Frenzy [DVD] [1972] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

This movie was a winner from the outset - it could not fail; having all the necessary ingredients of a super thriller - coupled with a cast that consisted of some of Britain's finest talent of the time. Indeed, we could never view Barry Foster quite the same afterwards! It also included an impeccable supporting cast that starred Jean Marsh, (who had risen to fame at about the same time with the success of the award-winning TV series 'Upstairs, Downstairs') Jimmy Gardner (of 10 Rillington Place fame - playing an effeminate porter!); Clive Swift, Billie Whitelaw, Anna Massey and Michael Bates. But the leads could not have been more well-chosen. Alec McCowen was simply superb as the handsome, and rather 'gentle' chief inspector, who is married to the subservient wife who uses him as her culinary guinea pig! Played by the marvellous Vivien Merchant, she gives us an entertaining performance, and amuses audiences by taking delight in reminding her wonderful husband (who, to use his own words; 'does not knock her about, or make her do degrading things') that it was 'he', that had put the poor Mr. Blaney behind bars - and not she! This film does have its amusing moments, but I think I am correct in saying that this was the very first movie to ever feature the showing of the full length murder of a victim in 'real time' as it were - something viewers today perhaps might not fully appreciate at just how shocking and disturbing this was at the time! Some of the younger viewers might also find some of the acting just a little dated and over-the-top; i.e. Jean Marsh - too 'prim' perhaps as the spinster secretary, and Mr. Blaney too 'angry a young man' as the young fellow down on his luck. But then this is how acting used to be; an art form, rather than the concentrating and the relying on special effects to gather audiences. It was far more improtant to see the actors' ability to interpret their roles in their own way. I believe this movie would still be a great shocker to anyone who hasn't already seen it - even today!

Highly recommended viewing!

FRENZY is excellent and shocking in equal measure. Elegantly scripted by playwright Anthony Shaffer and with the usual quota of standout sequences - the camera's slow track out on to a Covent Garden street from the flat of the killer, a blackly comic, desperate attempt to retrieve a vital clue by breaking the fingers of a corpse dumped in a lorry-load of potatoes, and the droll understatement of the detective's mealtime conversations with his wife. Supremely enjoyable late Hitchcock.

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