I just saw this 1972 film, Hitchcock’s second last, for the first time. I don’t particularly like this genre of film, and none of the actors were familiar to me, but I found myself enjoying all the plot twists, and the occasional humor. And the suspense continued until literally the final minute. Definitely a movie worth watching.
And oh man, I’m going to have nightmares about that scene in the back of the potato truck.
Yeah, a good one, possibly Hitchcock’s most explicitly violent. I love the Inspector’s wife.
It’s good, but it lacks a strong leading man. Hitchcock’s films worked best when he leaned on a charismatic lead - a Cary Grant, a Jimmy Stewart or an Anthony Perkins - to temper his craft with some humanity. *Frenzy’s *cast was capable, but anonymous.
I think it was reworking of his 1937 film Young and Innocent. It was a great improvement.
I LOVE Frenzy.
I thought Barry Foster was fantastically creepy throughout. The slow pan out from the office back into the hustle and bustle of the street whilst the killer murders one of the characters is, I think, one of the most haunting and bleak bits of any Hitchcock film.
Still, overall also just mordantly witty, summed up by the perfect (last?) line. “Mr Rusk, you’re not wearing your tie.”
Don’t forget “virtue is its own reward”
Hitchcock’s writers don’t get the credit they deserve, IMHO. Not one person here has mentioned the writer – although they like the lines. For the record, it’s Anthony Schaffer, who wrote Sleuth* He also wrote the screenplays to a couple of Hercule Poirot films in the 1970s, and another Broadway mystery that never got filmed – Whodunit?, which was sort of an upscale “Clue”. He’s the brother of playwright Peter Schaffer, who did Equus and Amadeus.
*I like Sleuth, dammit! And I wasn’t happy with Harold Pinter’s rewrite, which critics loved, putting down Schaffer’s version. But Schaffer’s version had wit, dammit, and was quotable.
Just because I didn’t mention the writer, doesn’t mean I didn’t know who he was or respect his work. I liked his screenplay for The Wicker Man too, for instance. But it’s a message board answer, not a dissertation.
Not at all. Hitchcock had remade Young and Innocent twice already – Saboteur and North by Northwest (one particular shot that’s well known in both films was originally used in Y&I) – and Young and Innocent is one of his most underrated films.
Frenzy doesn’t match any of them, other than having an innocent man accused of a crime. But the focus isn’t on the man, as it is in the other films. Still it has some classic bits – the staircase scene (of course – Hitchcock loved scenes on staircases) and the scenes between the inspector and his wife (plus the final line).
It was considered great shakes when it first came out, but I don’t think it wears well. Family Plot, OTOH, was less well liked on release but holds up much better.
Purely for your amusement, the Master (no, not that one) speaks:
*I used an overhead track. The interiors were all done in the studio. The overhead track extended a few feet in front of the ground-floor door, and I had the facade of the building duplicated exactly in the studio. When the camera had pulled back to the end of its track, I had a man walk in front of the camera with a sack of potatoes over his shoulder. Here, there was an imperceptible cut to the same man walking past the building on location. After that, I could pull back as far as I liked into Henrietta Street, and it looked like one continuous movement, beginning at the upstairs door…
And I experimented in sound. When Anna Massey first came out onto the sidewalk, you heard the murderer’s voice, “Got a place to stay?” I took every bit of sound off the track then. Dead silence…
And I used the same effect in reverse. When the camera discreetly retreated down the stairs after he took the girl to his room, it went out onto the street, and I brought the traffic up to a tremendous roar so that an audience would subconsciously say, “Well, if the girl screams, no one is going to hear it.”*
Except I didn’t subconsciously say that. I thought the scene was telling me how the extraordinary takes place within a stone’s throw of the commonplace.
Good film, I enjoy it. It’s reception in the US was far more favourable than it was over here.
Apparently Michael Caine was offered the role of Rusk. He found the character too repellent to consider portraying and refused.
And explicitly, and reverently, quoted by Scorsese at the end of Taxi Driver.
That’s such a fantastic cite, thank you so much for sharing it. And wow yes, the effect of no-one hearing the scream hit like a punch to the stomach. I kept looking at all the extras, people who would all rush to save a fellow human being if they only knew but none of them did know.
Huh. I utterly believe you but I just can’t clearly call the ending to mind. I remember thinking Taxi Driver was both stunning and yet also somehow a movie I keep putting off ever watching again. Strange, really - there are lots of films that are ostensibly waaay bleaker but there’s someting about that film that stops a rewatch. It has sat on my bookshelf for nearly 10 years and it still has the cellophane wrap on it. But thanks to this, I have to rip the cellophane off and have a rewatch 
I think the humor was as good as any Hitchcock movie. Love the meals that the poor inspector had set in front of him.