Frenzy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For other uses, see Frenzy (disambiguation).
| Frenzy | |
|---|---|
| Image:Frenzy movieposter.jpg | |
| Directed by | Alfred Hitchcock |
| Produced by | Associate producer: William Hill Uncredited: Alfred Hitchcock |
| Written by | Novel: Arthur La Berne Screenplay: Anthony Shaffer |
| Starring | Jon Finch Barry Foster Alec McCowen Billie Whitelaw Anna Massey Clive Swift Barbara Leigh-Hunt Jean Marsh Vivien Merchant Bernard Cribbins |
| Music by | Ron Goodwin |
| Cinematography | Gilbert Taylor Uncredited: Leonard J. South |
| Editing by | John Jympson |
| Distributed by | Universal Pictures |
| Release date(s) | Image:Flag of the United States.svg June 21, 1972 |
| Running time | 116 min. |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3,500,000 |
| All Movie Guide profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
Frenzy (1972) is a crime thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and is the penultimate feature film of his extensive career.
Contents |
[edit] Production
The film is based upon the novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square by Arthur La Berne, and was adapted for the screen by Anthony Shaffer.
After a decade of films depicting political intrigue and espionage, Hitchcock returned to the murder genre with this film, which told the story of a serial killer who strangled several women in London. The narrative made use of the familiar Hitchcock theme of an innocent man overwhelmed by circumstantial evidence and wrongly assumed to be guilty. Many critics consider Frenzy the last great Hitchcock film and a return to form after the lesser works of Topaz and Torn Curtain.
Hitchcock set and filmed Frenzy in London after many years making films in the United States. The film opens with a sweeping shot along the River Thames to the Tower Bridge, and while the interior scenes were filmed at Pinewood Studios, much of the location filming was done in and around Covent Garden and was an homage to the London of Hitchcock's childhood. The son of a Covent Garden merchant, Hitchcock filmed several key scenes showing the area as the working produce market that it was. Aware that the area's days as a market were numbered, Hitchcock wanted to record the area as he remembered it. Certainly the area as seen in the film still exists, but the market no longer operates from there, and the buildings seen in the film are now occupied by restaurants and nightclubs, and the laneways where merchants and workers once carried their produce are now occupied by tourists and street performers.
[edit] Synopsis
The film has become well known for a couple of grisly key scenes. The rape and murder of the Brenda character, played by Barbara Leigh-Hunt, makes use of numerous short edits in a similar fashion to the Janet Leigh shower scene in Psycho, and this serves to heighten the images of violence and horror.Only one murder is depicted onscreen, as screenwriter Schaffer convinced Hitchcock that to show a second murder would be redundant. The murder of the barmaid Babs occurs offscreen, although the audience sees her entering the killer's flat and is left with a clear message that she will be murdered. The audience next sees the killer carrying a large sack and placing it onto the back of a lorry where it sits unobtrusively amongst a load of potatoes ready to be transported. He soon recalls that as he was strangling her, Babs had torn a pin from his lapel. He climbs on to the lorry to retrieve the pin from Babs' dead fingers, only to find the lorry starting off on its way to market. The killer desperately scrabbles through the sack of potatoes to find the dead woman's hand. As rigor mortis has set in, he is unable to prise the pin from her grasp until he has broken her fingers. This sequence is also composed of numerous edits to create tension and remains one of this film's most identifiable scenes.
As in several other previous Hitchcock films, the audience is fully aware of the identity of the killer (Bob Rusk played by Barry Foster) very early in the proceedings, and is also shown how circumstantial guilt is rapidly built up around an innocent man (Richard Blaney played by Jon Finch). Blaney is duly apprehended by the police and jailed, all the while maintaining his innocence. The investigating detective reconsiders the previous events and begins to believe that he's arrested the wrong man. In several scenes showing the detective's domestic situation, comedy is used to heighten the horror of the death scenes. The detective and his wife discuss the case and the wife gently points the detective in the right direction with a series of simple but appropriate questions and comments. The innocent man escapes from prison, and the detective knows that he will head to Rusk's flat at Covent Garden, so immediately goes there. Blaney has already arrived to find another murdered woman in the killer's bed and is standing over her holding a tire iron as the detective bursts through the door. The two men wait in the flat for the killer. When he returns, he has a large trunk with him, presumably to carry away the dead body, and with the body lying in the bed, his guilt is finally obvious. The film ends with this scene and Chief Inspector Oxford's classic line, "Mr. Rusk, you're not wearing your tie."
One of the interesting aspects of Frenzy is that, more than any other film of Hitchcock's "wrong man" movies, it conclusively shows how the police can be mistaken and how innocent people can end up in prison for crimes they did not commit. Although the audience is fully aware that Blaney is innocent, much of the evidence surrounding Blaney would be conclusive in a court of law, and Blaney certainly does not do much to make matters better for himself. In fact, his efforts to prove his innocence do more harm than good; in the conclusion, he's largely freed due to the coincidental return of the real killer.
Also noted by reviewers is that unlike other Hitchcock "wrong men", Blaney is presented as more unlikable, though certainly not unsympathetic. He's temperamental and prone to tantrums. While films like The 39 Steps and North by Northwest dealt with similar "wrong man" themes they also had love interests who believed, or in one way or another aided, the hero. Frenzy is possibly the only Hitchcock film where the love interest is brutally murdered, leaving the hero to fend for himself. Despite the protagonist being freed in the end, he has, as he states, nothing to lose and is possibly the worse for wear than when he started out. For these reasons, many critics consider Frenzy Hitchcock's bleakest film.
[edit] Alfred Hitchcock cameo
Alfred Hitchcock appears in the center of a crowd scene wearing a bowler hat near the beginning of the film
[edit] Trivia
- On a 2004 A&E Biography episode on serial killer Joel Rifkin, Rifkin tells an interviewer that he was inspired to strangle his victims after watching the Alfred Hitchcock movie thriller, Frenzy.
- There do not seem to be any children or teenagers in this film. All actors and extras are middle aged or older.
- The Happy Mondays song "Bob's Yer Uncle" from the album Pills 'n' Thrills and Bellyaches takes its name from a line in this film.[citation needed]
[edit] External links
| Alfred Hitchcock's films |
|---|
| 1920s: The Pleasure Garden • The Mountain Eagle • The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog • Downhill • Easy Virtue • The Ring • The Farmer's Wife • Champagne • The Manxman • Blackmail • 1930s: Juno and the Paycock • Murder! • Elstree Calling • The Skin Game • Mary • Number Seventeen • Rich and Strange • Waltzes from Vienna • The Man Who Knew Too Much • The 39 Steps • Secret Agent • Sabotage • Young and Innocent • The Lady Vanishes • Jamaica Inn • 1940s: Rebecca • Foreign Correspondent • Mr. & Mrs. Smith • Suspicion • Saboteur • Shadow of a Doubt • Lifeboat • Aventure Malgache • Bon Voyage • Spellbound • Notorious • The Paradine Case • Rope • Under Capricorn • 1950s: Stage Fright • Strangers on a Train • I Confess • Dial M for Murder • Rear Window • To Catch a Thief • The Trouble with Harry • The Man Who Knew Too Much • The Wrong Man • Vertigo • North by Northwest • 1960s: Psycho • The Birds • Marnie • Torn Curtain • Topaz • 1970s: Frenzy • Family Plot |
es:Frenesí fr:Frenzy hr:Mahnitost (1972) is:Frenzy it:Frenzy ja:フレンジー pt:Frenzy ru:Дикий (персонаж мультфильма) sv:Frenzy
