risqué than many of his previous films; we witness a rape and an actresses bare breasts exposed which were not the sort of things that you'd normally see in a Hitchcock film. These things undoubtedly make Frenzy a memorable film, but possibly not entirely for the right reasons....Frenzy is quite slow-paced, but I feel that it may be deliberately slow (it kind of establishes Blaney as something of a lovable rogue which perhaps helps to get the audience on his side). The film does suffer from being a bit soapy at times (many of the scenes involving Blaney, Babs and Forsythe felt a little unnecessary and for me kind of got in the way of moving things along).Another thing that I found slightly disappointing about this film is that it isn't played out as a mystery film and is one that is more about a wrongly accused man fighting to prove his innocence. The way that the story is played out was effective enough to hold my interest (in the sense that I wanted to see how Blaney would finally expose Rusk). But personally, I would have preferred it if the killer's identity had been kept a secret and the audience then had to figure out who the killer was (this to me would have made it far more exciting). However, Hitchcock and screenwriter Anthony Schaffer were working from a novel so I can't really criticise either of them for the story that was presented to me.Frenzy is also probably one of the most tonally inconsistent films that I've seen from Hitchcock; the basic plot is quite dark and yes it contains that one brutal scene, but then he also seems to try some comedic touches to the film; the scene with the Inspector and his wife and her rather odd choices of cuisine or the scene where Rusk is in the potato truck with the corpse. It's possible that Hitchcock was trying to counter-balance a lot of the grim plot mechanics with some light-hearted relief. Although this seems a bit odd when watching the film, the two conflicting tones do serve each other fairly well.Hitchcock's camera work is flawless as always and observant viewers will spot Hitchcock's cameo role in this film (he's actually featured in more than one scene in this film). Frenzy has enough strengths to make it worth watching, but this is not classic Hitchcock in my book.

Hitchcock's penultimate film is just what you would expect from the master: a gripping, nail-biting thriller which manages to break a few taboos along the way. Once again Hitchcock effortlessly hooks the audience with his relatively complex storyline involving a strangler/rapist terrorising London and the man who is mistakenly believed to be the culprit. Eliciting excellent performances from his cast, Hitchcock here makes a one-off, unique film which offers a seedy, dirty view of London which is rarely seen.You get the impression that the city is a claustrophobic place, and that the streets are caked with filth. Behind closed doors there lurks hidden depravity. It's not a particularly uplifting film because of this but it's a damn good one. The photography is crisp making the film nice to look at, and there are plenty of stylistic touches (especially a tracking shot leading from a room where a murder is taking place back out onto the bustling streets where nobody is aware of what's going on only a few feet away).Jon Finch (MACBETH) heads the cast and is very good as the hunted man who becomes increasingly stressed and manic as time goes on but always retains his cool underneath. Alec McCowen makes for an amusing, pleasant policeman and the continuous comic relief regarding his wife's food is actually funny. It's easy to see that Hitchcock feels at home in his country and he rounds off the film with a cast of fine supporting actors, including Anna Massey, Billie Whitelaw, Gerald Sim, Clive Swift, and Bernard Cribbins (in a surprisingly straight role).Critics are unkind to this film because it's not up there with Hitchcock's best - it may have a few flaws, but it's still a damn good thriller. Watch out for the macabre scene where the killer struggles to receive something from his victim's hand and is forced to break her fingers due to the fact that rigor-mortis has set in. The violence and sexual aspects of the film are surprisingly explicit, and there's lots of female nudity in there too which led to accusations of misogyny. One particular moment where a woman is raped and then strangled is shown graphically and is very disturbing. Hitchcock lingers on the grotesque faces of the strangulation victim, complete with extruding tongues and bulging eyes. This is true horror and the most horrific thing he ever filmed. FRENZY isn't quite a masterpiece, but it's a well above-average thriller for movie buffs and one of my particular favourites.

A man who rapes women and then strangles them with a necktie is terrorizing London. Chief Inspector Oxford is in charge of the case, assisted by Sergeant Spearman. At one point during the movie, Oxford tells Spearman that when they catch up with the necktie strangler, it will probably turn out that he is impotent. Spearman expresses surprise, and rightly so, for this is a bizarre claim. A man who is impotent cannot get an erection, and therefore is incapable of having sexual intercourse. Therefore, if the necktie strangler were impotent, there would be no semen in the vaginas of his victims. Since all of his victims were murdered and thus could not give evidence, why would the police think the women were raped? Inspector Oxford does not address that question, but simply tells Sergeant Spearman that it is not sex that gratifies such rapists, but violence.Several years prior to the production of this movie, it became fashionable to say that rape was not about sex, and some people maintain that theory to this day. It is said that rape is really about power, about dominating women. Even if it is so that rape has some motive other than sex, there still has to be a rape, and that means that the rapist cannot be impotent, regardless of what his motive might be. If we bend over backwards to make sense of Oxford's claim, we might say that the rapist is able to penetrate, but cannot achieve completion, cannot ejaculate. But that would mean no semen in the vagina, which brings us right back to the question, what would make the police think the women had been raped?Oxford speaks with an authoritative voice in the movie, and so we know we are supposed to believe him. But aside from squaring impotence with rape, there is the incongruity between his words and the rape that took place in the movie thirty minutes before, when we see Rusk raping Brenda. In the history of mainstream cinema, no movie, made before or since, has depicted sex, consensual or coerced, in which anyone, male or female, experiences greater heights of sexual ecstasy than does that of the necktie strangler in "Frenzy."What is remarkable about this movie is that, in discussing it with others, I have noticed that a lot of people accept the pronouncements of the detective, notwithstanding their apparent inconsistency with the rape scene. This is in part due to the authoritative voice of the detective, and in part due to the widespread acceptance of the rape-is-not-about-sex theory at that time. I have seen people twist themselves into a pretzel trying to argue that the rapist never really got it up, let alone gratified himself sexually.I suspect that this was Hitchcock's idea of a joke. He purposely put this contradiction into the movie between the words of the pompous detective and the scene of sexual passion, as his way of making fun of that theory.