1972 Hitchcock film.
Added 10/5/2009
Hitchcock returns to London, to film Frenzy, where England is the back drop, of the film. Also features an all British cast, in the film. In any case, the film is a black comedy, and even though the subject matter is quite gruesome, the film plays well, due to the fact that it doesn't take the subject matter all too seriously.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
The Wrong Bloke
Added 10/5/2009
When it was released in 1972 after a couple of slower moving espionage flicks, many reviewers saw Hitchcock's FRENZY as something of a return to form--to say nothing of it being a welcome return to the director's native England. Even after he was firmly ensconced in Hollywood, Hitch had never really ceased making films with an English setting. But aside from the requisite location footage, those films were obviously shot on studio lots--DIAL M FOR MURDER and STAGE FRIGHT being prime examples. And those classics, good as they were, featured American actors in key roles. FRENZY, on the other hand, was veddy British and proudly so. Anglophiles the world over can take delight in the rather spectacular opening shots of the Thames and the Tower Bridge. And many of the exterior shots were filmed in Covent Garden, where decades before Hitchcock's own father had been a greengrocer.
Aside from the neighborhood and overall milieu, I wouldn't go overboard on stressing the autobiographical elements. The return to his homeland does seem to energize the director and make for a ripping good yarn, with a goodly amount of real suspense and gobs of dark Hitchcockian humor. But this is not an intensely personal film, in the manner of VERTIGO, say. Despite its grim premise--serial murder being something of delicate matter in the post-Manson early 70s--FRENZY has a lightness of touch that was largely absent in his classic 60s period. The movie is as much remembered for the wryly humorous domestic scenes between Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec MacGowan) and his ecctric but perceptive wife (Vivien Merchant)as it is for its graphic violence.
I remember any number of critics at the time commenting on the almost complete lack of glamour about the film. The shots of London were often breathtaking, but the cast seemed average in the extreme (if such a thing is possible). Even the potentially dashing Jon Finch (who had just wrapped Polanski's MACBETH) wasn't exactly radiating star power here. Whatever charisma he might have otherwise possessed, is hidden behind a rumpled suit and a bad haircut. The average man caught up in an intrigue he cannot quite fathom isn't a Hollywood luminary like Jimmy Stewart this time out. Finch looks every bit the down-on-his-luck former RAF pilot reduced to tending bar and scuffling his way through life in a Swinging London that seems to be leaving him behind.
And he's really not all that likeable, which may be Hitchcock's cleverest touch. He's anything but a sweetly bumbling Stewart type, or an elegant, cheeky Cary Grant. This character has baggage, much of it under his eyes. This is another "wrong man" tale, but the difference is, you have to work a bit harder to care about this particular wrong man.
Ultimately, the relative obscurity of the cast makes for a much more character driven film, and I'd say, one that's all the stronger for it. There are lot of familiar faces in this movie, but there's a world of difference between looking at a character actor and wondering, "Now where have I seen him before?" and saying, in effect, "Ah, Jimmy Stewart, well, we all know what he brings to the table."
Aside from being a compelling suspense film, FRENZY was also the first Hitchcock film to receive an "R" rating. Much had changed in the ten years since PSYCHO, for instance, and a romantic liaison in a hotel, for instance, would now feature actual nudity. It was the 70s, after all, and such was required in almost every film aimed at an adult audience. Interesting that the master handled this newfound freedom as well as he did. There is nothing that is gratuitous about the nudity in the trysting scenes, and while the equally graphic rape and murder scene (and there's only one, although others are implied)is quite disturbing, it also is anything but gratuitous. (Thank the good Lord and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer for convincing Hitchcock to only portray only ONE of the film's several murders up close and all too personal.)
FRENZY wasn't quite the hit it should have been, but it did serve to demonstrate that the later Hitchcock had lost none of his powers. Good show!
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Solid Hitchcock suspense, but his powers were waning
Added 7/2/2009
This has all the hallmarks of classic Hitchcock: a good man is turned victim of the system by bad luck, and must fight to exonerate himself while threatening his soul by seeking vengeance. The baddie is a serial killer who is revealed early on, so there is no guessing about who's who. There is also plenty of humor, both extremely grizzly (legs hanging out of potato sack) and mundane (British food anxieties).
Unfortunately, something about the chemistry of this film just doesn't work very well. At least for me, I couldn't quite believe it and did not get wrapped in a separate world, away from my own concerns. This is a very late film from the master, whose collaborator wife had recently passed away, and his imaginative energy simply cannot match the extraordinary qualities we expect from his film of the 50s and 60s.
REcommended only for the most serious of Hitchcock fans.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Good'n creepy
Added 4/20/2009
I first watched Frenzy when I was much younger and I remember being pretty darn scared. I've always loved Alfred Hitchcock's movies and this one is just so creepy because the wrong guy is the suspect through most of the movie until the very end, meanwhile the real culprit just keeps killing women. I think the actors couldn't have been picked more perfect for the roles and I simply just love this old movie.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
It is so easy to have someone else accused in your place
Added 2/8/2009
Hitchcock, one of the most famous British expatriates in the cinema industry, came back for one film in England, in London very exactly and he demonstrated in the early 70s he was able to build a cool thriller, in the traditional English style and rhythm and make it fascinating. The case is of course so quaint, so passé and he enjoys making thinks look the way they looked not in the 70s but in the 60s. He concentrates the film on Covent Garden when it was still a fruit and vegetable market, on their pubs, their dealers, their night life and their busy running hectic at times life. Today all that has disappeared and you can find the London Transport Museum where you used to have banana and orange wholesale dealers. Then he worked hard on finding the particular ways Londoners lived at that time, just after coal was banned around 1962. And of course his killer is well integrated in this extremely regular disorganized precipitation. The fashion is just right, the home furniture and various small equipment are just right, authentic, and yet the sarcastic eye of Alfred Hitchcock cannot forget to show the flaws and the drawbacks of this life that is slowly opening up to continental Europe and the whole world. The gourmet classes for housewives teaching them all kinds of French recipes that are of course deliciously failed by these amateurs while the good old bacon and eggs are getting out of fashion. But then we are in pure Hitchcockian fiction. A serial killer who strangles his victims with his ties and then dispose of them, both the victims and the ties together. An imbroglio that makes a friend of that killer be suspected and then, with a little of effort from the killer, that suspected person becomes the convicted killer who is no killer at all. He escapes the prison in the simplest British way you can imagine: he gets himself hospitalized so that he can go and have his vengeance on his friend who had had him arrested. And there the surprise will be total. Fiction again that shows a policeman who gets someone convicted for a serious crime and yet doubts his own conclusion and starts asking some more questions. Why did he not do it before? And he could have listened to his wife who, between serving pig trotters cooked with grapes or some partridges or pigeons cooked with cherries, had suggested that the suspect could not be the criminal for obscure reasons that have to do with feminine intuition. And he adds a good layer of gossip on publicans who both are tyrants in their pubs and informers to the police. That makes a pleasant film altogether whose rhythm is slow enough for peaceful enjoyment and fast enough for some thrilling pleasure. The title is of course one of these tricks Hitchcock was so fond of: he is not lying really, he is just overstating with a tongue in his cheek and that works all the time and we smile after the film since we were trapped into believing it was frantic and it was just intense.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID
1 out of 1 people found this helpful.
|
1972 Hitchcock film.
Added 10/5/2009
Hitchcock returns to London, to film Frenzy, where England is the back drop, of the film. Also features an all British cast, in the film. In any case, the film is a black comedy, and even though the subject matter is quite gruesome, the film plays well, due to the fact that it doesn't take the subject matter all too seriously.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
The Wrong Bloke
Added 10/5/2009
When it was released in 1972 after a couple of slower moving espionage flicks, many reviewers saw Hitchcock's FRENZY as something of a return to form--to say nothing of it being a welcome return to the director's native England. Even after he was firmly ensconced in Hollywood, Hitch had never really ceased making films with an English setting. But aside from the requisite location footage, those films were obviously shot on studio lots--DIAL M FOR MURDER and STAGE FRIGHT being prime examples. And those classics, good as they were, featured American actors in key roles. FRENZY, on the other hand, was veddy British and proudly so. Anglophiles the world over can take delight in the rather spectacular opening shots of the Thames and the Tower Bridge. And many of the exterior shots were filmed in Covent Garden, where decades before Hitchcock's own father had been a greengrocer.
Aside from the neighborhood and overall milieu, I wouldn't go overboard on stressing the autobiographical elements. The return to his homeland does seem to energize the director and make for a ripping good yarn, with a goodly amount of real suspense and gobs of dark Hitchcockian humor. But this is not an intensely personal film, in the manner of VERTIGO, say. Despite its grim premise--serial murder being something of delicate matter in the post-Manson early 70s--FRENZY has a lightness of touch that was largely absent in his classic 60s period. The movie is as much remembered for the wryly humorous domestic scenes between Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec MacGowan) and his ecctric but perceptive wife (Vivien Merchant)as it is for its graphic violence.
I remember any number of critics at the time commenting on the almost complete lack of glamour about the film. The shots of London were often breathtaking, but the cast seemed average in the extreme (if such a thing is possible). Even the potentially dashing Jon Finch (who had just wrapped Polanski's MACBETH) wasn't exactly radiating star power here. Whatever charisma he might have otherwise possessed, is hidden behind a rumpled suit and a bad haircut. The average man caught up in an intrigue he cannot quite fathom isn't a Hollywood luminary like Jimmy Stewart this time out. Finch looks every bit the down-on-his-luck former RAF pilot reduced to tending bar and scuffling his way through life in a Swinging London that seems to be leaving him behind.
And he's really not all that likeable, which may be Hitchcock's cleverest touch. He's anything but a sweetly bumbling Stewart type, or an elegant, cheeky Cary Grant. This character has baggage, much of it under his eyes. This is another "wrong man" tale, but the difference is, you have to work a bit harder to care about this particular wrong man.
Ultimately, the relative obscurity of the cast makes for a much more character driven film, and I'd say, one that's all the stronger for it. There are lot of familiar faces in this movie, but there's a world of difference between looking at a character actor and wondering, "Now where have I seen him before?" and saying, in effect, "Ah, Jimmy Stewart, well, we all know what he brings to the table."
Aside from being a compelling suspense film, FRENZY was also the first Hitchcock film to receive an "R" rating. Much had changed in the ten years since PSYCHO, for instance, and a romantic liaison in a hotel, for instance, would now feature actual nudity. It was the 70s, after all, and such was required in almost every film aimed at an adult audience. Interesting that the master handled this newfound freedom as well as he did. There is nothing that is gratuitous about the nudity in the trysting scenes, and while the equally graphic rape and murder scene (and there's only one, although others are implied)is quite disturbing, it also is anything but gratuitous. (Thank the good Lord and screenwriter Anthony Shaffer for convincing Hitchcock to only portray only ONE of the film's several murders up close and all too personal.)
FRENZY wasn't quite the hit it should have been, but it did serve to demonstrate that the later Hitchcock had lost none of his powers. Good show!
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
Solid Hitchcock suspense, but his powers were waning
Added 7/2/2009
This has all the hallmarks of classic Hitchcock: a good man is turned victim of the system by bad luck, and must fight to exonerate himself while threatening his soul by seeking vengeance. The baddie is a serial killer who is revealed early on, so there is no guessing about who's who. There is also plenty of humor, both extremely grizzly (legs hanging out of potato sack) and mundane (British food anxieties).
Unfortunately, something about the chemistry of this film just doesn't work very well. At least for me, I couldn't quite believe it and did not get wrapped in a separate world, away from my own concerns. This is a very late film from the master, whose collaborator wife had recently passed away, and his imaginative energy simply cannot match the extraordinary qualities we expect from his film of the 50s and 60s.
REcommended only for the most serious of Hitchcock fans.
0 out of 0 people found this helpful.
|
