Frenzy

Plot synopsis:
In London, a serial killer is raping women and strangling them with neckties. Most of the film takes place in Covent Garden, which at the time was still the location of the city's wholesale fruit and vegetable market. Fairly early in the film, the audience sees that fruit merchant Robert Rusk (Barry Foster) is in fact the murderer. However, circumstantial evidence has already built up around his friend Richard Blaney (Jon Finch).
Blaney's ex-wife, Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt), runs a matchmaking service that Rusk used until he was blacklisted for beating up his dates. One day, Rusk shows up at her office and tries to seduce her; when she spurns his advances, he rapes and strangles her in a fit of rage. Suspicion falls on Blaney, who is previously seen threatening his ex-wife in public, as well as being seen leaving her building shortly after her murder. The subsequent murder of Blaney's girlfriend, Barbara "Babs" Milligan (Anna Massey), occurs off-screen: the audience sees her entering Rusk's apartment with him, but the camera then pulls back down the stairs all the way out to the other side of the street.
The audience next sees Rusk at night carrying a large sack and lifting it into the back of a lorry among sacks of unsold potatoes bound for Lincolnshire. Rusk soon finds that his distinctive jeweled tie pin (with the initial R) is missing, and realises that Babs must have torn it off as he was murdering her. He climbs into the back of the lorry, but it starts off on its journey north. The killer desperately scrabbles through the sack of potatoes to find the dead woman's hand. Rigor mortis has set in, and he has to break her fingers in order to prise the pin from her grasp.
Owing to fake evidence set up by Rusk, Blaney is gaoled while protesting his innocence. Chief Inspector Oxford (Alec McCowen), the detective investigating the murders, reconsiders the previous events and begins to believe that he has arrested the wrong man. He discusses the case with his wife (Vivien Merchant) in several scenes of comic relief concerning her pretensions as a gourmet cook.
With the help of his fellow inmates, Blaney escapes from prison. Oxford knows he will head to Rusk's flat for revenge, and immediately goes there. Blaney arrives first, to find that the door to the flat is unlocked. He creeps in and sees what appears to be Rusk asleep in bed, and strikes the body three times with a tyre iron. However, the body is in fact the corpse of another of Rusk's female victims, strangled by a necktie.
Oxford bursts through the door. Blaney is still standing by the corpse holding the tyre iron, and begins to protest his innocence, but then they both hear something or someone banging heavily coming up the staircase. The two men wait in the flat and witness Rusk dragging a large trunk inside to cart away the body, only to come face to face with two determined witnesses. The film ends with Oxford's urbane but pointed comment, "Mr. Rusk, you're not wearing your tie." Rusk drops the trunk in defeat.

Tags: murder, cult, revenge, horror, flashback, suspenseful, sadist

Review:
After 30 years in the USA and after the disappointments of "Torn Curtain" (1966) and "Topaz" (1969), Alfred Hitchcock came back to his native Britain for this film -written by Anthony Shaffer from a novel by Arthur La Bern."Frenzy" is his penultimate movie, certainly the best one of his last period.
Furthermore, he wants this time more ordinary faces for making the story more shocking (with famous actors in the main roles, the plot -in a certain way- could be identified mostly with them and loose strength, instead Hitchcock avoids that "paradox"...).Maybe "Frenzy" is not an unforgettable masterpiece like "Psycho", "Vertigo", "Birds" or many other works.
Hitchcock had been in a bit of an artistic slump when, after some thirty years, he returned to England for this, his next to last film--and the result was his final masterpiece.Scripted with ghoulish humor by Anthony Schaffer, FRENZY opens with a ceremony on the banks of the Thames in which Londoners inaugurate legislation to rid the river of pollutants...
Leading man Jon Finch (Richard Blaney) is perfectly cast as the attractive but disreputable suspect on the run, and he is equaled by his chum Barry Foster (Robert Rusk.) A special mention must also be made of the two female leads, Anna Massey and Barbara Leigh-Hunt--not to mention the host of supporting characters who bring the entire panorama of the great city to life.In his earlier films, Hitchcock generally preferred to work by inference, implying danger and violence rather than openly showing it on the screen.
PSYCHO broke the mold, and with FRENZY Hitchcock presents a sequence that many believe equals the notorious "shower scene:" a horrific rape and slow strangulation that leaves the viewer simply stunned.
as we shudder with the knowledge that the woman who just entered that apartment door is now being horrifically raped and murdered.Hitchcock made one more film, a comic wink with twists of suspense starring Karen Black, Bruce Dern, and Barbara Harris called FAMILY PLOT--and it is an enjoyable film in its own right.
The suspense and tension is extreme at points of the movie, and Hitchcock (once again) proves his perfect understanding of the film-making elements and his ability to put them to good use.
Since The Birds in 1963 Hitchcock's movies (Marnie, Torn Curtain and Topaz) had not met with commercial success (though, personally, I think Marnie was great).Frenzy sees Hitchcock back to doing what he does best - suspenseful murder dramas.
Also tells you what Hitchcock could have done with is movies if all the stupid, puritanical censorship wasn't there all along.Not as tightly wound as his greats (Rear Window and Psycho especially), so not perfect as far as suspense and enthrallment goes.Good performance by Jon Finch in the lead role.
Now came Barry Foster's suave, cheery -- and quite insane -- Covent Garden greengrocer Bob Rusk as Hitchcock's fourth great psychopath, and his most graphically violent.Hitchcock created in "Frenzy" both a return to old times (London, "the wrong man") and a nod towards new times with "Frenzy." That's why it worked in 1972, and yet seems ugly and gritty today.
But the rape-murder of "Frenzy" is perhaps the most meaningful: heartbreaking and not titallating at all; a horrific look at what real psychopaths do to their real victims in real life.There's plenty of British humor and plenty of Hitchcock style to leaven the single horrific (on screen) sex murder of "Frenzy." (Try the staircase scene, the potato truck scene, the Scotland Yard man's dinner scenes, and the line "You're my type of woman" as examples.)  It is indeed a fine Hitchcock film -- if not quite a "great" -- and fits its particular brutal film era live a glove..
It's arguably the most meaningful, disturbing, economic tracking shot ever performed, and shows Hitchcock can genuinely chill without flamboyant rape and asphyxiation scenes.Frenzy is by no means top tier Hitchcock, but it does contain enough flashes of brilliance to put it close and justify its position as 'the last great Hitchcock film'..
There's a serial killer murdering and raping women in London using a necktie.Richard Ian Blaney (Ian Finch) becomes the main suspect of the horrible deeds after his ex-wife, Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) is killed.He's not the man behind them but he wants to find out who is.So he escapes from jail.In Frenzy (1972) Alfred Hitchcock goes back to England.In this movie he has a macabre style, having some awfully brutal scenes.You can't, in any case, call this movie entertaining.In some scenes it's pretty hard to watch.But I don't mean it's bad, not at all.It's a very interesting movie that glues to your seats till the ending credits.The actors are brilliant.I couldn't imagine anybody better than Jon Finch for the lead playing the every man Ian Blaney.Alec McGowen makes a great Chief Inspector Oxford.Barry Foster is most excellent as Robert Rusk.Then there are the ladies Billie Whitelaw (Hetty Porter), Anna Massey (Babs Milligan) and Barbara Leigh-Hunt (Brenda Margaret Blaney).They're all amazing.During the summer channel 2 was showing some of the masterpieces of Alfred Hitchcock on Saturday evenings.Those classic movies made my summer a little bit better.In the second last movie of Hitch he didn't fail.He may have been older but that didn't make him less competent.There has been and there never will be anyone quite like him..
There is not, for him, gratuitous use of blood and outlandish violence, what that observer failed to realise is that to be raped and murdered IS disgusting, and this is Hitch showing that many "horror" films are not horrific; this is.He clearly loved to be back in London, and this film has London as an important character, whilst a stylised mix of the London he remembered as a child and early 1970's London, it is never a caricature.In short, a wholly enjoyable suspense/horror, with some lovely light touches (I particularly enjoyed the long silence of the Sergeant watching his boss enjoying breakfast), some great performances, and a fine dramatic ending..
He is far from the Cary Grant-type of leading man Hitchcock was known for having in the past.Best scene has the killer searching desperately for his tie-pin in the back of a truck barreling down the highway hauling potatoes, and having to wrench his most recent victim's stiffened fingers open to retrieve it, and then still having to get away unnoticed from the truck.The violence is balanced with enough humour, particularly involving Chief Inspector Oxford, and his wife, who insists on feeding him the most grotesque looking meals imaginable.Oxford also delivers the brilliant final line, which would have been the perfect close of Hitchcock's career.Perhaps with the bombs that were his two previous films, and with his advancing age, Hitchcock thought "At my age, I might as well have a go at graphic horror"?
What Finch manages to do his very nicely implicate himself as the serial killer.Frenzy is a combination of a whole lot of Alfred Hitchcock chase movies like North By Northwest, Saboteur, The 39 Steps all involving wrongly accused men.
Hitchcock is playing with his audience, he's unmasked the killer, but you're not quite sure whether to hope he's caught or root for him to get away with it.Not the best of Hitch's later films..
After thirty years in Hollywood, a time which produced both Hitchcock's laziest, fluffiest films and his most personal and innovative, Hitchcock returns to the UK for "Frenzy", a grim and gruesome but ghoulishly comical thriller centered on a series of murderers by a 'necktie murderer', who rapes his victims before strangling them with, of course, his necktie.
It's not much of a mystery, as we discover the identity of the assailant around a quarter of the way through the film (not before Hitchcock attempts to deceive the audience through his construction of certain scenes visually), which leaves it largely a 'wrong man' sort of thriller, but one with a lot of gruesome and suspenseful moments, and one largely devoid of the gloss present in most of Hitchcock's Hollywood output.
It's grimy and gritty in a way few of Hitchcock's later films are, and is also Hitchcock's only film to contain an abundance of nudity and violence, which may to some seem unnecessary, but I found it added to the film's strength given the subject matter.One of several outstanding films scripted by Anthony Shaffer- "Sleuth", also released in 1972, "The Wicker Man", "Death on the Nile", "Murder on the Orient Express", "Frenzy" is typically well-written, with comic relief that doesn't feel even remotely misplaced (aside from one or two very slightly grating scenes featuring Inspector Oxford's wife) and an expert handling of the thriller aspects of the film, while also creating characters worth giving a damn about, so much so that when a certain death occurs one is far more affected than they would usually be by a film of this sort, where it is usually just another plot device.
Of course, "Frenzy" contains what is almost certainly the most horrifying and disturbing scene Hitchcock ever directed, an uncomfortably long and very graphic rape and murder scene, but one that is so beautifully filmed that a single shot of the victim reaching to cover her breast after he bra was ripped off is more effective than the entirety of something like Gaspar Noe's hilariously awful 10-minute long audience torture in "Irreversible", which was disturbing not for content but for how insipid and cinematically-retarded the scene was.The score by Ron Goodwin is excellent, and after hearing some of what Henry Mancini wrote for the film I have to side with Hitchcock.
The dialogue is intelligent but there is lots of black humour that manages to be hilarious without it detracting too much(the final line is a riot), and while the film is one of Hitchcock's grimmest with everyone and everything unattractive and genuinely terrifying rapes/murders it is still edge of your seat stuff as can be evident in the potato truck sequence.
Jon Finch does what he can with the man-at-the-wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time sort of character he has, and the performance is good enough without being one of the all-time greats for a Hitchcock film.
"Frenzy" is a solid, if sleazy and dull slasher-thriller.**SPOILERS**Having been recently fired, Richard Blaney, (Jon Finch) searches the streets of London for work and comes across old friend Bob Rusk, (Barry Foster) and tries to offer him some help to get out of his predicament.
Frenzy, in a way, doesn't do a whole lot different entertainment wise for an audience what Alfred Hitchcock's (British) films did in the 30s.
The difference here comes in two important aspects- 1) the director himself, having created this kind of suspenseful, daring, but always with a certain degree of dark hilarity, has to go a little further with this kind of murder mystery, and as the second to last film of his career shows him reaching further into a bag of tricks not even to impress and entertain audiences but only himself.
Luckily there are two things that happen through the course of the film- Finch really gets further, and more believably as another 'Wrong Man' for Hitchcock, and there is the villain Robert Rusk played by Barry Foster.
Filming a movie in his native England for the first time in 18 years, Alfred Hitchcock - watch for him as the man in the crowd at the beginning - tells the story of several bizarre murders in London.
I think what impresses me the most about "Frenzy," though, is the way Hitchcock reveals the murderer's identity in the first 20 minutes, but maintains a high-strung suspenseful atmosphere for the rest of the film (which runs about 2 hours); there's a lesson to be learned here, especially when modern filmmakers can't lend their culprits 5 minutes of credibility without having them blather a long, tacky monologue about the nature of their evil.
I've yet to see all of Hitchcock's films, but Frenzy has surely got to be his most brutal and shocking, a daring psycho-sexual thriller which, to the best of my knowledge, is the only one of his films to be released on DVD in the UK with an 18 certificate.Unlike 'vintage' Hitchcock movies such as Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho, this film is far less focused on impressing the viewer with impeccably staged, cleverly edited, edge-of-the seat set-pieces and more concerned with bringing a sense of realism to proceedings.
This means that there are no glamorous, big-name Hollywood stars—the relatively unknown British actors he uses look just like 'real' people—and the whole film is staged in the shabby, working-class surroundings of London's Covent Garden market.Hitch makes matters more gritty by pushing his film as far as possible in terms of sexual violence, with the first murder in particular proving extremely harrowing due to its explicit execution; it's a bold move from a long established director not afraid to change with the times.
The director's black sense of humour is also very much in evidence and serves to make the movie an even more uncomfortable experience, the deliberately awkward juxtaposition of the horrific and the comedic making the viewer feel bad for laughing.This shift in style from Hollywood gloss to British realism might be a step too far for some fans of the director, but I found the change to be rather refreshing, and despite the occasional flaw in the plot (police procedure is particularly shoddy), I reckon that this is one of the director's more accomplished films, a delightfully twisted tale from an undisputed master of the macabre..
As a proud Englishman it gave me great pleasure to see the Master back in England capturing the English time frame of London perfectly, for the film to work we really need to get the vibe of the place and to believe in the characters who frequent the area, I feel Hitch delivers this no problem at all.The story stands up as genuine thriller material, some crazy fruit loop is strangling women with neck ties and the police are trailing the wrong man...Sound familiar?
Well yes it is, but Hitch being Hitch, he manages to bring dashes of humour to go with the tense taut terror unfolding on the screen.The cast do fine here, and I do believe that the fact that none of the actors are top draw names actually helps the film bring out an uneasy feel, here the interesting fleshing of the characters is one of Hitchcock's great strengths in this particular piece.
The villain of the piece stands up as one of the best because he could easily be your best mate, someone you readily turn to in times of need, yet strip away that facade and you get the savage murdering rapist that Hitchcock takes great delight in assaulting our eyes with.Lovely...Lovely...LOVELY....LOVELY !Although its rating on IMDb hovers around 7.5 I have always been led to believe that Frenzy wasn't all that well thought of, tales of America refusing to embrace the film because of its London sensibility, and tired old arguments about the great man being past his peak etc.
But what I personally know is that Frenzy is a very good film that has me squirming and laughing in equal measure, so with that it's just shy of being a Hitchcock classic, but still it stands up as better than what most other thriller directors could ever have hoped to have achieved back then.
Getting laughs from a killer's attempt to recover evidence from a dead body.Like "Frenzy's" Richard Blaney, a decorated ex-military man now scrounging for decent work, Alfred Hitchcock was on a losing streak when he made this, his darkest, toughest film, counted out by even some who loved him most.
Hitchcock is out to shock, and shock he does in a rape/murder scene that's as harrowing as anything coming out of "New Hollywood" at the time, then shows the young turks how it's done the next time the serial killer strikes, in a virtuoso sequence that doesn't allow us to see or hear a single second of the second attack but still manages to be almost as upsetting as the first.This film really underscores how much the modern "thriller/horror" genre owes to Hitchcock.
The film 'Frenzy' is about a normal seeming man named Robert Rusk(Barry Foster) that goes on a murderous rampage around London raping and killing women by strangling them with neckties after he violates them.
Alfred Hitchcock directed this violent thriller set in London that stars Jon Finch as Richard Blaney, an unlucky and unpleasant man who becomes the chief suspect in a rash of brutal murders of women called the Necktie Killer.
Really, this is an incredibly bleak and unpleasant film when you really get into it, with Hitchcock seemingly free of the interference of Hollywood producers and the rigid confines of American censorship and finally able to present his ultimate treatise on murder at its most basic and disturbed.The helplessness of the central character, as played vividly by Jon Finch, mirrors our own helplessness when faced with Hitchcock's cold manipulation; confounding us with expectation and taking influence from the then quite radical exploitation cinema to confront the depiction of violence in a way that had rarely been presented in a mainstream thriller.
For those of you who haven't seen this, I won't spoil the "surprise" for you, except to say that I've owned FRENZY on VHS for two years now and it is quite a powerful Hitch murder thriller, making extremely fine use of its Central London locations and featuring many suspenseful moments which are enhanced by excellent camera work.
FRENZY is Hitchcock back in his British origins with another tale about a serial killer, the kind he made films about when he began his career in the U.K. This time, it's in color, beautifully photographed, but just as grim (although laced with dark humor) as some of his B&W classics.And as usual, there are some marvelous set pieces...the famous tracking shot from the killer's apartment, down a hallway and then out to the street, all in one sweeping camera pan.
When his ex-wife Brenda (Barbara Leigh-Hunt) the police suspect Richard is the killer; but the police is after the wrong man.Frenzy is a bold film for time with Hitchcock being more graphic with violence and nudity without the need to overuse the then new techniques and less strict limits.