Stars: Jon Finch, Alec McCowen, Barry Foster, Billie Whitelaw, Anna Massey, Barbara Leigh Hunt, Bernard Cribbins, Vivien Merchant

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Summary: Tense tale of an ex-RAF officer who is suspected of being London's 'necktie murderer'.

FRENZY was Alfred Hitchcock's penultimate film--and the first film he'd made in England in 20 years. Based on an Arthur La Bern novel, the film focuses on many of the same motifs that Hitchcock had obsessively examined throughout his life's work: the wrong man theme, doubling (in which one person acts out the repressed violence of another), and the general public's thirst for sex and violence. Hitchcock had made films featuring Jack the Ripper-type killers before, including THE LODGER in 1926, a silent movie about a series of murders in London and a mysterious man who appears to be guilty of the crimes. In FRENZY, Hitchcock goes mod with this blackly comic story about a sex criminal--the Necktie Killer--plaguing post-Carnaby London. An innocent man who is suspected by police as the murderer must fight to nab the real perpetrator and clear his name. Though not as well-known as his other films, FRENZY marked a striking return to form for the famed director. Anthony Shaffer's script is excellent, and Jon Finch brings distinctive qualities to his role as the classic Hitchcock man-accused hero.

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By the time Alfred Hitchcock's second-to-last picture came out in 1972, the censorship restrictions under which he had laboured during his long career had eased up. Now he could give full sway to his lurid fantasies, and that may explain why Frenzyis the director's most violent movie by far--outstripping even Psychofor sheer brutality. Adapted by playwright Anthony Shaffer, the story concerns a series of rape-murders committed by suave fruit-merchant Bob Rusk (Barry Foster), who gets his kicks from throttling women with a necktie. This being a Hitchcock thriller, suspicion naturally falls on the wrong man--ill-tempered publican Richard Blaney (Jon Finch). Enter Inspector Oxford from New Scotland Yard (Alex McCowan), who thrashes out the finer points of the case with his wife (Vivian Merchant), whose tireless enthusiasm for indigestible delicacies like quail with grapes supplies a classic running gag.

Frenzywas the first film Hitchcock had shot entirely in his native Britain since Jamaica Inn(1939), and many contemporary critics used that fact to account for what seemed to them a glorious return to form after a string of Hollywood duds (Marnie, Torn Curtain, Topaz). Hitchcock specialists are often less wild about it, judging the detective plot mechanical and the oh-so-English tone insufferable. But at least three sequences rank among the most skin-crawling the maestro ever put on celluloid. There is an astonishing moment when the camera backs away from a room in which a murder is occurring, down the stairs, through the front door and then across the street to join the crowd milling indifferently on the pavement. There is also the killer's nerve-wracking attempt to retrieve his tiepin from a corpse stuffed into a sack of potatoes. Finally, there is one act of strangulation so prolonged and gruesome it verges on the pornographic. Was the veteran film-maker a rampant misogynist as feminist observers have frequently charged? Sit through this appalling scene if you dare and decide for yourself. --Peter Matthews

Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Year:	1972
Release Date:	October 17, 2005
Runtime:	110 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	823 620 3
Label:	The Hitchcock Collection
Keywords:	General, Frenzy, Thriller
Genre:	Thriller