Friends and Frenzy

My old friend, the Right Rev. Schprock left a proposal for me the other day - that I watch and review Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy. He didn't give me many hints, except that it was low budget. I assumed it was a gritty, 70's psychological thriller, something a little noir.

I was quite wrong. The film is a romp - a mix of comedy of manners with slapstick, with rape/murders.

The film starts with a politician's speech interrupted by the discovery of a naked woman in the Thames, strangled with a necktie. Someone in the crowd (but not the familiar looking portly gentleman) draws our attention to the pattern on the tie. Cut to our "hero", Richard Blaney, putting on the same tie. He is a shiftless alcoholic divorced womanizing ex-RAF barman in Covent Garden, played by the Alan Bates-looking Jon Finch. When he is fired for taking a drink from the bar, we find that he is pretty much broke, has poor impulse control, and is fooling around with the barmaid. He looks good for the killer.

Later, we meet his old friend Rusk, played Michael-Caine-by-way-of-Gene-Wilder style by Barry Foster. He is trying to help Blaney, but Blaney won't take the help. He won't take help from his ex-wife, the marriage broker, either. That is his angry young man style.

When the barmaid, and later his ex-wife, turn up dead, it looks dark indeed.

However, we know he hasn't done it, in fact, we know who did. I'll skip the spoilers, but let you know that the killer is forced to go back to the corpse he had stuffed in a potato sack and wrestle with it. The scene is pure 3 Stooges, with the naked corpse's foot in the killer's face, and potatoes everywhere.

Not all of the humor is so broad. Most of it is simple observation of 70's London and its character types. It is more drab than swinging, although the fashions are late mod (big prints, sideburns). The women are plain, not chirpy dollybirds. The surroundings are a bit shabby. Life is desperate, but, stiff upper lip, mustn't grumble, make the best of it.

And then, between the slapstick and the observational humor - brutal rape, strangulation and murder. There is a touch of Hitchcock's misogyny here (a large touch - a bad touch), but he seems to show some love for these poor, downtrodden women, almost as if, in death, they have seen the passion that England has deprived them of.

So, in conclusion, big yuks, dead women. Caution - nudity. No caution is needed for the murders, I assume.